Tim Hsu

Pleased to announce that San Jose State Math/Stats (www.sjsu.edu/math/) is hiring two tenure-track faculty this year, one in discrete math/graph theory and one in statistics/data science! More details and application form in thread below:

My pal Danielle Koenig shared that her father Walter Koenig passed away last night at age 90. A performer whose kindness and warmth shone through the screen. He will be well remembered.

A trust owned by Texas AG Ken Paxton and his wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton, invested in a company led by a convicted fraudster. The firm and its affiliates later sent the trust 15 payments totaling $83K before and during the AG’s impeachment trial. w/ @texastribune.org

Early this year, I visited Ingram, a TX town of ~1,900, to check out a tip. The area was starting to recover from its worst flood in a century. But as Latino workers drove to jobsites to help rebuild, the tipster said, a cop in a black Dodge Charger kept stopping them ... 🧵

Huge follow-up reporting to my scoop: The Guardian confirmed America Next—the conservative nonprofit founded by Bobby Jindal that was offering students $ to disrupt El-Sayed events—paid a firm registered to Tommy Teepell’s dad Timmy $250k for “canvassing and influencer marketing” against El-Sayed.

Welcoming Josh Hutcherson as Mister Miracle and Mackenzie Davis as Big Barda in @tomking.bsky.social forthcoming animated DCU series from DC Studios and Warner Bros. Animation, #MisterMiracle.

Together with other scientists I’m suing the 🇺🇸 US National Institutes of Health for violating our 1st Amendment rights & censoring our health science. I’m ready to shine a light on the darkest days. Buckle up, read on. This gets pretty wild… THREAD

Some reflections on AI in math. I found it helpful to simply list out the various parts of what a mathematician does, why math is valuable, and where the funding comes from. From there, what happens if AI gets more capable? youtu.be/LKrwhjOI8Nc

PSA: For anyone writing a recommendation for the NSF grad fellowship this year, recs are due on Fri Oct 16, 8pm Eastern, cleverly *before* the actual application deadline. This tidbit isn't on the NSFGRF front page anymore; it's buried inside the program solicitation:

This MAA column is really showing us the value of AI in teaching, just maybe not in the way it was intended

youtu.be/OPKGbg16ulU?...

There is absolutely no viable path forward for this country that doesn’t hinge on extreme accountability for everyone involved in this administration. They’re going to whine about politicization and credulous media types will echo them, but the thing is, they’ve committed tons of obvious crimes!

Unsurprisingly, four days later, mathematicians have weighed in. And the results are equivocally valuable at best. More importantly the dump has flooded the zone with shit, which is precisely in line with this industry’s weaponized agnotology. Now actual scholars have to waste their time on this.

Over the last decade, there were two hypotheses: H1: the political right genuinely cared about threats to speech from the left. H2: they were using campus speech wars to impose their values and silence dissent. Today, the answer is clear, but I can't find any of the H1 people admitting their error.

Vote NO on Prop 38 There have been some stinker CA propositions over the years, but the nakedness of this cash grab is at a whole new level

WHAAAAATTTTT squeee!!!!!!

thank God this would never happen at the university level or in mathematics as a whole

I have to admit, this is pretty funny

Counter-proposal to Sam Altman: Go fuck yourself www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

If you are an academic who uses arXiv, please consider signing this. **Give Authors Control: Let Us Decide If AI Bots Can Read Our arXiv Papers** math.mit.edu/~elmos/petit...

Lmao arxiv.org/pdf/2404.00732

Terrific as always

Happy Mean Girls Day! Let's learn about the arithmetic, geometric, and harmonic mean.

Well, if you believe what the AI companies say, they really have no way of knowing what their agents are up to! So the only plausible consistent response they could have to plagiarism accusations is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Reposting our job openings at SJSU, please repost the original post quoted below One asst prof discrete math/graph theory, one open rank position in statistics/data science Please let your friends know!

This story is amazing, and appalling, and hilarious, and sad - ah, academia

This story is amazing, @missionlocal.org rules

Google study: AI "saves" scientists 7 hours a week, 25% of which they then burn going through AI slop; worse, AI leads to "less diverse, less risky and less innovative science" www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-worl... Not looking forward to the future where we become referees of AI slop

wtf

Who Knows What the Midterms Will Bring: But You Can Enjoy the GOP’s Sweet Agony Today! talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/who-k...

In case anyone thought the whole Susan Collins corruption thing is just a big misunderstanding

The publication that blew the lid off of Clarence Thomas' grift and Susan Collins' bribes is doing a membership drive. Money incredibly well spent! I have no affiliation with @propublica.org other than great admiration. Donate if you can. give.propublica.org/campaign/749...

As someone who grew up in Maine, I'm honestly shocked - not that Collins would be corrupt, but that she'd be so *openly* corrupt in such an easily discoverable way

As always, I feel that Yiddish translates well to Chinese

For Lauren Bacall’s birthday: Benjamin Schwartz New Yorker, May 29, 2023

not a lot of candidates out there making (correct!) calculus jokes!

Now *this* is the opinion I've been waiting to hear about The AI Thing - wise and humane as always

Now *this* is the opinion I've been waiting to hear about The AI Thing - wise and humane as always

not a lot of candidates out there making (correct!) calculus jokes!

every day we are farther from God's light

all these endless warnings about ‘getting left behind’ as if surely the thing i want most in the world is to cling to some deeply degraded version of my art just to keep my name out there and my paychecks coming lol i’ll go back to shake-dancing before i do that shit