Is there one ring to rule them all? Kevin Tucker goes deep into the world of mathematical rings, among other things.

Beautiful weaving of geometry, group theory, and visual art.

If you take a bunch of high tech math, modeling dependent types becomes surprisingly simple.

via: https://buttondown.com/hillelwayne/archive/the-angels-and-demons-of-nondeterminism/

Do we care about the best case or the worst case?

A clickable visual guide (tile map) to the Rust type system. Every type possible in Rust falls into one of the boxes shown.

A site with statistics regarding the decentralization status of various web services

Learning the right lessons from my old boss, in the wake of a successful acquisition.

Sign the pledge not to review for closed-access publications!

via: https://julesh.com/

The power of monoids strikes again.

The website Dildo.io has been used by many MIT students over the last few months as a matchmaking service restricted to students at MIT. However, such a service may have a key security flaw: all the information is centralized, and some central server(s) have access to everyone’s preferences. We wanted to set up a cryptographically secure matchmaking service in which no central server has access to anyone’s preferences, and we wanted to make it difficult for any client or the central server to learn about preferences. In addition, many solutions to secure matchmaking involve incredibly complex protocols, so we set out to make our system as easy to use as possible.

The protocol is nice, but I personally forsee some usability issues.

Even I think open games are hard to understand, and I invented them. (Perhaps this is just me though. Grothendieck wrote “The very idea of scheme is of infantile simplicity — so simple, so humble, that no one before me thought of stooping so low.” [Grothendieck, Récoltes et Samailles, translated by Colin McLarty] So simple,…

Categorical cybernetics, or CyberCat to its friends, is – no surprise – the application of methods of (applied) category theory to cybernetics. The “category theory” part is clear enough, but the term “cybernetics” is notoriously fluid, and throughout history has meant more or less whatever the writer wanted it to mean. So, let’s lay down some boundaries.