When I got to be an upper-level PhD student, I would go to conferences, look for the people who were five years or so ahead of me, and ask myself: do they seem happy? Do I want to be like them? Are they pleased to have exited the gauntlet of pain that separates my life and theirs? The answer was an emphatic no. Landing a professor position had not suddenly put all their neuroses into remission. If anything, their success had justified their suffering, thus inviting even more of it. If it took this much self-abnegation, mortification, and degradation to get an academic job, imagine how much you’ll need for tenure!

This is the kind of mathematics I was put on this earth to do. The equation explorer is also just a genuinely useful tool for looking up equations; did so earlier this year as part of preparations for a lecture I gave.

Langium is an open source language engineering tool with first-class support for the Language Server Protocol, written in TypeScript and running in Node.js.

What textX couldn’t be.

via: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rniw5QPddmI

The US legal system is so effed.

Such an aesthetic problem.

This is exactly why I refuted Paul Graham’s “Good Writing” post. Zombie facts poison discourse.

A nice linguistic principle, even absent of the post’s content:

we don’t have much conscious awareness of a lot of the patterns in our own speech, let alone much insight into the reasons for them

Even a killer rhythm pattern won’t make the grade if it’s played with lacklustre sounds. In the concluding part of this series, Nicholas Rowland puts on his sound designer’s head and explains how you can re-tread your tired timbres…

There are two senses in which writing can be good: it can sound good, and the ideas can be right. […] I think writing that sounds good is more likely to be right.

This thought feels dangerous and is arguably wrong. He later says that this isn’t quite right, but it still feels like a bad (and arguably bit dishonest) thing to lead your essay with.

So it’s not quite right to say that better sounding writing is more likely to be true. Better sounding writing is more likely to be internally consistent. If the writer is honest, internal consistency and truth converge.

This is significantly better, but still reads as naïve. If anything, I feel like well-written stuff can make it really hard to challenge the assumptions of an argument, which in a way is its own hell. I think Graham is right to point out that clumsy writing reflects wrong ideas, and that getting rid of those errors can help you fix the ideas, but I feel like in some way, because of how the argument is framed, that this essay is self-refuting.

In truth, much of this “are we, aren’t we in a bubble” talk isn’t actually useful if you are operating in our current environment. What is more important to ask is “what should I do?” and “what are some of the things to watch out for?” and “how do I make sense of our current moment?”

What starts out as a response to a comment on the importance of reading business biography transforms into an excellent commentary on why tech is where it currently is, and how the reader can take the time to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors.

Harmonia integrates mathematical reasoning into musical composition by introducing a new kind of system called Scientific Music Notation.

via: https://dmitri.mycpanel.princeton.edu/index.html

music21 is a Python-based toolkit for computer-aided musicology.

via: https://www.madmusicalscience.com/arcaexplanation.html via: https://dmitri.mycpanel.princeton.edu/index.html via: https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2025/11/beyond_the_geometry_of_music.html

Excellent programmer who’s now pivoted to writing and book publishing.

If we want to build robust systems in which humans play a part, we cannot write off human decisions as random. We must investigate what made the human act that way because that’s the only way we can improve system robustness. I’m not making a philosophical statement by saying human behaviour isn’t random – it’s a practical standpoint for the purpose of safety engineering. Human decision-making never fails. Instead, human error is a symptom of a system that needs to be redesigned.

A joint linguistics blog by Mark Liberman and Victor Mair. Posts frequently on many different topics, but not for me, sadly.

via: https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~myl/ via: Montell, Wordslut

WEDEL: There’s a great saying, that everyone is born with 1000 bad drawings inside them. You get to the good drawings — you get to be good at drawing — by exorcising the 1000 bad drawings. “I can’t draw” is just a shorter way of saying, “I’m unwilling to practice drawing.” (That probably sounds pretty strident. If you don’t want to be good at drawing, that’s fine. The world is big, full, and busy, and not everyone has to be interested in every possible thing. Just don’t mistake “I can’t draw” for a good reason not to try.)

LAWS: The first pancakes off the griddle are always funky, but you need to make them to get to the good pancakes. So too with drawing or journaling. Do not judge yourself by your first lines on paper on any given day.

LAWS: Drawing with the goal of the drawing itself makes a fetish of the product. […] Each drawing is not an end in itself. It is a vehicle to help you focus your attention.

Straight fire. Being able to make videos like this is one of the many benefits of computer music.

This is a lecture video about chapter 5 of HLA Hart’s seminal 1961 book, The Concept of Law. In this chapter Hart begins to present his own theory of law. He distinguishes primary rules from secondary rules. He enumerates three defects that plague systems of rules composed only of primary rules (uncertainty, static-ness, and inefficiency). He then explains how thee defects are remedied by secondary rules (the rule of recognition, rule of change, and rule of adjudication, respectively). This is part of a Philosophy of Law course.