Mark Dominus

mjd@mathstodon.xyz

I'm an expert computer programmer, looking for work. Check out my résumé: <a href="https://plover.com/~mjd/cv/Mark%20Jason%20Dominus.pdf" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no">https://plover.com/~mjd/cv/Mark%20Jason%20Dominus.pdf</a>Also, an amateur mathematician, but not the angle-trisecting kind.

Posts

Post #4445822
Ugggh. % jobs [1] Stopped emacs -nw book/elbow-shelf.blog [2] Stopped emacs -nw book/elbow-shelf.blog [3] Stopped emacs -nw book/elbow-shelf.blog [5] Stopped emacs -nw math/ordinals/04-coordinates.blog [6]- Stopped emacs -nw math/egyptian-multiplication.blog [7]+ Stopped emacs -nw math/egyptian-multiplication.blog
Post #4445821
“I never thought they&#39;d seize *my* property in the name of the People” sobs woman who voted for the Seize Property in the Name of the People party
Post #4265459
If Spice is required for interstellar travel, and is available only on Arrakis, how did humans get there in the first place?
Post #4180018
“[Sir Thomas Browne's prose] is a monument to a brief enchanted period in the seventeenth century when English had achieved the whole range of its expressive powers, and when its greatest writers were not yet burdened by any bad conscience about employing those powers to their fullest.” (David Bentley Hart) https://thelampmagazine.com/blog/how-to-write-english-prose #thomasBrowne
Post #4078393
This slide from a Polish researcher spells “Fraïssé” correctly but gets “Łódź” wrong??¿? #icm2026
Post #4041697
Who's the evil genius who decided there should be `sysctl` and `systemctl` commands that do completely different things? Are they in prison? Or at least an asylum for the criminally insane?
Post #4041487
RE: https://sigmoid.social/@conitzer/116969360352975674 Conitzer confirms that this is not sarcasm or a joke. He gave ChatGPT 5.6 Sol a single 300-word prompt asking it to solve a not-too-difficult but open problem of game theory, and to write a paper about it. This it did, without further guidance, in 90 minutes. He describes the result as being top-quality undergraduate-level work: “I would have encouraged the student to work on it just a bit more to submit it for publication somewhere.” I...
Post #4019565
RE: https://mathstodon.xyz/@pozorvlak/116965638671616359 “If the model knowingly is looking for vulnerabilities in order to escape, and this does not even surprise you all that much, something has already gone terribly wrong, and you know what you should expect when the models get smarter.”
Post #3992424
OK, so this article is discussing followup work to the recent work on the Erdős unit distance problem. It says: “The basic structure of the proof is that a profound theorem in number theory due to Golod and Shafarevich from the 1960s could be used to construct a counterexample to the conjecture.” OK so far. Later it continues: “Boris Alexeev announced on the Lean Zulip that he had steered ChatGPT to a complete formalization of the Erdős counterexample, assuming nothing beyond the axioms of...
Post #3987315
“I am not saying that it’s impossible for data centers to ever cause any problems with water. They require careful planning in the same ways other large industrial buildings do. What I am saying is that right now no reasonable forecasts imply that data centers will rise to become a significant problem for water access in the US. Almost all complaints about their national water use are basically just saying ‘We should not have a new large industry in America using water.’” https://blog.andymasle...
Post #3937899
“Isn’t it striking how many illustrations of a burning planet we see, and how few realistic images of just and sustainable futures we might be working towards?” https://buttondown.com/muledesign/archive/dodging-evitable-futures-together/
Post #3912310
The motto of biology should be “Yes, but it is vastly more complicated than that”.
Post #3899389
“We report the unexpected discovery that octopuses possess structurally unique ribosomes that enhance the accuracy of protein synthesis compared with ribosomes from all other tested animals.” https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.06.25.734654v1.full #octopus
Post #3732166
Sentences I wasn't expecting to read today: “One of the consequences of this is that eels urinate much more in fresh water than they do in the ocean.”
Post #3726295
I had a good Claude success yesterday. I wanted a diagram to demonstrate Euclid's Proposition 36, that if you have two parallelograms between the same pair of parallels, and their bases are equal length, then they have the same area. I thought I'd try to use Desmos' geometry tool to draw this, but I couldn't figure out how to do it. So I went to Claude and told it to make an SVG of the diagram I wanted, which it did. Then I said to Claude “I tried to draw this in Desmos's...
Post #3681117
“[Saunders Mac Lane] began inserting a space into his surname because his first wife found it difficult to type the name without a space.” what?
Post #3650597
“You can make money on Kalshi, now, not just by manipulating stock or Bitcoin or whatever markets, but by manipulating Spotify streams or temperature gauges or the words people say at press conferences or the location of a gorilla. The upshot is that now you can’t be sure whose song was the most popular last month, or what the temperature is in Paris, or why a gorilla is wandering around your neighborhood.” (Matt Levine)
Post #3590535
Typo of the day: “Cod review”.
Post #3524892
Here's one reason why birthright citizenship is important in the USA. Suppose my citizenship is questioned. Mine specifically, I mean. The government wants to deport me, detain me without trial, take away my voting rights, or prosecute me for being in the country illegally. I have an easy answer to this. I produce my birth certificate, which says that I was born in New York State in 1969. They confirm this with the New York State Department of Health, and that is the end of the matter....
Post #3491724
Why did early ASCII have ← and ↑ but not ↓ or →? https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/q/30618/6644
Post #3491257
Best Hacker News comment in a while: “Homeopathic medicine is already recommended by 1 out of 1000000000000000000 doctors.”
Post #3477120
This is the most exciting technical thing I've seen this week. Stephen Diehl has built an algebraic effects language, #prism , that might actually be usable. I've been excited about algebraic effects since Bauer and Pretnar's 2012 paper. Haskell's stacks of monad transformers always looked to me like a first-generation hack: yes, we have the technology that could fix the Awkward Squad, but we don't know yet what to do with it. Algebraic effects seemed like they could be th...
Post #3420334
OK, but what if this isn't late-stage capitalism? What if this is just the early stage?
Post #3420195
Now I think they could have had more fun with the quarks. Strange quark and charm quark are good but why not also Chocolate quark East quark Platypus quark Ginger quark
Post #2550168
Today I learned the geometry term “antiparallel lines”. And also, that parallel lines are antiparallel 😠. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiparallel_lines
Post #2516458
On police body cams: “We assumed that the justice system was eager to hold bad cops accountable and that all it was missing was the necessary evidence. It turns out the justice system is actually rather ambivalent about holding bad cops accountable, and so it handles additional evidence as halfheartedly as it handled all of the evidence it already had. A camera can allow you to see, but it can’t make you look.” (Adam Mastroianni) https://www.experimental-history.com/p/shame-them-shun-them-ban...
Post #2502348
The 2026 ICM (International Congress of Mathematicians) will be held in July in Philadelphia, where I live. I&#39;d like to attend. The ICM allows a regular participant to co-register an “accompanying person”. I&#39;d like to be an “accompanying person”. If you plan to attend and would be willing to register me as an accompanying person, please DM me. I would of course pay the registration fee. I will also, if you like, treat you to dinner. I am a middle-aged computer programmer...
Post #2330060
I forgot to mention it at the time, but yesterday was the 318th birthday of Leonhard Euler. Happy birthday!
Post #2117851
Noticing for the first time the thought-provoking similarity between the words ‘analogues’ and ‘abalones’. What is its kabbalistic meaning?
Post #2117850
RE: https://mastodon.social/@regehr/116524023644223750 “There&#39;s a recent report of a method to make a more stable form of [this substance], by mixing it with TNT.”