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There are many interesting thoughts in this great lecture by Terrence Tao on "Mathematics in the age of AI".

Android will become a locked-down platform in September 2026. Sign the petition, install F-Droid, debate with coleagues...

Loved this A Day in the Life of an Ensh*ttificator video by the Norwegian Consumer Council!

Related references:

• Consumer Rights Wiki

Fully agree with Cal Newport's message. I quote his final paragraphs (but encourage you to read the rest):

After troubling national events, there’s often a public conversation about the appropriate way to respond. Here’s one option to consider: Quit using these social platforms. Find other ways to keep up with the news, or spread ideas, or be entertained. Be a responsible grown-up who does useful things; someone who serves real people in the real world.

To save civil society, we need to end our decade-long experiment with global social platforms. We tried them. They became dark and awful. It’s time to move on.

So according to the recent talk Reflections on Haskell@Meta by Simon Marlow, Haskell is no longer used in Meta (Facebook, Instagram, ...) as the main language to specify automated moderation tools. Instead, they use Hack, their version of PHP.

As Simon explains in the talk, the decision to drop Haskell was made whilst knowing that many of Haskell safety guarantees will have to be dropped in the new system. I wonder if we should now expect to see many more unexpected moderation missteps in the coming years 🙂.

Some years ago Tom Leinster wrote a wonderful explanation of what makes a (mathematical) definition 'natural':

It’s a matter of aesthetics, and obviously there’s no precise answer, but here’s my stab at it. When you meet a new definition, there are two questions you might ask:

• where does it come from?

and

• why is the definition exactly that, not something slightly different?

If there’s a satisfactory answer to both, you can call the definition ‘natural’.

I've not been as careful about my definitions in the same way but I've been very careful about the notions and theories that I tend to study. To me Tom's explanation expands to these too. E.g. where does a theory (such as group theory, graph theory, ...) originate and why does it look the way it looks?

Follow-up to my previous post, the Haskell GHC compiler on top of the Foreign Function Interface now also supports the REPL and Template Haskell in its WASM/JavaScript backend! This makes it now viable for real-world usage!

For details see the announcement blog post by Cheng Shao: https://www.tweag.io/blog/2024-11-21-ghc-wasm-th-ghci/

I just realised how unusual British politics is. One day you have elections and the very next day you have a new prime minister. And that's it. In many countries (mine included) there would be negotations going on after the elections that can take weeks if not months and only then a new goverment is formed. I still believe coallition goverments are better, though 🙃.

Just had a blast listening to this podcast with Donald Knuth by Numberphile2.

Previously I wrote about how amazing DerivingVia could be in Haskell. It turns out that it can also help to solve the Monad-Applicative-Functor overhead introduced in Haskell recently. This issue was broad up by Martin Escardo on Mastodon and the answer was provided on Well-Typed's youtube channel.

Alexis King gave a killer presentation about Demand and Suspension in Haskell (aka the strictness analysis/optimisation). I can't recommend this enough, it has completely overwritten how I think about Haskell evaluation. It makes me think that strictness/laziness annotation in Haskell programs is actually possible (more precisely it would be called the demand annotation 🙂).

Since January 2019 I'm on Mastodon and since early 2020 I'm using Matrix and IndieWeb standards. And I am really happy to see that decentralised protocols are finally gaining some traction on many fronts. Meta has been rumoured to play with ActivityPub in with their Project 92. The EU through the Digital Markets Act (DMA) will force important online players to adapt some degree of interoperability by March 2024. This might finally (and I hope slowly) start the new era of decentralisation of social networks.

However, this requires a mental shift in how we understand and practice our online interactions. There is a nice article about this at the Atlantic: Ben Franklin Would Have Loved Bluesky, which draws an analogy with how it was also initially difficult for Americans to get used to their new constitution, back in the 17th century.

I like this blog post by Alexis King about types in Haskell. In particular the way she argues that "newtypes are not for type safety" and that the type system should be used pragmatically, as a tool. It makes me think if I'm also guilty of using types too dogmatically sometimes, rather than solely pragmatically.

Massive news for #Haskell, its main compiler #GHC will soon have the option to compile to #JavaScript!

This was previously only possible by using GHCJS which was a fork of GHC, a couple of versions behind GHC in features, etc.

https://engineering.iog.io/2022-12-13-ghc-js-backend-merged/

And now Pocket tells me I'm one of their top 1% readers! Wow, I didn't really think I read all that much. 🙂