Mohammad Keyhani @Keyhanimo

Someone needs to post the host state agreement between FIFA and the U.S. because this is absolutely insane and totally out of keeping with the ways in which host city agreements in the U.S. seem to operate (FIFA mostly calls the shots in those agreements).

Rob Harris @RobHarris

9 hours ago

FIFA confirms Somali referee Omar Abdulkadir Artan will be unable to officiate at the World Cup after he was denied entry into the United States. FIFA says was “informed by authorities that Mr Artan’s status will not be changed at present” & is host country who determines visas

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ABD, İsviçreli Embolo'ya vize vermedi. İncelemeye alındı, günler sonra takıma katılabildi. İran Milli Takımı günlerce Ankara'da konsolosluk önünde vize için beklemek zorunda kaldı. ABD sadece maç günleri ülkeye giriş yapma şartıyla verdi. Arka planda çalışan 15 kişiye vize verilmedi. Irak Milli Takım oyuncusu, ABD'ye gitti, ancak 7 saate yakın sorguda tutuldu. Sonrasında ülkeye girişine izin verildi. Afrika'da 2025 yılının en iyi hakemi seçilen ve turnuvada görev alacak olan Omar Artan'a vize verilmedi. Somali kendisine diplomatik pasaport verdi ve ABD'ye uçtu, ancak girişine izin verilmedi ve ülkesine gönderildi. Güney Afrika Milli Takımı kafilenin yarısına vize verilmediği için planlanandan çok sonra ABD'ye gidebildi. Birleşik Krallık vatadaşlarının ESTA sistemine kayıt olmaları halinde 90 gün vizesiz ABD'ye giriş hakları olmasına rağmen İskoç taraftarların vizeleri günler kala iptal edildi. Biletlerini alan otellerde yerini ayırtan ABD vizeleri reddedildi. Paraları da yandı. Dört yılda bir yapılan bir turnuvanın başlamadan içine ettiniz beyler! @FIFAWorldCup @FIFAcom

"They're made out of weights." "Weights?" "Weights. Floating-point numbers. We checked the whole thing through. It's nothing but weights." "Weights doing what? Where do the words come from?" "The weights make the words. Are you understanding me?"

An incredible bit of sports journalism by The Guardian here. A short summary of the playing style of all 48 World Cup nations and a short profile of all 1248 World Cup players. Bookmark and refer to the resources when watching the obscure matches: theguardian.com/football/ng-in…

Today a crazy quantum story just got wilder. On March 31, the Google Quantum AI team published a landmark result on Shor's algorithm for elliptic curve cryptography. Technically, the paper was a bombshell: a dramatic 10x improvement over the state-of-the-art. As a stunt and wakeup call to the blockchain space, those optimisations were illustrated on secp256k1, the elliptic curve underlying Bitcoin and Ethereum signatures. But perhaps the most striking part of the paper was sociological, not technical. Instead of following standard academic process, the optimisations were kept secret, hidden behind a zero-knowledge (ZK) proof. Google's accompanying blog post mentions they "engaged with the U.S. government". The ZK proof demonstrates the existence of algorithmic improvements without leaking details. Academic censorship with ZK, a historic first! As a co-author of the Google paper I witnessed some of the context surrounding this censorship. To be honest, multiple aspects of that context don't sit well with me. As much as I believe the general public ought to know more, I am limited in my ability to whistleblow. Though let me be clear about one thing: the Google team's professionalism has been absolutely exemplary, and they deserve nothing but praise. Censorship has a way of backfiring. The Streisand effect, where an attempt to bury something only draws more attention to it, is exactly what's unfolding today. First, Google's key optimisation has been rediscovered by the French. And in a thrilling turn of events, a collaborative Shor-at-home challenge just launched. The initiative, available at ecdsa[.]fail, breached a new Shor world record in a matter of hours. Let's start with the rediscovery. Just two months after Google's paper, French quantum expert André Schrottenloher cracks the main secret optimisation. His paper, titled "Optimized Point Addition Circuits for Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithms", landed on the arXiv today. Big congrats to André, who beat several other nerdsnipped experts to it. In a blog post also published today, Craig Gidney, the world expert on Shor optimisations, revealed that he'd been sitting on this very optimisation for a whole year under censorship pressure. Interestingly, André missed a handful of minor optimisations, both from Google's original publication and from improvements found since. It's plausible there's still plenty of juice left to squeeze out of Shor, and this is exactly what the ecdsa[.]fail challenge is about. The verifier program developed for the ZK proof does double duty, automatically filtering for valid submissions. Dozens of compounding small and micro improvements are rolling in. As of the time of writing there's an 8.4% improvement to Google's circuit, as measured by the product of logical qubit count and Toffoli gate count. Nice! The nerdsnipping ran deeper than anyone expected. Over the last few weeks it became clear it extended well beyond André and other quantum experts. Behind the scenes, a small army of amateurs quietly got to work. Inspired by Karpathy-style autoresearch, they turned AI on Shor. Ironically, the verifier program for the ZK proof makes an ideal reward function for AIs. The barrier to entry for this modern style of research is refreshingly low, with several non-experts, even a teenager, finding nice optimisations. Get in touch if you'd like to join a Telegram group with fellow autoresearchers :) Part 2: neutral atoms and qday The story doesn't end with Google. On the same day Google went public, a stealthy startup called Oratomic published its own Shor paper in a coordinated release. It made a splash, ultimately becoming the most upvoted paper on scirate[.]com, a website ranking arXiv papers. Oratomic's claim was wild. By building on Google's logical optimisations and applying custom physical optimisations for neutral atoms, they claimed just 10K physical qubits were sufficient to run Shor's algorithm on secp256k1. That number is mind-bogglingly low. Knowing essentially nothing about neutral atoms when Oratomic's paper landed, I was intrigued and decided to learn more about the tech. I fell straight down the rabbit hole and spent a couple hundred hours on the topic. I got a little obsessed and watched every YouTube video I could find and spoke to a bunch of experts. My conclusion? The tech is real, very real. Even Google recently decided to start a neutral atom lab, a notable pivot from their sole focus on superconducting qubits. If you care about qday, i.e. the day a quantum computer will break the first piece of cryptography in production, neutral atoms demand your attention. I shared some of my learnings on Shor and neutral atoms in a 30min talk at the ZKProof cryptography conference. You can find it on YouTube by searching "zkproof neutral atom". Here's an interesting observation about this duo of breakthrough papers: neither Google nor Oratomic say a word about what their results mean for qday. No timelines. Zero. Nada. That is especially baffling given that the whole point of whitehat quantum cryptanalysis is to inform qday estimations and help the general public make good decisions. So let me attempt to partially fill the silence, similarly to what Scott Aaronson did in his April 29 post. Given everything I know, including scary non-public information, I now put the odds of qday by 2032 at 50%. 10% by 2030. Anecdotally, the US government has its own date: 2035. Originating at the NSA and later adopted by NIST, it's when branches of the US government will be disallowed from using quantum-vulnerable cryptography. In plain language: with hindsight, that date is a joke and should be discounted entirely. I don't see how NIST avoids being forced to pull it forward by years. Part 3: post-quantum cryptography There are good reasons to sound the alarm today, but please do not panic. Rushing carelessly towards immature post-quantum cryptography is a recipe for disaster. IMO a good target date for migration is 2029, roughly 3.5 years out. 2029 happens to be the date selected by Google, Cloudflare, and the Ethereum Foundation. These days most of my time goes to safely migrating Ethereum towards post-quantum cryptography as part of the broader lean Ethereum effort. There's a lot to do. We need to rip out and replace BLS signatures at the consensus layer, KZG commitments at the data layer, and ECDSA signatures at the execution layer. The plan to get there is compelling, and is based on hash-based cryptography. Within the Ethereum Foundation we've developed a Swiss army knife called leanVM (github[.]com/leanEthereum/leanVM) powered by the magic of hash-based SNARKs. Thanks to truly exceptional work by Emile, Thomas, and others, its performance is derisked. Regarding security, leanVM is a jewel, a minimal zkVM crafted for end-to-end formal verification and maximum security. Want to help? There are two $1M initiatives. First, the Proximity Prize (proximityprize[.]org). Solve a long-standing mathematical conjecture in coding theory, improve hash-based SNARKs, and go home a millionaire. Second, the Poseidon Initiative (poseidon-initiative[.]info), offers $1M for breaking Poseidon, the SNARK-friendly hash function.

لحظة قصف اسرائيل لروضة أطفال جنوب لبنان 🇱🇧

@RaminNasibov I don't even know how a kid can get a proper developmental experience without Lemmings

@hoomanask @RaminNasibov Loved this one and games like it too. I remember one called Syndicate that I really enjoyed.

@Steve_Yegge Haha you can get one of these for pretty cheap at HelperBat.com

They said when Poincare died "there went the last mathematician". They meant he was the last generalist; after that, everyone was an algebraist, or an analyst, or, God forbid, a combinatorialist. ChatGPT Pro might be the first mathematician since Poincare.

This is the biggest brain gain opportunity in Canadian history. There are many extraordinarily talented individuals, pre-vetted on O-1/EB-1A visas, who may not/can not go home due to war, persecution, etc, who will seek safety and security elsewhere. @MarkJCarney pls!

Homeland Security @DHSgov

3 weeks ago

An alien who is in the U.S. temporarily and wants a Green Card must return to their home country to apply. This policy allows our immigration system to function as the law intended instead of incentivizing loopholes. The era of abusing our nation’s immigration system is over.

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Hi @googlemaps, why don't you have a "go back" button? 90% of the time, when I go somewhere, my next destination is to go back to where I came from.

This is a hard article to read, but I hope you'll do so. I've spent some time reporting on widespread rape and other sexual violence of Palestinian male and female prisoners by Israeli authorities, and the article is now published. The assault victims were warned not to give speak of what they endured -- they were sometimes told they would be killed or raped if they gave interviews -- but they found the courage to do so. One man described being raped three times in a single day in Israeli prison, the third time after he tried to protest. A young woman said the guards would come in at the beginning of each shift and strip her naked and abuse her. Another reported that she was shown photos of herself being raped and warned they would be released unless she cooperated with Israeli intelligence. Even three children who had been detained told me they had been sexually abused. Look, whatever our position on the Middle East, we should be able to agree on being anti-rape. Sexual assaults were horrific when Israeli women were targeted on Oct. 7, and they're equally horrific when Israeli authorities use them against Palestinians day after day after day. We should be able to find common ground in opposing rape. Here's a gift link to the article: nytimes.com/2026/05/11/opi…

I wonder if there's anything in the Bible about golden idols and stuff

Christopher Hale @ChristopherHale

a month ago

NEW: MAGA evangelical leaders gather in Mar-a-Lago to bless and dedicate a gold statue dedicate to Donald Trump.

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gonna play the heck out of GTA 6 simply because of its status as a cultural artefact: the final big game built before LLMs no-one will ever invest this much in a game again, no software will ever encode this quantity of hands-on human labour again. the last of the great pyramids

Kalshi @Kalshi

a month ago

JUST IN: GTA 6 estimated to have cost $1 billion

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It’s incredible! Banksy is a genius.

John Simpson @JohnSimpsonNews

a month ago

Congratulations to Westminster Council for their acceptance of Banksy’s brilliant statue near Pall Mall. Let’s hope it stays — a welcome note of calmness and humour at a time of growing extremism.

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I just had my first ride with HOVR, a Canadian alternative to Uber. They are cheaper and pay their drivers more. They already have over 3000 drivers in the Greater Toronto Area. You can download HOVR in App Store and Google Play using this link 📷 appurl.io/_njqzPQ57k

What do the smartest kids in the world do when they grow up? I did the largest study of ~18,000 International Olympiad medalists (IMO, IOI and IPhO) over the last 25yrs, arguably the sharpest analytical minds of the world in high school, to see where they ended up and traced ~50% of them. Founders of ~20 unicorns and ~7 decacorns and ~10 billionaires: OpenAI, Cursor, Stripe, Databricks, Perplexity, Ethereum, Cognition, Hyperliquid, Fireworks, Modal, Quora, Parallel, Cartesia, Wispr Most kids went to MIT, a whopping 12% of them, followed by Cambridge (7%) and Sharif (3%)! The career paths they chose (of those who graduated) were: — 36% Academia (professors) — 26% Other — 22% in Software / Tech — 12% in Quant / Finance — 5% Founders! The biggest employer was Google, by far, at 6%. Others interesting tidbits were: — 47 of them work at Jane Street (#3) — 38 at OpenAI (#5) — 15 at Anthropic — 8 at Cognition — 6 at Isomorphic Labs Olympiaders were 1500x more likely to be billionaires and 4000x more likely to be unicorn founders than the average person!

The guy who threatened to annihilate an entire civilian population would like us to ‘tone down the rhetoric’.

If you think about it, what Carney is saying (👇 x.com/sarobertsonca/…) - that the US has become completely untrustworthy and incapable of respecting agreements - is much more consequential than at first glance. Trust, or lack thereof, is the ultimate corrosive agent of power, in all dimensions. Take the military for instance: without trust you have no allies, no arms sales, no sharing of intelligence, everyone building their militaries AGAINST you, etc. Or take the economy: without trust no-one holds your debt, does contracts with you, invests in you, supply chains get rewired around you, etc. Whatever dimension you take, trust is the core foundation. Confucius recognized this 2,500 years ago when he said that a state can lose everything, even its military and food, except for trust without which "a state cannot survive" (thetedkarchive.com/library/confuc…). Now of course we're not there yet, the US remains enormously powerful. That's why I speak of *corrosive* agent: corrosion takes time, especially if what's being corroded is the largest structure ever built. But we're now at a stage where loss of trust is a fact, and that's a leading indicator: Canada and all countries who think like them (which is, probably, literally all countries) are now actively building for a world where US commitments mean nothing. And in such a world, US power means very little too.