Watercolor and ink drawing by Bartholomeus Ziesenis of the dancer Annette Köbler as she performs the “pas de shawl”, 1812.

One of two available as prints from our online shop: https://publicdomainreview.org/shop/fine-art-prints/artist/bartholomeus-ziesenis/

in 2017 a popular twitter game was to type a partial phrase then see what your phone auto-completes it with.

this proved so popular that it is now the only business model in the US.

BOOST OR QUOTE THIS!

Trying to find out how many people see a post without hashtags. Thank you!

(edit: Why, you ask? Long thread coming up … 1/7)

Steve Yegge writes about Anthropic’s culture after talking to 40+ people who work there. Nothing concrete, mostly vibes.

It has the same lightening in a bottle vibe of talented people who are changing the world that early Google & Amazon had.

He also notes Google lost that energy when it started to focus on profits under Larry Page, deemphasized 20% time and then suddenly had more people than there was work to go around.

https://steve-yegge.medium.com/the-anthropic-hive-mind-d01f768f3d7b

underrated feature of enterprise saas that can't be vibecoded away: plausible liability.

companies buy someone to blame when the software goes wrong. that's the product.

no exec is signing off on being the one responsible when the system goes down. you can't build that in house.

"Most people would accept the claim that #Oct7 was an inflection point in #Jewish history. But fewer realize that it was also an inflection point for #university 'professors of #Jewishhistory, particularly those who are themselves Jewish.

I once wryly told an Israeli ambassador that my job is to teach Jewish history, not to defend the State of Israel. But what about defending Jewish #students? I am not a diplomat, nor a politician. I am a #historian and a mother. I also happen to be Jewish, which, given my field of study and my name, is impossible to hide. It is something I have therefore chosen to publicly embrace, for better or for worse.

The consequence is that I have found myself taking on a #pastoral role, something for which I have no formal training and a responsibility that feels daunting."

https://www.jta.org/2026/01/30/ideas/im-a-jewish-studies-professor-i-wasnt-trained-to-give-pastoral-care-but-my-students-desperately-need-it

I have been booth an outspoken supporter of Wikipedia since Nupedia and also a harsh critic of Wikipedia regarding its handling both of the recent war in Gaza and of issues around antisemitism generally.

It seems that Jimmy Wales is now expressing similar concerns, which is so incredibly good to see.

Now it behooves Wikipedia English (and other Wikipedias) to address these content issues.

https://nypost.com/2025/11/03/business/wikipedia-co-founder-blocks-editing-of-gaza-genocide-page-over-egregious-anti-israel-claims/

#Wikipedia #JimmyWales #Israel #Antisemitism #Gaza

Over at the Erdos problem website, AI assistance is now becoming routine. Here is what happened recently regarding Erdos problem #367 https://www.erdosproblems.com/367 :

1. On Nov 20, Wouter van Doorn produced a (human-generated) disproof of the second part of this problem, contingent on a congruence identity that he thought was true, and was "sure someoneone here is able to verify... does indeed hold".

2. A few hours later, I posed this problem to Gemini Deepthink, which (after about ten minutes) produced a complete proof of the identity (and confirmed the entire argument): https://gemini.google.com/share/81a65aecfd70 . The argument used some p-adic algebraic number theory which was overkill for this problem. I then spent about half an hour converting the proof by hand into a more elementary proof, which I presented on the site. I then remarked that the resulting proof should be within range of "vibe formalizing" in Lean.

3. Two days later, Boris Alexeev used the Aristotle tool from Harmonic to complete the Lean formalization, making sure to formalize the final statement by hand to guard against AI exploits. This process took two to three hours, and the output can be found at https://borisalexeev.com/t/Erdos367.lean

EDIT: after making this post, I decided to round things out by making AI literature searches on this problem, which (after about fifteen minutes) turned up some related literature on consecutive powerful numbers, but nothing directly relating to #367. https://chatgpt.com/share/6921427d-9dc0-800e-b798-be8fc94a9240 https://gemini.google.com/share/0d296454bea0

Coming soon on your Mastodon server… The long awaited quote posts, with user-control (you can chose if you want to be quoted on a per-post basis, change it later, and retract any quote of your post)

Amazing work by the team 🎉

Expect a blog post with all the details in a few weeks, support in the mobile apps, then we will enable the feature on mastodon.social, then release Mastodon 4.5

#mastodon #quotePosts