Ancestors

Written by John Carlos Baez on 2025-01-20 at 18:18

The oligarchs are partying. They feel they have to.

Not long ago Trump threatened to send Zuckerberg to prison for life. Last night Zuckerberg, crushed and beaten, went to the big party in honor of Trump at Peter Thiel's house in DC, wearing a goofy bow tie. The Washington Post reports:

"Billionaires seen around Washington over the weekend included Miriam Adelson, the casino magnate and widow of Sheldon Adelson; Paul Singer, the hedge fund titan who is among the most influential Republican donors in the country; Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, who spent days party-hopping as part of his attempt to win a place in Mr. Trump’s orbit; and Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google who eight years ago around this time was unexpectedly showing up at protests against Mr. Trump’s travel ban on some Muslim countries."

It looks like Trump is following Putin's playbook: threaten and coerce the oligarchs until they pay obeisance and support him - then reward them and make them dependent on him.

Want to do something about this? See my list of Trump resistance organizations:

https://mathstodon.xyz/@johncarlosbaez/113485662024271142

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Written by Jesus Margar on 2025-01-20 at 18:30

@johncarlosbaez I have been wondering what Jim Simons would have done should he have been alive and well.

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Written by John Carlos Baez on 2025-01-20 at 19:06

@jesusmargar - "I have been wondering what Jim Simons would have done should he have been alive and well."

That's a very interesting question. I don't believe in "good" billionaires, but at least he was interestingly different.

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Written by Jesus Margar on 2025-01-20 at 20:44

@johncarlosbaez

Yeah, I don't believe in good billionaires either but he was a notorious donor to the democrats and bending backwards to please Trump like Zuckerberg has done would have felt out of character for him (it is feeling out of character for Zuckerberg, it is as if he became a different person).

On a related note, I would pay good money for a tell-all book on the relationship between Mercer and Simons.

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Written by Dima Pasechnik 🇺🇦 🇳🇱 on 2025-01-21 at 05:35

@jesusmargar @johncarlosbaez OTOH, at one point Simons has pleased (indirectly, but still) NSA, the biggest user of the computer algebra system Magma, by funding Magma licenses on the US campuses. Ruined careers of some people we know along the way.

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Written by Jesus Margar on 2025-01-21 at 07:29

@dimpase @johncarlosbaez

Could you please tell me more? How is the NSA the biggest user of Magma? I had no idea.

And whose career did Simons ruin?

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Toot

Written by Dima Pasechnik 🇺🇦 🇳🇱 on 2025-01-21 at 14:51

@jesusmargar @johncarlosbaez NSA is the biggest user of Magma, and the biggest employer of mathematicians in USA. Magma has the best availabile tools, in number theory and in group theory, for the kind of cryptography-related maths they need.

William Stein failed to get any grant money for SageMath from Simons, despite - or I suppose because of - being in position to develop open-source alternatives to Magma.

https://wstein.org/grants/

In an article I can't find any more he records his interactions with Simons Foundation. It's an interesting read.

EDIT: @jesusmargar kindly pointed at the link I wasn't finding:

https://sagemath.blogspot.com/2015/09/the-simons-foundation-and-open-source.html

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Descendants

Written by Jesus Margar on 2025-01-21 at 15:43

@dimpase @johncarlosbaez I had no idea of either factim not surprise about Simons prioritising the NSA but I'd never have imagined the NSA would use Magma. This explains a lot of their funding model and code secrecy. If you ever find the article again, please send it to me. I'd love to read it.

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Written by Jesus Margar on 2025-01-21 at 15:45

@dimpase @johncarlosbaez in the link you sent he doesn't list Simons as denied or submitted?

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Written by Dima Pasechnik 🇺🇦 🇳🇱 on 2025-01-21 at 16:10

@jesusmargar @johncarlosbaez

you can see the denial explained here:

https://sagemath.blogspot.com/2015/09/the-simons-foundation-and-open-source.html

They just won't be bothered to deal with a proposal, should it ever come, so it wasn't written.

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Written by John Carlos Baez on 2025-01-21 at 16:54

@dimpase @jesusmargar - interesting article! I didn't even know about Magma, nor did I know the problems Sage has been having.

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Written by Jesus Margar on 2025-01-21 at 19:39

@johncarlosbaez @dimpase

In a really bold move that I wouldn't contemplate myself under any circumstance, Stein left his (presumably?) cosy position at UW to focus full time on Sage development. This meant aeti g a company (cocalc) to exploit cloud computing on Sage. As an end user I cannot say I've seen a lot of difference to sage itself (maybe I use it for very specific things) beyond removing the windows version which was annoying.

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