A Changing Field

The software field is in a knot-twist about AI; but the people who are doing some of the best thinking about the impacts of AI are mathematicians.

(Note: I’m going to use AI here because it’s the parlance of the times. I continue to be very frustrated by the terminology flattening caused by continuous use of the term AI -- the difference between LLM, agent systems, generative video and image systems, audio processing, transcription, virtual manipulation and ink detection, and more is enormous, but we flatten everything into a single pair of characters: AI. This lack of nuance makes us weaker as a society, but for the purposes of this post, I’ll take the battle as lost.)

The famous mathematician and talented communicator Terence Tao has been leading the charge, or so it seems, on thinking through some of this. He has invited mathematicians to write guest posts on his blog, a good number of which I have read. I quite enjoyed “What should we tell our students”, especially the metaphor of the "polytope-of-ideas". Math is moving fast, but watching experts in the field have serious conversations about the field has been fascinating.

Yesterday Dr. Tao posted slides to a lecture Math 2.0. He highlights the change from a history of math where proofs were scarce to one where proofs were abundant, the challenges of recognizing the boundaries of the field and how AI helps and how it doesn’t.

The thing that I want to note more than anything is his model of problem solving: The ability to produce a verified artifact in pure mathematics without involving humans bypasses human understanding, and reduces ultimately the ability of humans to produce good results in the world of applications.

Human endeavour is ultimately just that: Human. I suspect the inhumanity is why people react so poorly to AI art and why art seemingly has to show it is human now. The challenge faced by so many fields now is going to be redrawing the lines: Where augmentation is legitimately helpful and where it starts to sap the human endeavour. Different fields will draw these lines differently: It seems likely to me that painters probably won’t land on the side of ‘lots of augmentation’ -- but other fields are going to have to walk this line.

Even the humanities will need to walk these lines. A recurring theme many fields are discovering is: “ChatBot: Solve My Problem” is rarely the thing -- instead, many fields are discovering that these tools are augmentations for those with expertise, and horrible preemptive amputations for those who do not yet have expertise.

The bottleneck will soon become not research findings themselves, but the attention of experts in niche topics.

At the end of the day, each field needs to figure out: what exactly is the endeavour? Math is discovering (or reminding itself) that it’s not proofs. For other fields, the answers here will be diverse -- and so too will be level of augmentation.

In my own field, the answers will be incredibly diverse! For some programmers the endeavour is the programming, the code is the art, and for them no level of AI augmentation will be acceptable. For others, sometimes the code isn’t art -- it’s a means to an end, a disposable artifact to serve some other need. For those programmers, AI can be a helpful augmentation, reducing tedium and allowing one to focus on the actual task at hand.

In 2023 I wrote about Crossing an AI Rubicon. The world has only gotten stranger in every possible dimension since then. On the AI front, we’re all having to grapple with what it means for these strange tools to exist.

I just hope that more fields can find their Terence, and navigate this time with care and compassion.

Kirk Drift

Just a while ago I finished reading “Freshly Remember’d: Kirk Drift”, an essay whose basic premise is that the womanizing callous “manly man” vision of Captain Kirk of Star Trek is an ahistorical toxic revisionist view.

“There is no other way to put this: essentially everything about Popular Consciousness Kirk is bullshit. Kirk, as received through mass culture memory and reflected in its productive imaginary (and subsequent franchise output, including the reboot movies), has little or no basis in Shatner’s performance and the television show as aired. Macho, brash Kirk is a mass hallucination.”

It’s a very good essay. What’s fascinating and horrifying too is the way in which this essay, written 10 years ago almost, has its finger on culture pulses that continue to echo today.

“ Heterosexuality has been through the fucking ringer in cultural productions in the last decades due to backlashes against feminism and queer visibility that have transformed portrayals and interpretations alike into dumbshows—crude pantomimes, as before the play. These frantic defenses have done more to render the proposition of men and women loving one another a piece of one-note unsustainable ridiculousness than women’s lib and LGBTQ rights ever could.”

There’s so much of this that I would love to clip and quote, but I’ll leave this final one here:

“If history is written by the winners, then people with power will always be the ones who control what is remembered, and marginal people’s truths and histories will be what is occluded. It is thus now. We cannot live without memory (and to do so would be to live without meaning). Given this, it becomes a question of what survives. If we do not strive for a strong and diverse collective memory, the collective memory that inexorably remains will be that of kyriarchy. Memory and accuracy also enable us to track and to contest changing definitions of masculinity.

[...]

Thus it becomes a matter of reclaiming texts via attentive reading. In the post-truth world, attention is a skill. Reading is a skill. We must vigilantly listen to the hum of the currents of power running through texts and their interpretations, to actions and their spin. We must insist upon reality in order to meaningfully and morally do the work of relativistic interpretation: there are four lights, for fuck’s sake. We do have to have stories, and so we need to be able to see them.”

E-Reading in 2026

A few months ago I lost my Kobo Libra H2O during a long trip. Apparently my brain failed me, and I left it somewhere in an airport or on a plane, and I was unable to retrieve it through any lost-and-founds.

An e-reader is a wonderful thing, so I found myself in the market for a new one. Shopping was hard, for reasons I was kind of surprised by:

  • Kobo has eliminated black-and-white from it’s middle of the road e-reader lineup.

    If I wanted the most direct match to my lost reader, I’d be looking at the Libra Colour... but I didn’t want colour! It’s lovely in theory, but in practice it’s still not there, in my experience of looking at it in store. It’s noticeably lower contrast and at least a little less pleasant to read.

    As someone who is mostly looking to read books I really had a hard time telling myself that colour would be the right choice.

  • I was quite interested in Boox: the idea of a full Android e-ink reader was appealing, as I would be able to read articles from my RSS feed easily, and growing skills around Android is always interesting to me. I know just enough adb to be dangerous.

    Of course, then I started to think more: The whole thing I like about e-readers is that I’m not “online”. The idea of being able to install arbitrary apps on my e-reader was probably more of a a downside not an upside. Also acquiring the B&W Boox Go 7 in Canada was just complicated enough that I hemmed and hawed on it for weeks.

One reader which stood out to me, and actually was the thing I pulled the trigger on first was the XTEINK X4. A colleague showed one off when I was on a work trip, and I was quite impressed. Given how affordable it was, I figured even it it was not to be my “main” e-reader, it would be a fun thing to explore, and apparently was quite hacakable. It turns out my timing on getting this was pretty good, as they’ve discontinued that model, though a replacement does seem to be coming.

While I was waiting for my XTEINK to arrive, I was dealing with the my lost Kobo, making sure whomever found my device couldn’t buy books, when I stumbled upon a refurbished Kobo Libra 2. This was exactly what I had been looking for -- B&W Kobo, familiar form-factor. Even a small upgrade on a few dimensions. Perfect. I clicked order.

These two devices are quite different in a lot of ways, so I’m actually going to talk about the separately for now.

The Kobo Libra 2

The biggest reason I bought a Kobo, in addition to the X4, is that I like the ability to take e-books out of my local library. The integration of this is pretty darn good in a Kobo, and so I figured I’d like another Kobo.

Still, I was doing so much e-reader research, that I started coming across interesting things I’d never really seen before. For example, I learned there are open-source software options for Kobo that I’d never heard of before. The one I’ve dug most into is KOReader.

KOReader

KOreader is fascinating. It’s way more than a reader, but not quite a full firmware. When you open it, it takes over the whole Kobo, and can be used to control things like wifi, USB sharing, and more... but you can quit, and get back to the original Kobo interface.

One really appealing thing, knowing I was having the X4 en-route was that KOreader has a device-to-device progress sync, and there’s an implementation for the X4. So you can read on one device, upload your progress, then download it to another. It’s not quite the very-pleasant ambient sync capability that Kobos have, but it works on any e-pub you have, keyed by hash of the e-pub... so it works on Standard EBooks for example!

Let me get this right out of the way: KOReader doesn’t quite map right to my brain. I’ve been using it for months and I still find it a touch un-intuitive though it’s getting easier. Many people complain it’s confusing, and they’re not wrong. However, there’s some really wonderful stuff in there; For example: Kobo has this horrible problem when jumping from book to book of the text size jumping around horribly. Totally fixed in KOReader.

There’s a wonderful Calendar view of your reading which is just fascinating (though makes you notice the gaps when you’re reading things like gasp Paper Book)

There’s also some incredibly strange things in there... like a terminal emulator and an SSH server: 

[root@kobo ~]# ls
bin         drivers     fs.md5sum   libexec     lost+found  proc        sbin        tmp         var
dev         etc         lib         linuxrc     mnt         root        sys         usr

I have a feeling I’ll be plumbing the depths of the KOReader for a good chunk of time.

The XTEINK X4

When I got it, I discovered right away that the default firmware is at best described as... not great. However, I had anticipated this and done my research, and heard great things about the alternative firmware: Crosspoint Reader. Flashing this was super simple: Plug in device and flash directly from Firefox.

It’s simple but effective. You load books over wifi or MicroSD card.

CrossPoint has quite a nice little WebUI when you’re connected via WiFi: You can change settings, log into your KOReader sync and more.

Reading

The experience of reading on the X4 is super nice. It’s shockingly light, very quick overall to read, and the screen is actually really good, though, I miss the front-light more than I expected -- being in perfect light just happens too rarely in reality.

There’s a built in font downloader and a good selection of fonts. There’s an anti-aliasing story, but after spending some time experimenting I came down on the side of skipping antialiasing. Partially because it looks fine without, and partially because with it enabled it means page renders are two phase: no-AA render, followed a few hundred ms after by a AA rendering pass.

Image rendering is totally serviceable a bit slow.

One thing that has surprised me extremely is how central the weight is to the experience of the X4. It barely feels like it weighs anything, and it actually makes the Kobo feel quite like a brick! Really makes me wish more gadgets chased lightness!

Battery life is extremely good. The lack of frontlight and only turning on wi-fi when syncing means it’s a real sipper.

Hackable

It’s quite neat to see all the various things people have done with the X4. If I ever got bored of it or perhaps if the battery stops charging well, I could turn it into a little Trmnl. Honestly, it’s so neat I’ve wondered about acquiring one just for hacking. I’d love to find out if it’s bootable without a battery, is converting it to a status screen without the battery is just such a lovely idea.

Some Caveats

I would mention a few things I’ve noticed:

  • At least on mine, the X4’s wifi modem is weak. By this, I mean that I can only connect basically when I’m in the same room as my router, where no other device cares so much.
  • When considering firmware selection, it does seem like it’s possible to get into a cul-de-sac: be cautious when evaluating them.
  • ePub rendering is very simple; which mostly means that sometimes more complicated formatting gets lost: block quotes, etc. I did also spot a few cases of ligatures hitting a fallback font.

Some Resources I Discovered on My Journey

It’s been neat looking into e-reading in 2026 with a more open mind than I have previously. I found a few neat resources to share:

  • Nico Verbruggen has done a really wonderful job of creating some beautiful fonts for Kobo devices. Give them a try!
  • For the X4, there’s a third-party app which is quite nice for using as a website clipper, called “Send to X4” which works pretty good for purpose. It makes it nice to use it to read really long articles
  • The KOReader Compendium is alternative manual that I occasionally understand better

Conclusion

E-reading in 2026 is still pretty great, and I’m excited to see new generations of devices. Actually, Crosspoint has a whole bunch of devices that are supported now, including some very neat looking options like the LILYGO T5.

A Tiny Mechanical Television

This is one of the coolest projects I’ve seen in ages: A tiny mechanical Television — with the incredible resolution of 4906x20 produced purely with 5 LEDs and a spinning drum with holes in it. All the plans on GitHub too!

I’ve jumped the below video to the demo: Wow.

D.K. Harrell Blues Band

What a very fun show with a very charismatic performer.

“Democracy”

We have a referendum coming up in Alberta. Rather than facing the challenges of our province, our provincial government enjoys the electoral success that comes from pushing the lines repeatedly, while wrapping themselves in flags of “democracy”.

I really liked this post from Duane Brett which reminds us… this is mostly an illusion.

Unfortunately this doesn’t mean we get to ignore the election. Albertans must stand up and push back on this governmentally-bolstered false separatism. The only plausible way that this tinderbox, that Danielle Smith chose to light, is extinguished is if we forcefully reject the question — and even then I worry that it may be too late, and that we will be dealing with this bullshit for decades.

Here’s a few links: