Greg Spradlin @spradlig@social.cleverlibre.org

Mastodon fixes “confusing” sign-up process to attract users fleeing Twitter

Mastodon forms a plan to make decentralized social networks go mainstream.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/05/mastodon-fixes-confusing-sign-up-process-to-attract-users-fleeing-twitter/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

NPR is the only major journalism org to have shown a spine in dealing with Musk. So he's threatened to give the NPR username to someone else.

Yet even now -- despite Musk's growing contempt for and acts against journalism -- most media organizations and their employees STILL pour their work and some of their advertising money in to his rancid site.

What will it take for journalists to wake the hell up?

https://www.npr.org/2023/05/02/1173422311/elon-musk-npr-twitter-reassign

OK, you Model UN and 3-D political chess types. You’ve been preparing for something like this for a long time, so here is your moment. The Democrats just deployed a parliamentary stealth weapon on the debt ceiling that could be a game changer. Here’s why. https://statuskuo.substack.com/p/the-democrats-unveil-a-secret-weapon?sd=pf

Techdirt leaving #Twitter. https://www.techdirt.com/2023/05/03/goodbye-twitter-techdirt-will-soon-end-our-automated-posting/

You asked for it, and it’s coming. Quote posts, search, and groups are on their way. In the meantime, check out the new onboarding experience launching today. https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/05/a-new-onboarding-experience-on-mastodon/

CNN has decided to promote a presidential candidate who, when he was president, tried to prevent his elected successor from taking office. It was an attempted coup d'etat.

CNN to democracy: Up yours.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/01/politics/donald-trump-town-hall/index.html

Big Journalism is deliberately repeating the worst of its past performance. Let's stop pretending otherwise.

The Republicans' corruption of the judicial system includes funding a law school that lavishes expensive gifts on -- you guessed it -- Supreme Court justices. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/30/us/supreme-court-scalia-law-school.html

CNN is fascinating because one week they'll fire a high profile anchor on the basis of being difficult to work with and the next week they'll carve out generous primetime coverage to a disgraced former president who is under criminal indictment separate from his rape trial.

Robert Carl on Postmodernism, Spectralism, Studying with Xenakis, and More https://youtu.be/TuVNxkV7ULA via @YouTube

Now the willful incompetents at the New York Times political desk are normalizing George Santos. It's hopeless to expect better from this crew. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/nyregion/george-santos-washington.html?smid=tw-share

If you become a Supreme Court Justice and your spouse embarks on a new line of work collecting more than $1,000,000 a year from law firms doing business before the Court—that’s corruption.

https://www.businessinsider.com/jane-roberts-chief-justice-wife-10-million-commissions-2023-4

All Federal employees must file a full financial disclosure every year, including spouses and immediate family, to prevent conflicts of interest. And Chief Injustice's wife Jane Sullivan Roberts was making millions from law firms seeking to try cases in front of her husband?? This is the most corrupt #scotus in our history. Congress needs to CLEAN UP #scotus CORRUPTION. It won't do that as long as the #gop holds ANY power. Remember that in 2O24.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/whistleblower-raises-alarm-over-john-roberts-wife-making-10-3-million-in-legal-commissions-i-knew-immediately-that-it-was-wrong/ar-AA1aunSy?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=5da69187317c4f5292880094a7c47919&ei=6

#introduction

Stuff that's not in my profile:

Denizen of Portland, Oregon

Musical influences: #SarahBelleReid #WendyCarlos #DavidCope #HarryPartch #AlwinNikolais #IannisXenakis #ErvWilson #HenriPousseur

#MaskUp #GetVaxxed #GetBoosted

Warning: I'm a better programmer than musician! 😈

Losing Tucker Carlson is a huge loss for the nation. And by "the nation," I mean Putin's Russia.

In the Clifford algebra Cliffₙ we start with the real numbers and then throw in n anticommuting square roots of -1. For example:

Cliff₀ = ℝ, Cliff₁ = ℂ, Cliff₂ = ℍ (the quaternions), etc.

With the quaternions, once you throw in i and j with i² = j² = -1 and make them anticommute (ij = -ji) you get k = ij for free.

Each Clifford algebra has 'representations': roughly, real vector spaces where elements of the Clifford algebra act as linear operators. The most famous representations of Cliffₙ are the 'pinor' representations, which describe spin-1/2 particles in n-dimensional space along with how reflections acts on these particles. But you get other representations by taking direct sums of pinor representations.

For example, in 2d space Cliff₂ = ℍ has a representation on itself, and this is the only pinor representation in 2d space. All other representations of Cliff₂ are direct sums of this one - so its category of representations is the category of quaternionic vector spaces!

This chart shows the categories of representations of the Clifford algebras up to dimension 7. After that they repeat.

The symbol ≃ means that two algebras have equivalent categories of representations. For example, Cliff₆ is the category of 8×8 real matrices! So it's not isomorphic to ℝ, but you can show they have equivalent categories of representations.

One other thing: Cliff₃ is isomorphic to ℍ⊕ℍ: an element is a pair of quaternions. So a representation is a pair of quaternionic vector spaces - or equivalently, a quaternionic vector space that's been 'split' as the direct sum of two pieces. That's what I mean by 'split' here.

Do you see the surprising pattern in this chart?

@jeffjarvis I miss NYT pitchbot. Why isn’t it here?