me when i organize all my math books by color

"housing for the undeserving"

Maybe I was insufficiently cynical going in, but as we approach the end of the mayoral campaign it's shocking what a huge fraction of the anti-Mamdani discourse is just "but he's Muslim."

yes, please sell your brownstone, for under market rate if you must, especially if you are in Brooklyn near Prospect Park or off a major train line, then please send me your seller's agent's contact info

The undergrads know I am a chatterbox but also perpetually extremely busy, and have started poking their heads into my office and opening with "are you locked in right now 👀👀👀?" and honestly they nailed it that's exactly the rapport I am looking for

Fondly remember my first bits of independence pre-smartphones. I would look up directions to my friend's house online, write them down, then during the route play the game of memorizing as many steps ahead as I could. Rinse+repeat until I knew how to bike anywhere I cared to go.

A related loop: > try 1st explanation 6/10 students understand > try 2nd explanation now 8/10 understand > try 3rd explanation now 9/10 understand > try 4th explanation 10/10 understand 10th student: "finally the ~real~ explanation, why didn't you start with that?"

Anyone else finding Overleaf's "uh oh that compile took too long, you need to upgrade!" getting silly recently? It's now holding a ~10 page document hostage, surely that's within the realm of the free tier?

NYU bookstore getting... political?

The motion of the tele-operator taking his headset off 😭😭😭 omg

Des économistes français expliquant la notion de bien supérieur : « Imaginez du beurre... »

I always got the impression that 2010s beer on tap + ping pong table tech culture was largely a cargo cult phenomenon, replicating the aesthetic trappings of Google + Facebook for lack of understanding of the deeper cultural forces of which the aesthetics were just symptoms.

Demis is almost certainly right, but I suspect a lot of the use cases popularly associated with "AGI" (by whatever floating definition you like) are implementable with maybe one more breakthrough plus really good scaffolding. Useful ATP might not even need a real breakthrough.

It’s “well-known” that science is upstream of abundance: improving our understanding of the universe → improves our ability to act → leads to the ability to do more with “the same” resources. This is fundamental to our civilization! I’ve found it surprisingly difficult to

nytimes.com/2025/12/16/us/… A terrible loss for the field

I agree (and also used to do things like this pretty regularly as an undergrad). But I think the key is to go in with a sense of "I wonder why this problem is hard" or "I wonder what is the obstruction to doing X", rather than "I will solve this problem because I am a genius".

this is the worst show I have ever seen I hope it runs for 300 seasons

Daniel Litt competent mathematicians and scientists engage one another in good faith. they don't take it personally when someone points out errors in their work, because the expectation is that there are errors to find - that is the process of ascertaining new facts! but the number and