As part of Elon Musk’s weird Department of Government Efficiency’s unconstitutional rampage through the federal government, USAID’s ForeignAssistance.gov was taken offline on January 31, 2025.

A colleague of mine recently lent a hand implementing a polynomial approximation routine I could port to our compiler, though it wasn’t the method I was expecting. As I had written about previously, I was studying the Remez algorithm and implementing a prototype in Python. Remez approximation involves an iterated loop that alternates between root-finding and linear-system solving, and as such it can be rather brittle and difficult.

If you spend any time on LinkedIn, it’s almost a certainty that you have come across a bevy of alleged ‘agentic AI architectures’. They all look something like this: All very neat, but the audience might be forgiven for asking what exactly is agentic about this, except for relabeling subprocesses in what is a run-of-the-mill RPA workflow as ‘agents’. And the audience is, this once, perfectly right.

Carl Edward Rasmussen recently gave a great talk in our group about his thoughts on mechanisms against climate change. He persuasively argued that the Paris Agreement was doing more harm than good by giving the illusion of being a concrete agreement, but is in reality a huge distraction. Our actual emissions have increased since the Paris agreement was signed!

Science that’s not just made by and for white men is under more-than-usual attack these days, thanks to the new administration in the USA under the leadership of Trump/Musk, which made a directive to remove all mentions and funding for initiatives relating to diversity, equity & inclusion (DEI) on January 22, 2025.

二月

While Bluesky is taking off like a rocket, a number of us moving towards self sovereign digital infrastructure have been looking at how to use the Bluesky network for other uses than just short-form notes. This is possible because of my colleague Martin Kleppmann's hard work on the "AT Protocol" that underpins the Bluesky network.

The Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) quantifies how precipitation deviates from the historical average over multiple time scales (e.g., from 1 to 12 months), allowing for consistent monitoring of droughts and floods across regions and time, making it a valuable tool for early warning and risk assessment systems.

Relawan Jurnal Indonesia and PKP invite journal managers, editors, and system administrators using OJS 2 to upgrade to OJS 3 in this free 2-day workshop.

This is mostly a test, but if it turns out the way I hope it will, likely after a few iterations, it adds support in my blog for CiTO intent annotations to the DOIs I cite. I pondered about the earlier.

Lucans Bellum Civile (oder Pharsalia) ist einer der großen europäischen Referenztexte über die menschliche Destruktivität.