Dan Piponi

Disclaimer:
👽 My opinions are not my own. They're beamed to me by aliens

Current life:
🎮 Epic Games

Previous lives:
🍩 PhD in Riemann theta functions
🧬 Glaxo Group Research
🚀 Argonaut Games
💥 Mass Illusion, Esc, ILM
🎈 Google X, Verily, Google

Likes:
🚴 I like to bike
🏃 I like to run
🎛️ my musical tastes lie towards the electronic end of the spectrum
🚀 I like Andor *and* The Mandalorian
📈 I have an OEIS entry https://oeis.org/A387361

Public Key

npub1x78ms56a50yyrl0t6ztxuksk70fp6n5c3wf9u3cl9k8a7g696t5s9nxn0m

NIP-05 Address

dpiponi_at_mathstodon.xyz@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsr0rac2dw68jzplh4ap9nwtgt085saf6vghyj7gu0jmr7lydza96gprpmhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0d4hhxarj9ecxjmntqyxhwumn8ghj77tpvf6jumt9jrjfvk

Publishing to

relay.momostr.pink

yabu.me

public.relaying.io

Author Public Key

npub1x78ms56a50yyrl0t6ztxuksk70fp6n5c3wf9u3cl9k8a7g696t5s9nxn0m

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Last Notes

2025-10-06 16:55:04 UTC

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But surely this isn't really an analogy, it's HoTT doing the work it was intended to do. The magnetic field in the AB effect comes from a cocycle in a cohomology which means it acts as a mapping from paths to some base ring or field and HoTT was built to work with those paths. You'll get good mileage out of this :)

2025-07-16 17:44:44 UTC

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I have a hard time with American documentaries that use famous actors as hosts. It always feels like someone reading a script rather than telling us about this cool thing they want to share.

2025-04-16 19:16:05 UTC

Before you plug in your new Timex/Sinclair 1000, please take a moment to think about this exciting new adventure. We want to assure you that:
1. You will enjoy computing.
2. You will find it easy as well as enjoyable.
3. You shouldn’t be afraid of the computer. You are smarter than it is. So is your parakeet, for that matter.
4. You will make mistakes as you learn. The computer will not laugh at you.
5. Your mistakes will not do any harm to the computer. You can’t break it by pushing the “wrong” button.
6. You are about to take a giant step into the future. Everyone will soon be using computers in every part of their daily lives, and you will have a head start.
-- Steve Vickers, Timex/Sinclair 1000 Instruction Manual (aka the US ZX81 manual)
https://media.mathstodon.xyz/media_attachments/files/114/349/237/048/109/572/original/afe692984d9c5c53.png

2025-03-19 20:37:12 UTC

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There's more than a lack of preparedness - there's anti-preparedness. By and large Americans from any part of the political spectrum are brainwashed from birth and are incapable of having thoughts contradictory to the constitution. So even though it's trivially obvious that there is no magic to separation of powers, and anyone with eyes could see the Republicans have been stacking the Supreme Court, it has still taken people by surprise. Except that's not true - most Americans aren't even aware enough, or care enough, to be surprised. And among the ones who do care, many are cheering it along.

2025-03-12 01:35:25 UTC

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I hope so, but when people speaking for the government says things like it being worth going into recession to achieve their goals I think we've moved into a new mode.

2025-03-12 00:58:04 UTC

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I'm not sure anyone has anywhere been offered this choice. We have a bunch of billionaires with a thirst for even more power, probably with different motivations, colluding for now, and we'll see the tearing down of those parts of federal government that don't satisfy their desires.

2025-03-10 16:49:36 UTC

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Use deepseek instead. Google's Gemini is an embarrassment even in a field rife with embarrassments. It's barely worth making fun of it.

2025-03-10 15:15:54 UTC

It's not easy, but don't buy from American companies. Even if you can't achieve a total ban, you can still reduce how much money you send to support the regime here.
Certainly don't visit the US. If you are not a citizen you have no rights. This makes the US a dangerous country to visit.

2025-03-06 20:14:36 UTC

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I feel like artists have already settled on this kind of hue for neutron stars so it's interesting to see the agreement.
https://media.mathstodon.xyz/media_attachments/files/114/117/316/105/976/851/original/6ee7b51b89ddea3d.jpeg

2025-02-24 21:44:36 UTC

TERMS OF SERVICE
By reading this text (the "Work"), you irrevocably agree that all mental states, ideas, beliefs, suspicions, hunches, inventions, dreams and other neural patterns ("Thoughts") produced through engagement with the Work are exclusively the property of Dan Piponi. This includes, but is not limited to, all physical, virtual and logical substrates hosting said Thoughts, whether directly, or through emulation.

2025-02-20 16:01:51 UTC

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Nice trick! I like to make liberal use of subscript characters but never thought to use one in a search like that.

2025-02-19 18:21:14 UTC

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"designed to scale to a million qubits on a single chip"
Is this before or after controlled nuclear fusion?

2025-02-18 23:12:06 UTC

While we're eliminating waste maybe we can get rid of 17. It's not like anyone uses it for anything. You never get 17 eggs in a box or 17 dimensional manifolds. Nobody has ever solved an important problem with 17. And if you really think you need it, 17.1 is probably just as good.

2025-02-08 04:05:18 UTC

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I’ve always been mystified by that story because I’ve never understood why it would take a Gödel

2025-02-08 02:57:09 UTC

Wasn't it trivially obvious to you, the first time you read the constitution of the US, that separation of powers was nonsense? That it merely relied on the luck of who happened to be elected when?

2025-02-07 06:20:41 UTC

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You almost took the words out of my mouth. I just mentioned to my wife that I've noticed people of middling intelligence are more likely to be obsessed with IQ.

2025-02-07 05:29:36 UTC

The US has started a programme of eugenics hasn't it? Deportation, anti-trans, anti-diversity, anti-abortion, the frequent talk of producing babies, ⊤⊥'s talk of "good genes". It's not like there isn't precedent, the US exported the idea to the Nazis originally. When I talk to conservatives it doesn't take long for them to start talking about IQ and inheritance.

2025-02-04 23:10:23 UTC

Just noticed that the picture I took in my bathroom now appears on the catastrophe theory page on wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catastrophe_theory
https://media.mathstodon.xyz/media_attachments/files/113/948/137/875/134/701/original/1f7363012c995823.png

2025-01-28 21:06:47 UTC

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That's the good case
https://media.mathstodon.xyz/media_attachments/files/113/908/016/954/974/702/original/f79744202f2ee8fe.png

2025-01-28 17:00:33 UTC

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Caves and chalk. It'd work for mathematicians.

2025-01-28 15:51:33 UTC

Apologies if this is all obvious to you but I had to follow it through in my own mind.
Long term I think things play out like this:
* Increasingly a large amount of the web is going to be machine generated.
* This means reduced diversity because content will be coming from a small number of sources.
* Those few sources are run by billionaires who are now cosying up to the right wing establishment.
* I’m not just talking about purely machine generated content. Likely a large fraction of text published online, including that nominally authored by humans, goes via ChatGPT.
* The government now controls text and image generation by holding (some of) the purse strings and manipulating everything from scientific research funding to tax breaks and investment for tech companies.
* Which means eventually most content, including content from ostensibly independent authors, is going to be inflected with bigotry, xenophobia and authoritarianism. Subtle at first, and then more extreme as time goes by and the Overton window shifts.
* 1984 is going to seem like nothing. “AI” is the ultimate authoritarian mind-control dream.
* It's not going to take long.

2025-01-28 01:17:45 UTC

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In fact, without using the image, if you take the 50 numbers in the table and augment with a constant distribution for the other 10000-50 probabilities you can bound the entropy above at 12.006. I think.

2025-01-28 01:05:52 UTC

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Some absolute values are given in the text so you can use this to calibrate. Requires some work though...

2025-01-27 23:58:06 UTC

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I've always been a bit envious of people who have an intuition about actual numerical values of entropy (eg. my ex-colleagues at Google) but in this case 12.9576 seems so close to 13.2877 that it doesn't seem right.

2025-01-27 23:12:05 UTC

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what's the entropy?