borisveytsman.bsky.social
@borisveytsman.bsky.social
American exceptionalism. Under our fascists, the trains and the plains do not run on time.
November 9, 2025 at 3:27 PM
Google translate is lowering barriers between people.

Our car has been transported over the continent. When the Uzbek truck driver sent me the delivery report, I answered, "Rahmat." He replied, "Україна переможе безумовно."
November 7, 2025 at 5:16 PM
Looks like the media is trying to use Zohran Mamdani's aunt in the same way they used Hillary's emails.
October 28, 2025 at 9:20 PM
Ilya Ruderman from CSTM fonts told a funny story in his lecture about the history of Cyrillic.

Bodoni made beautiful Cyrillic typefaces (you can see the samples in his Manuale Typograficum). They were gifted to Alexander I during the short thaw between Russia and France

1/2
October 15, 2025 at 1:00 PM
An article in NYT (www.nytimes.com/2025/10/05/o...). A whiz kid who made millions in crypto has been kidnapped by his former friend, the de facto ruler of Georgia, beaten and forced to give away his crypto.

The techbros supporting Trump do not understand that this is their future as well.
Opinion | Someone Tipped Me Off About a Crypto Story. What I Found Was Crazy.
www.nytimes.com
October 14, 2025 at 6:51 PM
A talented font artist from India Rajeesh KV added math to the beautiful typeface Arsenal by a Ukrainian artist Andrij Shevchenko: ctan.org/pkg/arsenal-...

A rare example of a sans serif font with the full math support.

#TeXLaTeX #fonts
CTAN: Package ArsenalMath
ctan.org
October 14, 2025 at 5:40 AM
Ins Choi wrote Kim's Convenience and staged it in 2011 in Toronto Soulpepper Theater with himself playing the young Jung. Then he produced a 65-episode sitcom on Netflix, and when the sitcom closed, he revived the Soulpepper show with himself playing the older Appa.

1/5
October 5, 2025 at 8:33 PM
There is a quality of certain books, movies, and shows that can be called timeliness. This is exactly what one needs at the moment.

I feel that Noises Off by @sfplayhouse.org has been such a show for me.

1/4
October 3, 2025 at 6:39 AM
I grew up in the USSR. I remember our leaders with dementia sending our money to prop up corrupt and incompetent regimes in Latin America and Africa because they have been "ideological allies. "

Thus, there is nothing new for me when Trump is sending money to Xavier Milei.
September 24, 2025 at 4:19 PM
September 18, 2025 at 4:00 PM
Some people claim that Korean engineers violated the terms of their visas. Thus, their treatment was somehow justified.

First, we do not know whether they did. This is for the lawyers to find out. But let us for the argument sake stipulate they did.

1/2
September 15, 2025 at 4:08 PM
I disagreed with the late Charlie Kirk on a lot of issues. However, I share his position on Epstein files. We must open them and punish the perpetrators.

It is possible he died for this.
September 13, 2025 at 6:33 PM
The only group clearly benefitting from Kirk's death is Trumpists.

What happened to the old Cui Prodest principle?
September 11, 2025 at 3:16 PM
"Thus the Tories in England long imagined that they were enthusiastic about monarchy, the church, and the beauties of the old English Constitution, until the day of danger wrung from them the confession that they are enthusiastic only about ground rent."

Karl Marx
August 26, 2025 at 5:46 PM
The cat got a prescription diet after a minor surgery. Now he refuses to eat anything else.

The internet is full of advice how to make a cat to eat prescription diet. Nobody says how to make him to stop.
August 25, 2025 at 5:11 PM
I have on my laptop a copy of John Bolton's memoir about Trump. I wonder, is it safe to cross the US border with this laptop? What about having with me it during a traffic stop?

Time to refresh my skills of hiding forbidden books acquired during my Soviet youth.
August 23, 2025 at 3:33 PM
When I was a postdoc, I once left my workstation unlocked. The student sysadmin told me, "When I see an unlocked workstation for the second time, I type there 'rm -rf ~'".

When I worked in industry, we got chewed if we left sensitive papers on the desks.

www.npr.org/2025/08/16/n...
Government papers found in an Alaskan hotel reveal new details of Trump-Putin summit
Documents with sensitive details about the meeting between President Trump and Russian President Putin were left behind on a public hotel printer.
www.npr.org
August 16, 2025 at 6:57 PM
TIL the thought I have been promoting for quite some time is actually not mine. It belongs to Hanna Arendt.

"Law, on its own, is incapable of restraining political action." Only a power can check power.

See this great lecture hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/h...
Hannah Arendt and the Constitution of Freedom
This week I gave a lecture at the University of São Paulo in Brazil that asked, Why Law Alone Can’t Defend Democracy—and why Only Power Can Check Power.  | Hannah Arendt Center...
hac.bard.edu
August 13, 2025 at 5:15 PM
Three decades ago, Margarita Rodnikova wrote a review of my PhD thesis (Nikolay Malomuzh was my advisor)

authors.elsevier.com/a/1lb6wc8qpi...
authors.elsevier.com
August 12, 2025 at 7:41 PM
Die Maske des Bösen
Bertolt Brecht

An meiner Wand hängt ein japanisches Holzwerk
Maske eines bösen Dämons, bemalt mit Goldlack.
Mitfühlend sehe ich
Die geschwollenen Stirnadern, andeutend
Wie anstrengend es ist, böse zu sein.
August 12, 2025 at 4:19 PM
I have read a Gothic story by Conan Doyle. The character, among other things, was able to decipher cuneiform and read the ancient occult books.

He would be disappointed to know that the vast majority of tablets are mundane bookkeeping entries.

1/2
August 6, 2025 at 4:29 PM
My colleagues at @cziscience.bsky.social and I started to explore whether we can use AI to make scientific papers more accessible for blind and low vision scientists. While the preliminary results are not too optimistic, we see some prospects arxiv.org/abs/2508.00826
Use of LLMs in preparing accessible scientific papers
Making scientific papers accessible may require reprocessing old papers to create output compliant with accessibility standards. An important step there is to convert the visual formatting to the logi...
arxiv.org
August 6, 2025 at 1:53 AM
“We’re gonna get the drug prices down — not 30% or 40%, which would be great. Not 50% or 60%. No, we’re gonna get them down 1,000%, 600%, 500%, 1,500%.”

www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddo...

This reminds me of a story my late grandfather told me.

1/4
On prescription drug costs, Trump flunks arithmetic in embarrassing fashion
The president apparently intends to lower the cost of prescription drugs by up to 1,500%, which is badly at odds with how numbers work.
www.msnbc.com
August 2, 2025 at 5:04 PM