There are ways to trim your videogame development budget, and then there are *ways* to trim your videogame development budget.

cursed diagrams

Yesterday...Northwestern Ontario looked like a scene straight out of Dante’s Peak.

warm warm cat warm sunny cat happy warm sunny cat happy sunny cat happy sunny happy

never writing latex by hand ever again. You are not ready.

my younger self is horrified rn

back to my favorite medium for thought

Out on the morning's Walk Fitness with Fitness Coach Vanburen, I was thinking of this, as I sometimes do: news.lettersofnote.com/p/she-was-th...

She was the music heard faintly at the edge of sound

The Letters of Raymond Chandler

news.lettersofnote.com

zen and the department of cryptid zoology

More evidence, from a large-scale study in China, that using AI hurts learning if it undermines mental effort. When homework time drops due to AI use, so do test scores. Across studies, there is a clear theme: AI tutoring in support of classes is good, using AI to "help" with homework is bad.

oklch is too good

Has anyone done domain theory for query languages? I have a new blog post about nontermination in query languages, why it poses a problem for query optimization, and three possible ways forward: www.rntz.net/post/2026-06...

S tears of joy A tears of relief B tears of laughter C tears because of bright light D tears of pain F tears of grief

So-called "parallel or", (x por y), terminates with true iff either x or y does, unlike "x or y" which diverges if x does. What about "parallel and": false and x = false x and false = false true and x = x x and true = x Is there a canonical or useful reference for either of these?

I followed the instructions from https:// lean-lang.org/install/ to install lean via VSCode and create a first project with mathlib, and then I ran $ du -hs first-project/ 7.0G first-project SEVEN GIGABYTES what the fuck is going on here? who the fuck thought this was ok?

The miniKanren and Relational Programming workshop is accepting submissions until June 5th! You (yes you!) should submit! We accept short or long papers, about miniKanren or relational programming more widely - and, this year especially, about relating the two! :) icfp26.sigplan.org/home/minikan...

miniKanren 2026 - ICFP 2026

The miniKanren and Relational Programming Workshop is a workshop about relational programming with an emphasis on the miniKanren family of languages: miniKanren, microKanren, core.logic, OCanren, Guan...

icfp26.sigplan.org

Interesting data from Pew on use of Ai by race/ethnic categories and by wealth. www.pewresearch.org/internet/202... Broadly speaking the more social privilege you have the less likely you are to use Ai for help.

a Python gist explaining why this closed form formula for the nth prime works and also why it's inefficient and not very useful (90 lines with comments): gist.github.com/rntz/216cef1...

An explanation of a closed formula for the nth prime number and why it's not very interesting

An explanation of a closed formula for the nth prime number and why it's not very interesting - closed_form_for_primes.py

gist.github.com

Quantian@quantian.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Fun math fact: There is actually a simple closed form definition for prime numbers! It is a curiosity that is useless in practice and it provides basically no theoretical insight, but by this argument number theorists are also practicing “mysticism” when they talk about open problems in the field.

wild stuff e360.yale.edu/digest/china...

Photos Capture the Breathtaking Scale of China's Wind and Solar Buildout

e360.yale.edu

If you take all the parking spaces in DC and add up their area, they would cover over 8 square miles, or the equivalent of 3 Rock Creek Parks.

I have a new paper! "Finite Functional Programming" combines functional programming with relational/tensor algebra using functions of finite support: Datalog relations are finite boolean functions; tensors are finite real-valued funs. arxiv.org/abs/2604.26161

Finite Functional Programming

We unify functional and logic programming by treating predicatesas functions equipped with their support: the set of inputs whose output is nonzero. Datalog, for instance, is a language of finitely su...

arxiv.org

conjecture: well-moded bottom-up logic programming is about degree constraints in the sense of arxiv.org/pdf/2504.02770. R(x,y) has deg(y|x) < n iff ∀x. |{y:R(x,y)}| < n. If we relax this to ∀x.{y:R(x,y)} is finite, we're giving it mode R(x-, y+): if x is input, y is output.

does the powerset monad distribute over the stream/possibly-infinite-list monad? (in the category theoretic sense of a distributive law of monads)

I have muted the thread that was in the TYPES list on which you were probably expecting a subskeet Forgive me it was predictable so long and so dull

> ghc foo.hs -outputdir ~/.Trash highly sus... yet oddly useful