ColinWright

So starting from scratch is ... tricky.

“Mathematician Laurence Sigler had made it his mission to translate [Fibonacci’s Liber Abaci], rushing to complete the task right before he died of lymphocytic leukemia in 1997. But his editor moved on, and the manuscript languished on floppy disks for years. For a while Sigler’s widow Judith Sigler Fell, fearing the project would be killed, took the extraordinary step of impersonating her husband in communiqués.

By the time Fell found a new publisher, Springer Verlag (now part of the same publisher as Nature), floppy disks had been superseded and she had to hire a hacker to extract the files. Fell then discovered that Springer only accepted submissions in TEX format, the technical standard for physics and mathematics texts. She learned it and spent six months retyping the text. Fibonacci’s Liber Abaci was finally published in 2002 — the 800th anniversary of the book’s first appearance.”

Am I missing something? Can you explain or expand on that comment?

Representatives from Springer Nature declined to comment, beyond saying that “detailed information about specific retractions is usually confidential and can only be shared with the relevant authors.”

So the only person with whom Springer can discuss why the papers have been withdrawn is ... Plank.

Well ... good luck with that.

[0] By some metric, of course.

And I don't know what my instance is running on ... I have a tech co-mod who deals with it. We have two rather grunty servers running the the cloud, that's all I know.

If you're genuinely interested, email me and I'll find out for you. Details in my profile.

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Added in edit ...

From their "about" page:

Hello World! Welcome to mastodon@bauhaus, our small niche in the fediverse.

This server originated @maschinenraum, a small hackspace in Weimar. It is currently administrated and moderated by a small team via @admin.

We run our own server in a local data centre just down the road, so there's no cloud here – however, that also means if it breaks, it breaks. And it will happen every now and then, and there are backups, and it's mostly fine, but don't expect 100% uptime – 99% will have to do.

We're part of the Chaos family surrounding the Chaos Computer Club, so you can meet us at events like the C3 and get to know your admins!

-- https://social.bau-ha.us/about

Text reads:

And just like that—surprise!—one AI company bails out another AI company's grift. Google agreeing to rent compute from xAI (cough, "SpaceX") magically makes them eligible for inclusion in the S&P500.

Americans, they are looting your life savings, the ones you earned through labour that they are gleefully replacing. Your descendants will never have the chance you had.

-- https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/05/google-will-pay-spacex-920...

Lawyer A began chatting with the firm's AI on 20th March 2026 following receipt of my query of that date.

What is remarkable when reading those chats is, first, that one would think that the text attributed to the AI was produced by an intelligent human being.

The second remarkable thing is that, on a large number of occasions, it is plainly wrong or, at the very least, extremely misleading.

FWIW: I have over 135K karma and I can't downvote submissions.

Meanwhile, I used "lynx -dump" and lightly edited the result, so the plain text is here:

https://solipsys.co.uk/documents/AI_Doxxing.txt

And I've worked with many youngsters who have significant amounts of empathy. They feel the pain almost as if it's their own.

>> definitely matters as to how old they are, and how much they've done.

> No, it doesn't. Either the tool is good/useful or it isn't.

So if a developer with decades of experience in writing software would receive exactly the same feedback from you as a 16-year-old writing their first project?

If not, if you would tailor your feedback, then it does matter how old they are.

And those kids ... inexperienced, no mortgage, no creditors, no "real world" responsibilities ... absolutely see it.

When someone builds something using the tools at hand and the experience they have, it definitely matters as to how old they are, and how much they've done. That shapes how you give feedback, both in style and content.

I know a lot of bright, intelligent, keen, motivated kids, and in every way I encourage them to go and build things that they think are relevant and important, even if I don't agree. The experience will shape them and make them better.

Pondering the orb refers to a meme that features a sagely figure looking into a crystal ball, often used humorously in various edits and templates online. It originated from a Twitter post in October 2021 and has since become popular across social media.

I knew nothing of this. Maybe I'll put the post up under that title and set the linked page to be a re-direct.

> This video was surprisingly interesting.

Practice make permanent.

You need to practise the right thing, and that's where you will benefit from good quality feedback.

Learning on your own is hard.

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Never mind.

Here's a PDF:

https://dn710709.ca.archive.org/0/items/TheFeelingOfPower/Th...

Also, it's no surprise that it's been submitted many times before. Here's one of the earlier discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=931273

Even so, perhaps there are new things to say in this time of emerging "AI-assisted programming".

I'm in the UK, and it's four hours since you asked. I suspect it's suffering the occasional HN "Hug of Death".

Great sense of scale, lovely to see the Moon apparently a long way from the "intercept" point, and it seems "accurate enough".