2026-04-04 01:04:00
My bubble and I have been reading Tanya Klowden and Terry Tao's new state-of-the-union style philosophy paper on AI, Mathematical methods and human thought in the age of AI. I should probably write a post about it sometime.
In that paper, Tanya and Terry mention this other paper, Roy Wagner's "Mathematical consensus: a research program". I looked it up. It is open access on Springer. I was a bit surprised to have missed this paper, it seems very much my alley.
I read the paper today, and boy was it fun.
One of the distinguishing features of mathematics is the exceptional level of consensus among mathematicians.
Which we all internally just know perhaps. But when said like that, it gave me goosebumps. What does this mean philosophically? About the human condition etc. Anyway, if you're into math, you might immediately say, "Formalization techniques ofc!".
Since a sharp rise in consensus occurs around the turn of the 20th century, it makes sense to explain this consensus by the concurrent formalization of mathematics.
Not so fast eh? He goes on to set the scene with his definition of mathematics, a very beautiful one.
It is commonplace to observe that mathematics is the realm of knowledge distinguished by a clear agreement on right and wrong answers.
But then he immediately corrects into the obvious nuance. Mathematicians don't actually agree on truth. They disagree about the axiom of choice and about whether asking if an axiom is "true" even makes sense. What they do agree on is whether a given proof is valid. That's the consensus we are interested in, and it's a much more specific and interesting claim than "math people agree on stuff".
So how do mathematicians reach their consensus? He articulates a dance.
Mathematician P (prover) suggests a proof. Mathematician C (critic) challenges it. The challenge is of the form “I don’t quite see how you justify this statement in the proof”. The answer may draw on a large variety of tools: known theorems, analogies to known similar cases, explication of implicit steps, reference to a diagram, etc. After a while, C may be persuaded that the proof is valid, P may be convinced that it is not, or C will require a re-write of some aspects of the proof. Several iterations may follow, at the end of which, usually (but not always), the prover and critic will reach an agreement concerning the validity of the proof.
There's a twist though.
P: my proof is valid
C: no what about X?
P: see X is actually A, B, C
C: yeah the old proof isn't valid, the new one is a new proof
That's the simple dance. There are ofc more complex dances. The story of the abc conjecture is one such. That thing is still unresolved.
Perhaps the most famous contemporary disagreement about the validity of a proof (again, not entangled with the problem of individuation), is Shinichi Mochizuki’s purported proof from 2012 of the abc conjecture. The majority of the mathematical community finds the proof impenetrable or outright invalid, but a circle of supporters is still convinced. In 2018, the efforts of two critics, Peter Scholze and Jakob Stix, culminated in pointing out a corollary whose proof doesn’t work. Mochizuki, however, claims that they simply misunderstand the corollary (Klarreich 2018). As one commentator put it, Scholze and Stix “appeal to ‘certain radical simplifications’ that seem to get the heart of the matter, but they are also aware that ‘such simplifications [might] strip away all the interesting mathematics that forms the core of Mochizuki’s proof’. … It is this that Mochizuki condemns as illicit, and in his own support, he offers a number of examples that, he claims, lead to incorrect results if so treated. But Mochizuki, in defending himself, again uses some idiosyncratic definitions for common constructions in category theory, while still using standard terminology.”
The paper goes on. The quick paper preview blog post ends here, but I highly recommend giving the paper a read, it is a fun one.
2026-04-03 22:55:00
Heya! So, as you might know, I host and maintain guestbooks.kamiscorner.xyz, a guestbook service for indie web blogs (specifically bearblog ones, though it can be used on any website).
Now, it's been a while since i initially started working on the thing, and it's been pretty stable for a good while now, so i thought I'd talk a bit about the process of making the thing, my thoughts on indie web services like this and "trusting the little guy", as ava put it in one of her blogposts a couple months ago.
So, first of all, why did i make the thing? Well, at the time guestbooks.meadow.cafe was experiencing a pretty long outage, due to the maintainers Microsoft azure account getting suspended. And while i personally don't have a Guestbook, a couple of my friends do, and had also been annoyed at some limitations of the service when it comes to data exports and account deletion.
So, if you know me, you might be aware that i can't stand unsolved tech problems. Most of the scripts on this blog were created because i saw someone else complaining about a problem they had and immediately got nerd-sniped trying to figure out the solution for them. The same thing applies here. I had some freetime at the time due to being on vacation, so i immediately made a new laravel project and got to work.
The goals were the following:
Getting the core functionality in place was the easy part. About 2 days in, and you could do pretty much anything that you'd realistically want to do on a Guestbook website.
But here's the thing: I wasn't making this for myself to use. I was making it for other people. And, sadly, other people occasionally have a tendency to suck. So, i needed moderation features. And UI to go with them. And captchas. All of this probably took up a good 40% of devtime. As it turns out, decent moderation tools take a while.
So, what are the other 60%? Implementing the core features? Well... No, actually. As I said, all the user facing functionality was mostly good to go after two days.
About 10% was fighting with docker to get the damn thing hosted properly.
The rest, was data protection and accessibility. As it turns out, writing a privacy policy, getting the infrastructure set up to notify users, having everything be sufficiently transparent... That takes a lot of time. And effort. It's not a matter of "just" writing the thing. Getting emails sent out whenever you update your privacy policy requires you to have a way of knowing when your privacy policy gets updated. You need a history of changes, you need to edit this stuff serverside with a submit button, or have a github action that sends out emails automatically when the file changes and then deal with all of the pain that comes with CI workflows. Not to mention actually sending out emails!
Basically, it's a lot of work. Doing "the bare minimum" of just having a privacy policy is quite difficult. Doing moderation features in a way that collects a minimal amount of data while still having a somewhat effective system for banning people and stopping bots is also surprisingly hard. Even figuring out what data you collect can take some time, with frameworks doing a lot of the heavy lifting for you when it comes to backend stuff. And I'm still not an expert at these things. I'd say I did a pretty good job. ...but I'm also not a lawyer.
This is all to say one thing, basically: This stuff is hard. It's actually really difficult to do this properly, and to be sufficiently transparent, and to be somewhat trustworthy.
Getting moderation, and data protection, rule-enforcement and licensing right turned this whole thing from a weekend project to the equivalent of a month of full-time work.
And when it comes to discourse around indieweb services, people tend to forget that sometimes, i think. These are hobby projects. I don't think it's reasonable to expect people to do this much work. I'd like everything to work this way. It would be nice. But i don't think you can expect it of people.
And, crucially, i don't think you should have to.
Because, here's the thing, i don't think it's a good idea to set up a project like this in a way that requires people to trust you - or for you to have to trust people.
I don't collect any data besides the stuff that's shown publicly on your guestbook, and your account name and password. If you delete something, it's gone permanently, i don't retain it. The code is open source, you can take a look at it, or host it yourself.
Even if the database were to get leaked tomorrow, you wouldn't really find anything of note in there. Some encrypted passwords, i guess. You could try brute-forcing my admin password using the hash. You wouldn't be able to, laravel uses a good hashing algorithm. But you could try. That's about it.
Now, this sort of thing doesn't work for a commercial service.
I'll never add premium accounts, because i don't want to interface with people's payment information in any way. Because that means you'd have to trust me to get it right, and i don't want to be responsible for that. I'll never add ads or really in-depth analytics either. Same reason. I don't want your data.
And i think this sort of thing is a much more reasonable expectation to have of indie web services. Put the code out there, don't collect any data. You don't need financial information to run a guestbook. You don't need legal names. You don't even need to store IP adresses.
Treat hobby projects as hobby projects. You shouldn't need to trust me, and you shouldn't need to trust my software either. Get ublock, block tracking scripts and don't give me any info you wouldn't want the public to know about you.
That's my take on this sort of thing at least, after having the experience of trying my best to get all this stuff right.
It was fun, sure. But it was also a lot of work. So, personally, I'd say we need to be more charitable when it comes to this, and instead build and use things that don't require you to trust others in this way. It's quite easy if you're making a public, non commercial service.
2026-04-03 20:41:00
I recently found out that public universities in Germany are free (aside from the semester fee) which was really surprising.
Germany sounds like a pretty nice place to study and live in, therefore, I'm studying German since most of the classes in the universities are taught in German (and also because it's easy to get a job and I want to fit in). I've been studying German for 2 days and so far, I struggle with pronunciation since German has a lot of sounds that are not used much in the languages I'm fluent in (Khmer and English). I will now begin writing in German. Please do note that, I haven't studied the grammar yet so it will be extremely wrong. So if you know German, you might die from reading this.
Hallo! Ich heiße Leanghok. Ich bin 14 Jahre alt und Ich komme Cambodia. Ich lerne Deutsch und Ich will studere Informatik in Göttingen oder Aachen (RWTH Universitat). Danke und Tschüss.
I know this is terrible. I'd love to come back next month with better German. Oh and I know "Scheiße".
2026-04-03 19:50:00
Before we start let's clarify my background, I am of Turkish Cypriot descent, a third generation product of the diaspora following the attempted ethnic cleansing of Turkish Cypriots from the island. My Dad's side of the family are often mistaken for being Indian or South Asian as they are darker than other Turks, and we think this is where our surname comes from, as it is not traditionally Turkish.
My mum's side of the family (also Turkish Cypriot) have paler skin and look more Eastern Mediterranean, which in some parts of the UK had it's own issues. My mum has been mistaken for Moroccan recently and faced her fair share of discrimination early on in life, predominantly white British schools in the 70's & 80's may have been worse for my Dad but they are pretty hostile to anyone they deem "foreign".
On my end, I've been told I look West Asian mostly, although some people have mistaken me for Indian in the past, and on the first day of my current job a child asked "who the Mexican was". It's hard to tell if people assume you're white because whiteness is largely unspoken, although it has definitely happened to me in the past, particularly online, where the subtler differences in skin tones feel more like a product of lighting and colour grading.
Being a bit more ambiguous racially obviously has it's perks but it also has drawbacks. I think the best summary I can give is the time a friend of mine got sloshed and called me a racial slur (beginning with p) I'm not dark enough to say.
I experience moments and fragments of that oppression (a fair amount in my lifetime because of the shittiness of my surroundings) but it's difficult because I'm probably not getting the whole thing. There is an unquantifiable collection of moments that could have been worse had it been more obvious.
Because of that it's hard to feel that shared connection. It's a privilege obviously, to be in a position where it's not as obvious, but it comes at a cost.
My own experience growing up, (the accents made at my uncles, the constant othering and the endless terrorist "jokes") is why I reject the idea of being white, but the fact it's even in question means I probably could have experienced more no? It's hard to put a finger on what that really means, and even harder when examining it and embracing it can lead to opposition from people who insist that they know more about your race than you do.
It's also worth mentioning just how exclusionary British racism is. The kind of claims that Trump makes about Haitian and Hispanics immigrants, Farage makes about Eastern European ones, espousing that they eat Swans and fearmongering about a "Romanian Crime Wave". Indeed, British racism is so intrinsically tied to a general jingoism in favour of "the west" that one could genuinely argue eastern Europeans are white passing in the UK rather than just white.
This creates a large cultural disconnect between American and British racism that the online world has made extremely apparent to me. It creates an odd situation in which I have to basically spill out about my own (often unpleasant to say the least) encounters with race in the UK in order to sort of "prove" that I fit the description.
Gary Lineker is an Irish-English white man who played for Barcelona and England in the 80's. He was tan at a time when racism was still effecting Italians and other Mediterranean white people, and on his podcast he spoke on the colourism he faced at that time, highlighting that this is a long-standing issue and that if even he as a white man received such abuse it must be awful for the actually marginalised people trying to play for the team. There is obviously nothing wrong with this.
It was lied about constantly though, the tabloids removed all context from the headline as you would expect, and so it became "Gary Lineker opens up about racism" which in turn became jokes about he identified as black etc etc. The same ambiguity that led to him being abused for "darkish" skin as a kid in school was also a bludgeon to silence him for daring to talk about it.
Hasan Piker is a Turkish man and streamer "hasanabi" born to two parents who look Eastern Mediterranean/ West Asian. Unlike me, Hasan considers himself white.
Hasan grew up in Turkey, (where he's obviously a member of the dominant ethnic group) and the US, which has a very different perception of race altogether.
The presence of slavery and the genocide of Native Americans always meant race in the US had much clearer visual lines. The Irish diaspora may have experienced it's own discrimination in the US, but there were no "no blacks no dogs no Irish" signs in the 60's across it's windows. If you looked white enough on a first pass, you're white. If you don't, you're coloured.
Indeed, in an interview with FD Signifier on the topic, Hasan says that he knew he was white when people were comfortable being racist around him, as if he were part of a club. In other words, in most contexts Hasan is white passing.
There is a exception though, whenever hasan attempts to talk about the Muslim world or indeed any brown or West Asian country, he is immediately an "islamic fundamentalist", "barbaric" and a "terrorist". FD actually says this is part of why Hasan isn't white, to paraphrase slightly: "to be white means all slurs are funny, if there's any (racial) slur that might make you slap a motherfucker in the face then you aren't white".
But unlike me, Hasan has the white experience in most situations, the kind of looks I receive when I walk into a pub aren't the kind Hasan has received. The neighbours of white people in the States have always been visually distinct, Hispanic, black, native, and so race is drawn cleanly (or not so cleanly) along those lines. In the states the ambiguous are assumed white, in the UK they are still the other.
This benefits Hasan rhetorically, as he speaks to a mostly American audience, the fact he passes as white means his race does not hamper how likely people are to click on his content. It also means that he's able to more accurately relate to the disenfranchised young white men in America, and his conventionally masculine appearance also helps him pull them out of the world of the manosphere.
The truth about racial ambiguity is also largely the truth about race, it is almost entirely about the perception of the onlooker. Lineker probably wouldn't have been perceived in the same way had he grown up a few decades later, and yet nothing about him changed.
Hasan may have faced more direct opposition with issues outside of the Muslim world had he existed in a nation where his own racial differences were considered more important.
Likewise, if I had grown up in an area less exclusionary than the uniquely insane world of White British suburbia I might have a different perspective on my own race. What is "white" or "white passing" is not just different historically, but geographically. Whiteness is a social in group after all, not a biological category.
2026-04-03 18:34:00
I was going to title this 'and so i flew too close to the sun' but decided to go with the current one. It's a bit click-baity, I admit, but everything I'll yap about here comes down to those three words.
I first discovered Neocities shortly before BearBlog. That was my official introduction to the Indie Web. The world 'minimalist' was the key to my heart, really. Also, I don't know how to code. And so I've made home here, eventually [lowkey] urging my friends to blog, too.
I got comfortable in BearBlog. I re-learned CSS with very little high school coding memory (like how you never really forget how to use a bike?). I started with the Archie theme and tweaked it. The colors, then the font, then the toast button. I added a bunch of add-ons and images to every post. I made a guestbook, a now page, a 'reply via email' button. I was on that blogging high. I've written one blog a day for more than a week.
It wasn't enough. When I felt like my creativity was being limited, I tried Neocities again. I spent a whole all-nighter trying to figure out the thing (which is a big deal for me, because it is a truth universally acknowledged that I easily pass out when sleep-deprived), gave up, and then tried again after a couple of days.
I spent the next three days constantly at our kitchen table (because my desk is a mess) with eyes glued to the screen. I was on VSCode for almost the entire time that I have forgotten the look of a white screen. At some point, I even worked on a postcard stamp container for 24 hours straight. I couldn't stop, because there was so much work to do.
And then, just a few hours ago, I realized how I haven't been writing much ever since I fell down this Neocities rabbit hole. Not in BearBlog, not in my journal. And then I realized -- oh, that is the point of BearBlog. It's minimalistic, barely any if not totally free of clutter, to maintain the focus on writing.
At first, I was planning to make my Neocities my main digital garden and Bear for blogging. But coming back to Bear after my focus had been on the other side for a few days, it didn't feel right. BearBlog is simple and straightforward. BearBlog is home.
Like a crazed artist suddenly possessed by inspiration, I took down most of my blog embellishments. There weren't a lot, but I want to lean more closely to BearBlog's minimalism1. And boy does it feel good.
So my new manifesto:
Disclaimer: I don't have anything against people with really fun blogs! I looking through them. This is just what works for me better :)↩
2026-04-03 11:11:00
直到昨天我才知道，运营部三个人，我手里是三十多个产品，其他两个人手里都是十多个产品。
整个2025年，我刚刚从编剧行业转回来做老本行跨境电商，花了很大工夫去复健跨境电商的技能。并且一上来就要从0开始做三个国家的站点。
这期间甚至把自己弄崩溃逼出过抑郁症，一度自我厌弃到想要自杀。我一直以为其他两个同事也很忙，觉得人家能做到为什么我做不到，所以我一直很努力地在学习，一边学习一边在心里骂自己没用。
最后一年下来，三个国家都做到了盈利。整体每个月的利润都在稳步增长，提前完成了年目标。
——然后，在我回来一年的时间点，就是昨晚，在讨论产品线调整的时候，我才突然被告知，其他两个人其实手里的产品都没我多。我手里三十多个，而他们每个人手里其实只有十多个，甚至他们手里有些产品还是几年前公司初创的时候我自己选品然后一手做起来的爆款。
（我是公司初创的时候就在，中间离开过两年，一年做自由职业，一年做编剧，然后去年回来继续做跨境）。
所以我其实是以最薄弱的状态去迎接最难的挑战。我还是啃下来了，而且做到现在甚至也不觉得自己有多忙，甚至从不加班。我手里90%的产品都在盈利。
我真的比我想象的还要厉害。我从来没有想过自己面临着什么样的挑战，只是一直坚定地认为，既然别人能做到，我这么优秀，我没理由做不到。没做到一定是因为还不够努力。现在想想，可能就是无知所以无畏吧，因为不知道自己在做什么难度的题，所以反而没有因为恐惧而退缩。
用一个不太恰当的比喻就是，我一上来就跟队友失散了，之前的技能书也被遗忘掉了，剑盾都没有了，我痛苦地刷级造剑盾攒料理攒小药，靠着“我不能给队友拖后腿”的意志，一个人磨死了最终大boss，然后回去找到队友才发现我们此行的目标其实是刷中低等级的小首领，大boss不是我们这个等级的任务。
我真想穿到2025年的5月告诉那时候的自己这一切，告诉她，“你已经很棒了”。但我知道时间不会倒流，也无法穿越。去年的崩溃一定程度上也影响了我此后的性格，我倒没有感到遗憾，只是很庆幸当时没有真的选择自我了断。
有时候真想详细写一篇自己工作的经历，感觉真是好多可以写的哈哈。
然后重复一遍，我真的比我想象的还要厉害。