Jon Sterling / is on Nostr

Categorical computer scientist at Aarhus University. Next: Associate Professor at University of Cambridge.

Last Notes

2024-11-07 09:46:30

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@npub1238…g63g I think you are correct overall — but maybe there is an issue with the framing. The Left — which is labour, socialism, communism, etc. — has not had any kind of non-marginal presence in US politics for decades owing in part to the severe repression of the 1960s–1980s followed by the fall of the USSR.
I think that whatever marginal shards of the smashed Left do exist in the US were not exactly (to my knowledge) part of the crowd saying things like “Violence is never the answer!” and “Elections are sacrosanct, no matter the outcome!”. The Left did participate in (and lead some of) the riots of 2020, but I think this had minimal impact overall because the demands of 2020 were easily co-opted by liberalism and drowned in NGO politics, which is not and cannot be revolutionary.
So if the question is, will Liberalism riot against or simply abet emergent fascism? I think the answer is usually "abet fascism" and one need not look further than the repression of the KPD in the Weimar Republic to see that this is the default mode for liberalism.

2024-11-06 10:40:07

Let’s have some good news and cheer today. Mine is that I am enjoying preparing a paper about domain theory for an upcoming conference, and that the writing is not yet feeling like a chore in the way it usually does.

2024-06-06 15:50:38

OMG. I am immediately getting owned by the fact that students always try to prove even the simplest things by contradiction...
Honestly, I love classical math and find it to be worth teaching. But this kind of thing makes me think that we actually should not start students off with classical math... They make things so complicated.

2024-06-06 15:50:38

2024-05-27 12:17:04

I love this time of year in Cambridge — when they start letting all the tall grasses and flowers and weeds grow freely in the fields…

2024-05-27 12:17:04

I love this time of year in Cambridge — when they start letting all the tall grasses and flowers and weeds grow freely in the fields…

2024-05-01 21:48:28

Ultimately we have to ask ourselves if it was overall a good thing that computer science as a discipline ceased to be part of mathematics — rather than broadening the horizons of mathematics and bridging the gap between mathematics and social science. I am not speaking purely rhetorically, as there are legitimate arguments to be made on both sides.

2024-03-25 08:33:57

Sad to hear this. I never had the honour to meet or talk with Bill Tait, but I hear he was very kind.
I owe my entire career to his brilliant ideas, which still today provoke new questions. May he rest in peace.
https://mathstodon.xyz/@rrrichardzach/112153080528259275

2024-03-22 20:39:11

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@npub1aa3…zykt very nice!!

2024-03-22 20:39:11

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@npub1aa3…zykt very nice!!

2024-01-15 15:04:56

Do I have any followers involved in Digital Humanities? Please reach out to me if you can...

2024-01-14 11:35:02

I'm learning about the Text Encoding Initiative, and it actually looks really well-thought-out on many ways... https://tei-c.org
It would be cool if Forester 4.0 used this as a target format, so as to integrate better with other tools and corpora.
I notice that many people in our circles think that all this XML stuff and standardised data formats is a thing of the past, but in humanities and philology, this stuff is actually used to great effect — for instance, the amazing [Perseus project](http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/) which continues to innovate (e.g. with [Beyond Translation](https://beyond-translation.perseus.org/reader/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0012.tlg001.perseus-grc2:1.1-1.7)).
Therefore, I consider it a defect that Forester currently uses its own ad hoc format. A version of Forester that outputs TEI could, for instance, facilitate federation of forests...

2023-09-02 16:32:56

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@npub1ez3…xnxl So I think the search still continues for [a computational version of HoTT that is not 10x more complicated than HoTT]. it might be that this search leads us to think differently about computation too…
(For instance, one thing that people usually ignore is the fact that "computationalness” in principle does not require that all computation steps are judgmental: what matters in some of these cases is *effectiveness*.)

2023-09-02 16:29:52

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@npub1ez3…xnxl I think you're right, this is what I have been starting to think as well... And the non-portability is a big problem for me.
Here's the thing that made me think that cubical type theory was more than assembly language in the past, but about which I am not so sure anymore. In type theory, everything needs to be dependent eventually; paths / identifications are no different. Unfortunately, dependent paths are really awkward to work with in HoTT — in ways that cubical type theory handles more naturally IMO.
But the thing I noticed is that the place dependent paths usually arise is in sigma types, but one of the lessons of serious HoTT developments (both cubical and non-cubical) is that every time you have a sigma type you'll use more than once, you need to really characterize its identity type right away in terms of something more natural (using SIP, etc.). And doing this thing, which you always have to do anyway, tends to get rid of a lot of the very painful dependent path algebra anyway.

2023-09-02 15:55:17

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@npub1ez3…xnxl Not looking forward to learning about “deloopings of crises” lol

2023-09-01 13:10:03

I will be looking for one PhD student this cycle (applications due in December). If you are interested in deep semantics, applications of category theory, topos theory, or homotopy type theory to programming languages, or anything in the near vicinity of these topics, I encourage you to contact me and I can explain a little more about how the process works at Cambridge.
You can message me on here, or on my departmental email (js2878 at cam.ac.uk). Realistically, a successful applicant will likely have some prior work in one of these or related areas that we can discuss. Looking forward to hearing from you!
(P.S. If you are not sure whether you would make a good applicant, please chat with me anyway. I promise I won't bite.)