Simon @spoltier@qoto.org

@mkarliner reminds me of the money quote from a podcast I listened to recently:

"If you’re searching for comparative advantage in doing creative work, you want to know where status is, but mostly so you can avoid it."

https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/michael-nielsen/

There has been a remarkable breakthrough towards the Riemann hypothesis (though still very far from fully resolving this conjecture) by Guth and Maynard making the first substantial improvement to a classical 1940 bound of Ingham regarding the zeroes of the Riemann zeta function (and more generally, controlling the large values of various Dirichlet series): https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.20552

Let 𝑁(σ,𝑇) denote the number of zeroes of the Riemann zeta function with real part at least σ and imaginary part at most 𝑇 in magnitude. The Riemann hypothesis tells us that 𝑁(σ,𝑇) vanishes for any σ>1/2. We of course can't prove this unconditionally. But as the next best thing, we can prove zero density estimates, which are non-trivial upper bounds on 𝑁(σ,𝑇). It turns out that the value σ=3/4 is a key value. In 1940, Ingham obtained the bound \(N(\sigma,T) \ll T^{3/5+o(1)}\). Over the next eighty years, the only improvement to this bound has been small refinements to the 𝑜(1) error. This has limited us from doing many things in analytic number theory: for instance, to get a good prime number theorem in almost all short intervals of the form \((x,x+x^\theta)\), we have long been limited to the range \(\theta>1/6\), with the main obstacle being the lack of improvement to the Ingham bound. (1/2)

Looking back on  #emfcamp, I don't know if anyone else noticed, but as far as I could see there were no LLM or GenAI demos, and I didn't have any conversations about AI/ML with anyone.
Actually, I take it back, there was a really cool video GenAI in the Null Sector. But still...

#emf #ai

*scratching head* is… renting a car way cheaper in France than it is in North America for some reason? Because I just reserved a car rental out of Charles De Gaulle, which is where I'd expect gouging, and it was shockingly cheap to me

Recorded a podcast interview with Robby Peralta at mnemonic last week! Very much enjoyed our conversation about security for high-risk people, executives, and civil society in general. Even snuck in a brief mention of indoor skydiving, just because. https://mnemonic.buzzsprout.com/652378/15179615

It's kind of amazing how much people disparage work that's really intentionally about helping people. I don't even think people know they're doing it. Even when people emphasize the care aspect it's almost always at the cost of acting like you're less intelligent

Architectural elements that are actually interesting are not hard to find in Barcelona, though they may be interspersed with the same newer boring cubes as we have everywhere in the US

I ask this relatively regularly because I want to keep an eye on the landscape.

I'm a software engineer with a PhD in international criminal law. I am on the lookout for (open source?) projects that are useful to human rights researchers/activists/defenders. I am hoping to contribute as a volunteer software engineer.

If you know of a project like this, please get in touch. If you don't, please boost if you'd like!

#opensource #humanrights #tech

i never thought about whether my selves from parallel universes might be better than me. Thanks for the new complex, Apple TV

@hazelweakly this blew my mind a bit. I've spent a lot of my career working in the financial industry, and the situation is almost inverted there. The first department-wide e-mail I got on my first job out of university was the CFO celebrating the successful decommissioning of 300 Excel sheets 😅. Some of them were chonky multi-100 mb things on a shared drive, that took minutes to open.
So what you're telling me is that people just hate Excel on some BS nerd-cred grounds? Honestly should have known, but stupidly assumed they had more practical reasons 🫤

@spoltier yup! There are absolutely times when you should use a real database, but so many people out there are building massive complicated databases in order to handle a system that does 100 queries per second. If that. On .... 6000 rows of data

That is well into "this could probably just be one table in Excel if not entirely one JSON fuckin object" territory

But no, multi year project, tons of engineering effort. For no reason

Cactuc garden is allllmost as insane as the one on Catalina. Pretty funny to come all the way here to see cacti from TX, AZ, CA, and MX 😂 none from Colorado that I spotted though, claret cups apparently are for us alone

🏳️‍🌈 Happy Pride Month y’all!

#pride #climbing

cursed idea: it might be possible to hack the firmware of a normal, off the shelf micro SD card such that it wirelessly leaks files to a distant server using LoRaWAN

Custom FW on uSDs: https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/on-microsd-problems/on-hacking-microsd-cards/
Transmitting LoRa 250m by toggling GPIOs on various uCs (without using a "real" antenna): https://youtu.be/eIdHBDSQHyw

*deep breath continues*

Low code isn't trash, you're just bad at building tools your coworkers can use

"Technical user" doesn't mean "I use vim". The people from $NOT_ENGINEERING are fuckin awesome, stop refusing to acknowledge they exist

Your ETL pipeline could've been an excel spreadsheet if you weren't elitist about it

Your whole startup could've been a pivot table + some visual basic, honestly

Algorithms™ aren't all bad, you just hate being reminded that you're susceptible to feelings

@grimalkina You may be interested in the Volts newsletter and podcast from David Roberts. Interconnection queues, reconductoring, grid storage (including his favorite, "hot rocks"), and other stuff https://www.volts.wtf/podcast

*deeper breath*

The amount of "I think logically without emotion" tone policing that goes on is absolutely outrageous. Especially when it's targeted at women and not all the people that fork every single OSS project at the slightest hint of disagreement

"Communication skills are useless" says person who just spent 12 days reading the documentation wrong because they feel less manly if they ask for help

"Irreplaceable" and loud toxic people suppress invaluable and quiet brilliance

Vaguely remembered learning juice as zumo a million years ago in Spanish class but have mainly heard it as jugo, with all other jugos than naranja being jugo de <something>.

Today I learned that the secondary streets close to cars and become open to café seating on saturdays in “my” neighborhood 💖 And I also learned in Spain orange juice isn’t jugo, it’s only ever zumo de naranja y de dónde eres, México, chica?