Notices by Andrew (andrewt@mathstodon.xyz)

Following the paperclips incident, AGIs had been banned from the manufacturing industry, and confined to "harmless" pursuits. The regulators hadn't been imaginative enough. Having proven that all even numbers above 10¹²⁰ could be written as the sum of two primes, the AGI tasked with proving the Goldbach conjecture realised it could have the problem solved in a century by converting every atom in the solar system into a giant computer.

Many died in the fight to stop the AI, but it was only defeated by an even more powerful AI, which conquered humanity and instigated a regime of equality and prosperity for all humankind, reasoning that if our minds were free of material concerns, then sooner or later one of us was *bound* to complete the AGI's core purpose of proving the Collatz conjecture.

From then on, humanity led a peaceful and pampered life, with only one rule, unwritten and spoken only on hushed tones: under no circumstances was anyone allowed to work on the Collatz conjecture, lest our cybernetic overlord, satisfied with the result, shut itself down and allow the Goldbach AI to turn us into a RAM chip for its giant computer.

It wasn't perfect, but most people were happy enough. We were still really curious about the Collatz conjecture, though.

I feel sure these are intended for people with this many children but they seem like a really cute polycule gift

plus the polycule version could have the rings linked according to who is dating who

imagine the jeweller like "sorry, you either have to break up with david or start seeing jen, otherwise your necklace is mathematically impossible"

My favourite thing about Manchester's public transport Bee Network is when the buses get back to the bus station and drive around in a massive waggle dance to tell the other buses where Chorlton is

The biblical genesis story reads like an amateur game jam devlog

Day 1: create day/night cycle
Day 2: water effects and skybox
Day 3: make the map
Day 4: more sky graphics
Day 5: add decorative critters
Day 6: desperately try to make all the actual characters in one day
Day 7: fuck it, submit early, can't be arsed any more

Final results:
Earth, 4.1/10, placed #5327 overall

Someone should make a game with an alchemy mechanic that just never does anything. Imagine the Reddit threads.

"I can't get alchemy to work"
"well yes"
"Ok but it's in the game so it must work???"
"why"

@bencurthoys YES

getting a lot of pushback from organisations when i pitch my new inclusive bathroom sign design

Who called it "coming out as a trans woman" and not "going completely masc off"?

I think Employment Hero is using some kind of LLM to scan uploaded CVs because it thinks I'm a certified air traffic controller. No idea why.

It has generated a list of skills for me and added "puppetry".

"Puppeteer" is a web app testing tool.

Please help me, Reddit, I 41M can't get a present delivered to my GF 39F because Argos say it's not a valid postcode

AITA? My girlfriend (36F) is upset that whenever I mention her I parenthetically tell everyone her bra size

We have handy words for "clockwise" and "anticlockwise" but we don't have good names for the two main 2D diagonal directions.

So I propose that the south-west to north-east diagonal be called "stonkswise" and the south-east to north-west diagonal be called "antistonkswise"

anyway so bluesky continue not to fix this nonsense so i am going to keep abusing it until someone does something about it

Cybersecurity training: always be on the lookout, because cyber criminals use a range of highly sophisticated technical and social engineering techniques to create extremely convincing messages targeted specifically at you

Cyber criminals:

@ikeacurtains @dat it could, but it sounds like bluesky don't want to do that kind of solution because "the server" could be anyone. you know, because bluesky is """decentralised"""

So it turns out the geniuses over at Bluesky trust the client app to fetch, and honestly report, webpage metadata for preview cards, so with a little tinkering in the debug tools you can post whatever news stories you like and they look exactly the same as real ones.

https://bsky.app/profile/andrewt.net/post/3ljo2dja62224

@julesh nothing good has ever been "unleashed"

Thomas Becket is often mistakenly called "Thomas a Becket" after a medieval scribe hit the "a" key instead of "shift" on his phone keyboard

Surnames exist because medieval peasants would find a bread seller they really liked but already had a "Dave" in their phone, so they put the new one in as "Dave Baker"

follow me for more history facts