Scientists and engineers use diagrams of networks in many different ways. Together with many collaborators I am studying networks with the tools of modern mathematics, such as category theory. You can read blog articles, papers and a book about our research. I am collaborating with the Topos Institute to use the resulting math for scientific computation, such as quickly adaptable models of infectious disease.

Collection of notes on the intersection of networks and categories by one of the contemporary GOATs of category theory.

Features an MIT student from my class.

Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem explained with Pen, Paper & Lean (the proof assistant)

How we can think about pushouts as applying rules via substitution, featuring examples in categorical databases and Datalog.

Substitution of a term into a predicate is pullback, but substitution of a term into a term is composition.

Do you say “in the interest” or “in the interests?”

Schemathesis automatically generates thousands of test cases from your OpenAPI or GraphQL schema and finds the edge cases that break your API.

neurodivergent public scholar

In my view, the effectiveness of what most people understand to be “linguistic engineering”—banning words, redefining them by fiat, trying to force people to use new words invented by engineers—is seriously overrated. If it were held to the same standard as actual engineering (does this work? Can we rely on it to keep working?), it would fail almost every time. Which is not to say we shouldn’t criticize it (though I’d prefer it if we didn’t only criticize the other side’s version while giving our own side a free pass); but I think we should probably focus less on the idea that “they” are messing with our minds, and more on the other, more prosaic tools which are used to crush dissent and enforce compliance.

I think there is much to be done regarding making linguistic engineering a legitimate field.

Last week the bromance between Donald Trump and Elon Musk ended in a spectacular war of words on social media. As the world watched, the US president and his “First Buddy” traded accusations, threats and insults. But while some people just reached for the popcorn, others apparently saw a golden opportunity to expound their pet…

because: Montell, Amanda. Wordslut. Nero, 2019.

Prohibition failed, but it succeeded in empowering women to speak up about issues like domestic violence.

Prohibition is strongly linked to the rise of women in American politics. A fascinating brief history of the 18th Amendment.

The discourse around Harry Styles, former One Direction member and one of the stars of “Don’t Worry Darling”, has taken an interesting turn. Perhaps it’s time someone… said something. Watch to find out whether Billie Eilish, Charlie Puth, Nick Jonas, and Shawn Mendes need to be… CANCELLED!?? In light of the recent heartbreaking tweet from Kit Connor, it’s seems like something should be said. Along the way, we’ll make friends with Judith Butler and weird gay sociologists and philosophers. Don’t you just love Twitter?

This video is such a great deconstruction of queerbaiting, from both the perspective of cinema and celebrity. It does well to ask both if common conceptions of queerbaiting are internally consistent and actually useful for working towards liberation.

Asexual discourse - a tedious internet spam war, or a snapshot of queer history? Guess we’ll find out that and more together…

Decent Patterns is a collective effort to further the adoption of decentralized technologies by providing open tooling and resources for the community.

via: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKOwTHQ2Jzc

Local-first technologies face unique UX challenges. Let’s explore and discuss what’s needed to address them!

Whether your app is local-first or more traditional, collaborative text editing is a tricky problem that requires advanced algorithms. Or does it? In this talk, I will describe a simple approach to collaborative text editing based on intuitive “insert after” operations. By using these operations in a general-purpose collaborative architecture (server reconciliation), you can implement text editing without CRDTs or OT. I will also discuss nuanced conflict resolution and decentralized variants.

Text version: https://mattweidner.com/2025/05/21/text-without-crdts.html

via: https://www.localfirst.fm/14