Letter from János Bolyai's father (Farkas Bolyai) on Euclid's parallel postulate:

you must not attempt this approach to the parallels. I know this way to the very end. I have transversed this bottomless night, which extinguished all light and joy of my life. I entreat you, leave the science of parallels alone [...] I thought I would sacrifice myself for the sake of truth. I was ready to become a martyr who would remove the flaw from geometry and return it purified to mankind. I accomplished monstrous, enormous labours: my creations are far better than those of others and yet I have not achieved complete satisfaction [...] I turned back when I saw no man can reach the bottom of this night. I turned back unconsoled , pitying myself and all mankind. Learn from my example: I wanted to know about parallels. I remain ignorant, this has taken all the flowers of my life and all my time from me.

His Abstract Algebra course is still the best one on YouTube.

Going live for Emacs Reader development

https://tv.dyne.org/w/aqbcMQuPaBV8X92EZaxx1d

Not going to stream here today, since I'm streaming from my libre laptop that doesn't have telegram. Feel free to join the peertube and/or the IRC #phi-mu-lambda

Or, as usually misattributed to Mao: "There is great disorder under the heavens, and the situation is excellent".

50th birthday of the Scheme Programming Language

Finally a new Guix release after ages.

https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2026/gnu-guix-1.5.0-released/

To be emphasized these are accepted papers. Accepted by some of the most elite academics from the most elite companies or universities. Definitely we've made tremendous progress in intelligence, so much so that we are unable to distinguish it from useless hallucinations.

Imagine how much the average person is not being able to distinguish between stupid hallucinatory propaganda if these hyper-educated academics can't, in their own area of expertise.

Either that, or they were paid to accept these papers regardless. Both explanations denote the degradation of the already terrible state of academia. It's similar to the slop PRs free software maintainers have to spend time perusing through.

I sort of made a breakthrough, I originally thought this would be impossible but it eventually worked!

We now have a cursor for navigating the text in a document in Emacs Reader! And you can navigate entirely by keyboard!!

Right now in the demo below it can only emulate forward and backward movement, but I'll be implementing vertical movement. Not just that, you would be able to set marks and highlight just by your keyboard!

A bit of history, once integrated Emacs Reader would be the only document reader inside Emacs, and actually beyond Emacs even to support a fully keyboard-driven document reader. Even zathura or sioyek only navigate the page, not at character, word or line level.

Notoriously there was a huge (3K!) LOC PR to pdf-tools to enable this, which implements exactly this but it never got merged:

https://github.com/vedang/pdf-tools/pull/39