Linklist: June 28, 2025
most recommended: 2, 4, 9, 11
links (links with excerpts below):
Lessons from the Library: Extreme Minimalist Scaling at Pirate Ebook Platforms
AI Is Evolving — And Changing Our Understanding Of Intelligence
links with excerpts:
"At 33TB of data in its main collection, the highly illegal Library Genesis project is one of the largest repositories of copyright-violating educational ebooks ever created. Established over a decade ago in 2008, the goal of Library Genesis is nothing short of a modern Library of Alexandria, albeit without anyone’s legal sanction. As one of its administrators wrote: “within decades, generations of people everywhere in the world will grow up with access to the best scientific texts of all time. [...] [T]he quality and accessibility of education to the poor will grow dramatically too. Frankly, I see this as the only way to naturally improve mankind: we need to make all the information available to them at any time” [Bodó 2018b]. Rooted in its homeland’s Russian communist principles and particularly the Soviet isolationist copyright policies of the twentieth century, Library Genesis is a formidable resource and threat to conventional academic publishers.
The Library Genesis database had just short of 1.2m records (books) in 2014 [Bodó 2018a]. As of January 2020, this capacity has doubled to 2.5m books. In this article, I examine the minimal computational design choices taken by this maximal-in-intent, illicit archive of epistemological dissent and how such decisions have shaped the scalability and growth of the platform. This includes Library Genesis’s numerical subdivision of record identifiers into “buckets” to work around directory file limitations in the GNU/Linux operating system; its use of md5 hashing of filenames within directories capped at 1,000 files to avoid future hashing collisions while allowing for on-disk integrity checking; and its use of the MySQL socket/network server as opposed to SQLite or similar disk-based database.
Beyond these computational details, though, the theoretical tension that this article highlights is the path dependencies that are set in (illegal) computational projects that have goals of absolute abundance and maximalist capacity, and the minimalist design principles that they must instigate at the outset to ensure a degree of scalability. I also query the ways in which the project’s contested mission statements target an economic (geographic) audience demographic with only minimalist access to high-capacity computing resources. I finally examine the limits on scalability of the distribution of the Library Genesis through its torrent archive and other distributed networking technologies such as IPFS, which despite their promise of peer-to-peer redundancy fall down on an archive of this size."
"In the spring of 2021, Talgar Shaybyrov embarked on a heartbreaking journey. For twenty years, Talgar had hunted with a golden eagle he called Tumara. The two lived at nearly 6,000 feet above sea level, in the quiet town of Bokonbaevo, Kyrgyzstan, where guesthouses and yurt camps line the shore of Issyk Kul, the world’s second-largest saltwater lake. They had spent the past two decades hunting jackals and foxes together, often traveling in Talgar’s run-down Volkswagen Golf, a modern replacement for a horse. Now Talgar was ready to return Tumara to the wilderness, as was the custom among eagle hunters. Doing so allows the birds a chance to mate and be free as they near the end of their long lives. “I have spent so many years with her,” Talgar told me. “I hope she will enjoy her freedom.”
Kyrgyzstan’s eagle hunters, or burkutchu, carry on a long-standing tradition. For centuries, hunting with an eagle was essential to the region’s nomadic lifestyle: A good hunter could help feed and clothe a village. One family member typically teaches another, and it begins when a hunter finds a nest with multiple eaglets and chooses one to raise. It can take three months to train and raise a fledgling. The hunters spend years with their birds, and the relationship can take on an almost human quality. “Suluuke is like a daughter to me,” said Nursultan Kolbaev, Talgar’s nephew, of the bird he began training in 2012."
"These assumptions mostly stem from the way that game theorists think about the world. In their language, democracy is a self enforcing equilibrium, which will just keep on going so long as the parameter values don’t shift too radically. You don’t have to worry too much about destabilizing forces emerging from within democracy.
Unfortunately, it has become clear to many (including Przeworski himself) that this understanding can’t really explain why democracy is degenerating in the U.S. and elsewhere. Look around you: there are visibly circumstances under which democracy can be self-destabilizing rather than self-reinforcing, but standard game theory has little to say about this. As a result, Przeworski has begun to ask different questions about people’s expectations than he used to. People’s preferences and beliefs about democracy can change for endogenous reasons, as they are affected by the back-and-forth within the democratic system. Whether they are stabilizing or not will depend on circumstances that aren’t easy to capture with game theory.
That is why I think that Brian Eno’s ideas are politically as well as artistically valuable. To be clear, this is a notion that I’ve come to slowly. I’m a third generation product of the loose school that Przeworski and others founded in the 1980s.* But like Przeworski himself, I’ve begun to think over the last several years that the standard understanding misses a lot of what is happening."
"Two experiences challenged what I thought I knew about the phonetic alphabet. First, at a party in college, I met someone with a split tongue like a snake’s. I immediately wondered how you would fit the novel sounds she could make with two tongues into the current phonetic system. I quickly realized you could not. This person was capable of creating sounds we had no definers for.
Then, a few years after college, I discovered the yoga move Kechari mudra, where you work your tongue to the back of your throat and into the nasal cavity. It’s made possible with religious stretching and practice or by getting your frenulum severed. It looks like this:
Once again, the phonetic system failed to accommodate the unique sounds producible from this position. I wondered how an active linguistics researcher would respond to this so I forwarded the Wikipedia article to my old professor, Allard Jongman.
“I had no idea,” Jongman wrote. “I will definitely be including these images in my class from now on. The big question is if any sounds produced this way have been recorded!”"
"Atomism viewed the universe as composed of tiny atomic elements. They were too small to see and too numerous to count, but they nevertheless made up our entire material world. In this context, some philosophers recognized that combining and recombining atoms in linear ways must have limits. In consequence, they imagined that some kind of nonlinearity or “swerving” must be necessary to support additional complexity. This is attested, for example, in the work of Lucretius.
In his poem “On the Nature of Things [De Rerum Natura],” Lucretius discussed the concept of the “swerve” or “inclination” [clinamen] of atoms—an infinitesimally small deviation in their linear motion. This deviation was crucial as it introduced an element of nonlinearity and unpredictability in a universe primarily governed by linearity. Lucretius explained this idea in Book II of his poem, where he posited that without swerving, all motion would be completely linear and everything would fall straight down through the void like raindrops. Here’s a brief portion of the text discussing this concept, translated into English:
“The atoms move by themselves... But when they are traveling straight down through empty space by their own weight, at quite indeterminate times and places they swerve ever so little from their course. [Without swerving] bodies would never be able […] to produce the various motions by which nature carries its processes. […] Furthermore, […] without swerving […] there would be no free will in living beings all over the earth.” (4)
Clearly, Lucretius considered that nonlinearity began with small swerves and individual inclinations. This also comes to bear in Lucretius’s verses about horse races, where the horses accelerate, although only gradually. It takes time for the individual inclinations to spark a larger, physically observable change. Here are Lucretius’s own words:
“Do you not see when the cells are thrown open that nevertheless the horses cannot burst forward as fast as the mind itself craves?”"
"A few years ago, while searching online for something related to king cobras, I discovered the species was India's National Reptile. Typically, Rom would have been involved in an endeavour to get a creepy-crawly iconic status, but he had no idea of this development. When did the king cobra achieve national icon status? No information online. But there are zillions of websites that make this claim. A Hindu article of 2011 stated the king cobra had been declared the National Reptile soon after Independence. Maybe in the flurry of events of that time, this didn't gain attention and since it was so long ago, in the pre-digital era, no one remembers the date. We let it go.
India has all kinds of national this and that. Even a National Microbe. Rather than a bureaucratic diktat, the participants of the Science Express voted for the yoghurt bacillus in 2013.
Tracing the paperwork for the National animal (tiger) and bird (peacock) proved no easy task. When an RTI activist filed a request, the ministry couldn't find any evidence in its files. The debate about both, however, is in the public records. The tiger replaced the lion sometime in the 1970s. In the 1960s, the peacock received its status simply because the bustard (the great Indian), championed by Salim Ali, was one letter away from a cussword. Still, the ministry decided it couldn't leave this matter without a paper trail and notified both anew in 2011.
In recent years, however, some confusion arose. Is the lotus India's national flower? Apparently not, according to the minister of environment and forests, who replied to the question posed in the Rajya Sabha in 2019. That's not the impression many thousands of websites create. Then there are the National Heritage Animal (elephant), National Fruit (mango) and so on. No idea when they were officially declared."
"The history of infinitesimals involved a number of philosophical and religious controversies already during the seventeenth century and even earlier. Our intention here is to deal with the post-Leibnizian period, not including Leibniz. The reason is that Leibniz has been amply covered elsewhere, including the most recent exchange between Arthur and Rabouin (Citation2024) and Katz and Kuhlemann (Citation2025). For older studies, see Goldenbaum and Jesseph (Citation2008) and work cited therein.
In the eighteenth century, d'Alembert used the deprecating epithet chimera (referring to an illusory thing) for infinitesimals.Footnote1 The epithet found an eager following in the ensuing centuries. In nineteenth century France, infinitesimals were panned as chimeras by Jesuit-trained Abbé Moigno. Moigno wroteFootnote2:
In effect, either these magnitudes, smaller than any given magnitude, still have substance and are divisible, or they are simple and indivisible: in the first case their existence is a chimera, since, necessarily greater than their half, their quarter, etc., they are not actually less than any given magnitude; in the second hypothesis, they are no longer mathematical magnitudes, but take on this quality, this would renounce the idea of the continuum divisible to infinity, a necessary and fundamental point of departure of all the mathematical sciences.Footnote3
In the twentieth century, the term was picked up by Moigno's compatriot Alain Connes:
A nonstandard number is some sort of chimera which is impossible to grasp and certainly not a concrete object. In fact when you look at nonstandard analysis you find out that except for the use of ultraproducts, which is very efficient, it just shifts the order in logic by one step; it's not doing much more."
"I guess I must have done something right because to my astonishment I was awarded the Royal Society’s Faraday prize – think David Attenborough, Richard Dawkins, Brian Cox – for science communication in 2014. In my prize lecture, I expressed many of my misgivings, illustrating my arguments with both chemistry from the literature and a few favourite demonstrations. By the time of the party after the talk, I was walking on air.
Yet the sense of responsibility towards my community and my audiences began to creep up on me, especially when I talked to journalists about endlessly dark chemistry-related news. More and more I felt I had to talk about climate change, industrial safety, chemical weapons, disinformation – questions that few other chemists were talking about in public."
"Claims that computing underlies physical reality are hard to prove or disprove, but a clear-cut case for computation in nature came to light far earlier than Wheeler’s “it from bit” hypothesis. John von Neumann, an accomplished mathematical physicist and another founding figure of computer science, discovered a profound link between computing and biology as far back as 1951.
Von Neumann realized that for a complex organism to reproduce, it would need to contain instructions for building itself, along with a machine for reading and executing that instruction “tape.” The tape must also be copyable and include the instructions for building the machine that reads it. As it happens, the technical requirements for that “universal constructor” correspond precisely to the technical requirements for a UTM. Remarkably, von Neumann’s insight anticipated the discovery of DNA’s Turing-tape-like structure and function in 1953.
Von Neumann had shown that life is inherently computational. This may sound surprising, since we think of computers as decidedly not alive, and of living things as most definitely not computers. But it’s true: DNA is code — although the code is hard to reverse-engineer and doesn’t execute sequentially. Living things necessarily compute, not only to reproduce, but to develop, grow and heal. And it is becoming increasingly possible to edit or program foundational biological systems."
"A couple of years ago, Dave and I were both very high very early on Tanoshi Inomata, a then-fourth-grader with ice in his veins. He sprouted a long ponytail and wore a snappy blazer and a piano-key bowtie, but that was the extent to which he let his personality show. Expressionless, he'd approach the mic, hear the word, ask for all of the information, spell the word, and wait for confirmation that he'd nailed it. Just as expressionless, he'd return to his seat. He took the trophy two years in a row. Never saw him smile.
Tanoshi's not here this year, either, so I'll have to find a new favorite while breaking in yet another new Head Judge. The Head Judge has the best title but the worst job. After the speller makes the attempt, the Head Judge either says "That's correct," or dings the bell to signal an error, at which point I read out the correct spelling.
It's a thankless job, which is my theory as to why we've gone through four Head Judges in four years, from the President of the Boston Public Library, to various mayor's office officials, to this year's Deputy Chief of Staff of Boston Public Schools. To each of my Head Judges: You were great, and I get why you don't want to come back. There's not a lot of action, and when there is you have to be the bad guy."
"Cynically, we might say that that the loss of public funding will be spun as a boon for the creation of private markets, with biotech startups taking over from where universities left off (and, indeed, universities have been sharing the burden of funding research with private industry for years). Scientists will likely relocate in droves to the private sector, which, in any case, they’ve already been doing for decades; those who do not will likely move to other countries. This would undoubtedly come as a blow for a nation long exalted as a beacon on the hill for science, with more science Nobel laureates than any other country in the world. But the fact that the United States has the most Nobel laureates while also an 11 percent poverty rate, ranking last in health care compared to other high-income countries and forty-ninth in the world for life expectancy, makes you wonder where, or for whom, all of that Nobel knowledge has been directed. And yet the major newspapers continue to churn out op-eds singing the unqualified praises of American science without mentioning its ties to market imperatives and wealth inequity.
Liberal commentators, like Krugman and others, tell us that MAGA wants to destroy science, that scientific facts disrupt their political prejudices, that what we are witnessing is nothing more than a celebration of ignorance. They call it a war on science. It may indeed be a war, but it is not science that is the target. The dramatic reorganization of the conventions of scientific research that we are currently witnessing instead fulfills a very different aim, namely, to continue to disenfranchise socially and economically marginalized populations and communities. So let us call this what it has always been: class war. To that end, science as such is not the object of antagonism; the people are. Science has simply become a preeminent tool for political and economic oppression. For this is all that science is: a craft to be deployed for whatever ends we assign it."