Reading about the new math discoveries made with Lean, and having interviewed Sir Timothy Gowers at @gosimfoundation Paris about his work at Cambridge and the Collège de France on it, I made a note to myself to check out Lean. And last night, I did, counting the ways a river can cross a road. It's a problem posted by the Soviet mathematician V.I. Arnold, and my older brother counted some of n on BESM-6, a Soviet supercomputer my mom used to program. It's a long way from punch cards and line printer output to the beautiful visualizations and fast Lean transfer matrices! Read the blog: chief.sc/arnold-meanders/

Buddhists are cool. But can they convert between different kinds of USB?

I was today’s year old when I learned malaria is simply mal aria, bad air.

Finally the man himself!

Napoleon was a founder too!

TIL Character Chinese meaning Japanese meaning 手紙 Toilet paper Letter 勉強 To force someone / reluctantly Studying 汽車 Automobile Steam train 愛人 Lover / romantic partner Spouse (formal usage)

Agents serving soda to citizens of the USSR, 1978.

Wheels up PVG NRT

У мово Виталия красивые шефталии.

Chinese officials are quite set in their ways. If you stand a long line to check in for a train and your passport fails to scan, and you scoot over to the manual lane, the officer waives to the end of line again. You have to stand firm and keep explaining that you did stand the whole line already. Then the officer asks the next in line if that’s OK and they say yes. An airline cancelled my flight and I had to go to another city. They tried to charge me for luggage and I refused saying I had to spend a lot on a hotel and a train and more taxis. Thy still could not align it and tried to push me to pay and ask for compensation but I said no and just stood there until they called HQ and got an approval. Stand your ground.

Leaving China soon. I first visited last year. A former boss tried to dissuade me from going then. I shudder to think I’d not get connected to this eternal and young culture, and OSS AI powerhouse. I had to (foolishly) cut my visit short then (didn’t help) but made up for it now with 3 more new cities. And I’ll always have Hangzhou. I thought this time, why can’t I understand the text and the words? Built myself a little app and bought a few books, translations of Grossman, Murakami and Rappoport, and a Chinese history original. Since I know and care about the topics, it’s much easier to learn this way. An Obsidian vault with custom plugin contains multiple books with translations to multiple languages. The vaults are built on my Oakland box that is tunneling over Tailscale for agents and delivered to iCloud. @obsdmd sync works well too. What a wonderful edition of Vassily Grossman! Got at Naive, a book bar. I found such awesome ones in Beijing too, PageBean and Books and Tea (serves craft beer as well). If your heart falls you somewhere, like China, go, despite of everything. Don’t let anyone stop you.

What if aliens left their planet in search of outsourcing jobs after AI took over? They are now cold-emailing you about 15 minutes of your time to see where agents are headed.