When AI data centers get press nowadays, it's typically negative. They are large, unbeautiful buildings. They consume ginormous amounts of power. They make noise.

But an otherwise typical article about data centers last year also bemoaned that they're doing tons of matrix multiplication which the author deemed unbeautiful:

"Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics," the mathematician G. H. Hardy wrote, in 1940. But matrix multiplication, to which our civilization is now devoting so many of its marginal resources, has all the elegance of a man hammering a nail into a board. It is possessed of neither beauty nor symmetry: in fact, in matrix multiplication, a times b is not the same as b times a.

For a lot of us, some of the most tasty forms of symmetry are those modeled by nonabelian groups (expressible by matrix multiplication). But to each his own.

And masterful use of a hammer can be elegant indeed.

An oblique sheep in a linear algebra textbook.

A rain/snow boundary at just a couple hundred feet above my neighborhood is chef's kiss.

So. A NY Times columinst (Ross Douthat) invited an author (Seth Harp) to a debate. Seth said OK, they had a debate, but it never aired. Seth was miffed and posted this response he got from the Times: Comments are mixed: some say Ross was a coward and some say it was undignified of Seth to publicize what happened. I leave that to others to discuss; I bring this up because the pivot away phrasing kills me. When this person has to cancel dinner plans, do they call and say they're going to pivot away from meeting up?

Jensen Huang, on President Tr--p:

I've never met anybody with such incredible work ethic.

Really? I'm guessing most people at Nvidia don't go golfing 1 out of 5 days.

Amazon, on Melania:

We licensed the film for one reason and one reason only—because we think customers are going to love it.

I used to be proud to work in the tech sector. The industry wasn't without its faults but it wasn't routine for companies to debase themselves as they do nowadays.

Two months ago, I wrote:

There are two kinds of people: those who tell me I could be making money doing <thing x> when they see I have a skill for it, and those who don't.

"You could have a store on Etsy," they say.

OK, I have a store on Etsy now. I've sold one (1) picture frame, which sold by virtue of what collectible thing it displayed. Other items offered on the store get scarcely any notice.

I know nothing about who got the frame beyond their name and address. I've gotten no feedback on how well they liked it. Instead, one gets money.

Probably the best thing about having an Etsy store is that it puts an end to being continually reminded that I could set one up.

I'm not linking to the store because this is not a commercial blog. As the FAQ says,

Some images reproduced here are subject to licenses that only allow noncommercial use and I honor their terms.