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Jules Hedges (May 02 2022 at 13:46):I guess everyone here is at least aware that nLab has been having technical difficulties in the last months. But I only just saw these words written by Urs: (http://128.2.67.219/schreiber/show/What+is...+the+nLab#fn:1)
"The operation of the main web of the nnLab had been abruptly suspended on 29 Dec. 2021 by its single volunteer installation administrator at that time, without notice or discussion. (The forum page with the shutdown announcement is now down, too.) Authors have been locked out of all their pages since (in particular I continue being locked out of my home page, please check by email whether information given there is still accurate, in case it matters).
The currently remaining rudimentary page display is hence outdated, besides having been partially broken in the shutdown process; and readers should please beware that the nnLab pages they currently get to see have not been, are not being and cannot be maintained until further notice. (Some pages are not even displaying their latest content as of the shutdown moment anymore.)
Requests to at least post an alert to this effect on displayed pages have been turned down without reason; and a succession of announcements of system recovery have all passed without effect, instead further functionality has been switched off since. In short, the nnLab installation has de facto died on 29 Dec. 2021, and it is unclear if or when it will be revived in the future, and in which state of coherence or trustworthiness. Myself, I have unfortunately no control or command over the installation, having trusted in volunteer help on this crucial point.
A hard restart of the entire nnLab project seems to be necessary, and maybe there is some value to this, dire as it feels at this point. If anyone reading this sees themselves willing and capable to set up, host and administrate a research wiki vaguely like the nnLab was, possibly better, then please contact me."
Jules Hedges (May 02 2022 at 13:51):My first thought is that if we talk to our ACT friends in industry it probably would be quite easy to get enough money to pay a professional sysadmin, and not rely on volunteers.
James Deikun (May 02 2022 at 14:05):The important thing isn't not to rely on volunteers, but insofar as possible not to rely. The main thing is to have a process by which the service can be set up again without help from whoever is currently running it, like always having up-to-date backups in the hands of the wiki administrators (and if possible, slightly-less-up-to-date backups available to the general public).
James Deikun (May 02 2022 at 14:08):(Also, the domain should be held by an organization composed of the wiki administrators, rather than by any unrelated org 'on their behalf'. This is secondary though--links being broken is bad, but not nearly as bad as links being broken unsystematically.)
Fabrizio Genovese (May 02 2022 at 14:30):Jules Hedges said:
My first thought is that if we talk to our ACT friends in industry it probably would be quite easy to get enough money to pay a professional sysadmin, and not rely on volunteers.
From an industry perspective, the scarcest resource is time.
Fabrizio Genovese (May 02 2022 at 14:31):Putting someone to work on this means paying someone part-time to do it. At least for a startup-like reality, this is just not possible. Also I wouldn't be too happy knowing that ncatlab is privately managed.
Fabrizio Genovese (May 02 2022 at 14:33):The best strategy imho would be to request some sort of grant for this task, and use that money to pay some freelance professional to take care of it. Also, I'd request monthly or at least quarterly backups so that if something like this happens again in the future the project can be restarted easily. I really hope Urs has some backups of the ncatlab.
Jules Hedges (May 02 2022 at 14:45):Yes, I had in mind grants or donations from industry
Jade Master (May 02 2022 at 14:46):Sounds like something that an institute could help with ;)
Paolo Perrone (May 02 2022 at 14:48):Does anyone know what the problem with the nForum currently is?
Zhen Lin Low (May 02 2022 at 14:50):It may be difficult to revive the old nLab even with the page source code... I recall the engine was heavily customised.
Mike Shulman (May 02 2022 at 15:47):29 Dec 2021 is a long time ago, and the nLab has been "running" much more recently than that. I suggest asking Urs whether that quoted text is just an out-of-date leftover.
However, I do certainly agree that the reliance on the current volunteer labor is a bad situation, for many reasons.
Jules Hedges (May 02 2022 at 15:56):I didn't explicitly ask, but he tweeted a screenshot of this same text today, so I would assume it still stands
David Corfield (May 02 2022 at 16:37):The nForum has a SSL certificate problem, apparently.
There were funds collected for the nLab migration (here) . When the nForum is running again, you'll be able to see how much was collected from the final comment in the thread.
Henry Story (May 02 2022 at 16:40):The best way to avoid certificate problems is to use the Electronic Frontier Foundations https://letsencrypt.org
It is quite easy to use and automatically fetches new certificates on a regular basis.
Mike Shulman (May 02 2022 at 16:56):Ah, reading more closely I see that Urs is referring to the shutdown of editing, which has indeed been going on that long. I wish I were able to help with solving the problem myself, but I have too much on my plate at the moment already.
I do think that there are backups of the page source, in at least some form. My personal workstation has been running daily backups for a while, and I think Urs and possibly one or two others also have. It looks like they stopped working this March, but I still have backups from December, January, and February -- I haven't looked at them, but the gzipped files are 1.2G, so they have something in them.
Fabrizio Genovese (May 02 2022 at 17:15):Jules Hedges said:
Yes, I had in mind grants or donations from industry
Industry usually gives money to develop things. You finance an institute or a startup to get a slice of the possible earnings. From this point of view financing the nlab is a bit of a dead end: It is not intrinsically novel per sé, it's just a repository. Industry investors have little incentives to invest in something like this instead of moving their money towards something that deliver novel, exploitable research. The only incentive I can think of is philanthropy, which is a very rare thing to find lol
Fabrizio Genovese (May 02 2022 at 17:16):Clearly if something like the Topos Institute acquires a staggering valuation, then they could use part of the money to maintain the nlab. The problem is getting to that valuation. Almost all startups in this space are pretty early on, in a stage where every penny counts :smile:
Oscar Cunningham (May 02 2022 at 17:48):Richard estimates that costs will be < $6 a month (https://nforum.ncatlab.org/discussion/13776/nlab-migration-to-the-cloud/?Focus=97893#Comment_97893). So securing funding is not a top priority.
Urs seems to be being overly dramatic about the whole thing. This migration was necessary to create the kind of robust technology for the nLab that we all want. It's now running on AWS; whereas before it was running on a single box in someone's office. The plan is also to open-source all the code.
Also, the search is now infinitely faster than it was before, which anyone who experienced the old search will know is an absolute blessing.
Mike Shulman (May 02 2022 at 17:49):I don't think shutting down fundamental features for months on end is a normal way of migrating to a cloud server and developing new code.
Jules Hedges (May 02 2022 at 18:00):I suppose what Urs says can be summed up in one sentence as "the admin is not cooperating or communicating", which is a pretty bad situation
Jules Hedges (May 02 2022 at 18:14):I'd guess the nForum is probably down for an unrelated reason; I just checked that the nCafe has no post about the nLab's technical problems, so probably this very thread is 3rd in line to the throne of places that anyone can even talk about this. (Which isn't ideal because Urs himself isn't signed up here, I think)
Oscar Cunningham (May 02 2022 at 18:15):Sure. And Urs' post made some sense when he originally made it. I just don't understand why he's sounding the alarm again by retweeting it now that most of the trouble is over. It's lead to a post on reddit declaring 'Apparently nLab is dead' at the top of r/math with 105 votes. This is frustrating because it will discourage people from interacting with the nLab at exactly the moment when editing is being reopened.
Oscar Cunningham (May 02 2022 at 18:17):It seems like everyone here is running to panic stations, when in fact we've already reached the point where we're sorting out the finer details.
Oscar Cunningham (May 02 2022 at 18:18):Henry Story said:
The best way to avoid certificate problems is to use the Electronic Frontier Foundations https://letsencrypt.org
It is quite easy to use and automatically fetches new certificates on a regular basis.
The certificate is already from Let's Encrypt, so it's not as automatic as one would hope.
Jules Hedges (May 02 2022 at 18:19):Ah, I see..... communication problems coming from the nForum being down at the time it's most needed!
Reid Barton (May 02 2022 at 18:20):But it is not actually down... just has an expired certificate
Oscar Cunningham (May 02 2022 at 18:20):Right, I can still post there by telling my browser to access it anyway. (For some reason my phone gives me this option but my laptop does not.)
Reid Barton (May 02 2022 at 18:20):And at https://nforum.ncatlab.org/discussion/13776/3/nlab-migration-to-the-cloud/ there are like a dozen posts from Richard Williamson in the past week.
Nathanael Arkor (May 02 2022 at 18:21):Reid Barton said:
But it is not actually down... just has an expired certificate
Most modern browsers will refuse to allow you to visit a site with an expired certificate nowadays.
Jules Hedges (May 02 2022 at 18:21):Firefox tells me "you can't add an exception to visit this site", so for me it's functionally down
Reid Barton (May 02 2022 at 18:22):Well, I can't help all of you with broken browsers :upside_down:
Jason Erbele (May 02 2022 at 18:22):Maybe download Internet Explorer? :octopus:
Jules Hedges (May 02 2022 at 18:24):For what it's worth, here https://stackoverflow.com/questions/67707027/how-to-get-through-security-error-pages-in-firefox-browser are instructions to override for Firefox, although I'm not going to do so
Reid Barton (May 02 2022 at 18:26):(Using Firefox) I just clicked the "allow anyways" button, don't know why it is different for others.
Jules Hedges (May 02 2022 at 18:28):Oh yeah, I just opened my personal laptop and I have that button. So this is a recent change to Firefox, they took that button away, presumably so that anyone capable of finding and carrying out the override instructions is more likely to understand the risks
John Baez (May 02 2022 at 19:43):Jules Hedges said:
I'd guess the nForum is probably down for an unrelated reason; I just checked that the nCafe has no post about the nLab's technical problems, so probably this very thread is 3rd in line to the throne of places that anyone can even talk about this. (Which isn't ideal because Urs himself isn't signed up here, I think)
Urs quit posting on the nCafe years ago, so any such post would most likely emanate from Mike Shulman or David Corfield.
John Baez (May 02 2022 at 19:53):I have up-to-date Firefox and I have no trouble seeing nLab pages. Maybe at some point I said I was okay with an expired certificate. Or maybe it's back up now? I can't tell.
Nathanael Arkor (May 02 2022 at 19:54):I still cannot access the nForum.
Nathanael Arkor (May 02 2022 at 19:54):It may be that Richard Williamson is unaware of the certificate issues if his browser is not complaining. Perhaps someone who can access the nForum could send a post notifying him about the certificate issues if no-one has done already?
John Baez (May 02 2022 at 20:01):I tried going to the nForum. I got a warning about an expired security certificate on my up-to-date Firefox 99.0.1 (64-bit Windows version). It allowed me to take a chance and go ahead. It works fine.
Oscar Cunningham (May 02 2022 at 20:04):John Baez said:
I have up-to-date Firefox and I have no trouble seeing nLab pages. Maybe at some point I said I was okay with an expired certificate. Or maybe it's back up now? I can't tell.
Only the nForum is affected by the expired certificate. It's unrelated to any issues with the nLab.
John Baez (May 02 2022 at 20:05):Oh, thanks for that correction.
I posted a comment here on the nForum:
Maybe you folks already know this, but the security certificate on the nForum has expired. Thus, my Firefox browser warned me not to go ahead and visit these sites... but I said I was willing to take the risk and went ahead. Other less brave users think something really bad has happened.
Oscar Cunningham (May 02 2022 at 20:05):Nathanael Arkor said:
It may be that Richard Williamson is unaware of the certificate issues if his browser is not complaining. Perhaps someone who can access the nForum could send a post notifying him about the certificate issues if no-one has done already?
Toby Bartels posted 5 hours ago confirming that Richard knows about the certificate issue and aimed to fix it today.
John Baez (May 02 2022 at 20:08):Okay. So I guess Urs' dire warning concerns our inability to edit the nLab, and maybe some other issues.
Todd Trimble (May 02 2022 at 21:07):There have been a number of assurances from Richard that editing functionality will be available by such-and-such date, but it seems the goalposts keep getting moved. I assume that and the licensing problem with the nForum are the things frustrating Urs. (And him above anyone else, since he had made the nLab inseparable from his research life.)
Matteo Capucci (he/him) (May 03 2022 at 07:31):It is indeed quite unfortunate that Richard is deciding on the fate of the nLab almost unilaterally at this point, but at least it's clear he is approaching the goal
Some pages are being reopened, like this one
Matteo Capucci (he/him) (May 03 2022 at 07:31):I totally get Urs's frustration... it'd be as if someone took my laptop for repairs and resisted giving it back. I would have too bought a new laptop by now.
Oscar Cunningham (May 03 2022 at 11:34):More concerningly, the nLab is now down and the nForum is an email server. image.png
Oscar Cunningham (May 03 2022 at 11:35):I hope this is just a temporary stage as Richard mucks about with stuff to fix the certificate issue.
Beppe Metere (May 03 2022 at 13:07):In fact the website "https://ncatlab.org/" is still down, and the domain "https://nlab-pages.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/" seems to be down too.
Tim Hosgood (May 03 2022 at 13:23):https://ncatlab.org is up for me :-)
Tom de Jong (May 03 2022 at 13:26):Are you sure you're not just looking at a cached version, @Tim Hosgood? These checking-websites also report https://ncatlab.org as down: https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ncatlab.org & https://www.isitdownrightnow.com/ncatlab.org.html
Tim Hosgood (May 03 2022 at 13:29):I'm pretty sure — I clicked on a random page I've never been to before (https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/nonstandard+analysis) and it works, even with a forced reload.
Edit: yeah, I've clicked around a bunch and everything loads fine for me :shrug:
Henry Story (May 03 2022 at 13:31):I have access to ncatlab.org using MS Edge. It is using an Amazon certificate from Feb.
Henry Story (May 03 2022 at 13:32):Same with Safari
Reid Barton (May 03 2022 at 13:33):I think you might have a cached DNS record for ncatlab.org, since that seems to be the problem for me.
Matteo Capucci (he/him) (May 03 2022 at 13:36):it's down for me
Henry Story (May 03 2022 at 13:36):This is what I have in the command line
$ nslookup ncatlab.org
Server: 192.168.178.1
Address: 192.168.178.1#53
Non-authoritative answer:
Name: ncatlab.org
Address: 18.66.192.74
Name: ncatlab.org
Address: 18.66.192.43
Name: ncatlab.org
Address: 18.66.192.97
Name: ncatlab.org
Address: 18.66.192.57
Perhaps n < 4 of the servers has a good certificate and 4 - n a broken one?
Reid Barton (May 03 2022 at 13:39):Wow MIT sold a lot of IP addresses.
Tom de Jong (May 03 2022 at 13:42):FWIW
$ nslookup ncatlab.org
Server: 192.168.1.1
Address: 192.168.1.1#53
Non-authoritative answer:
*** Can't find ncatlab.org: No answer
Anyways, hopefully it's a sign that stuff is Happening, rather than Not Happening
Fabrizio Genovese (May 03 2022 at 13:58):Oscar Cunningham said:
Richard estimates that costs will be < $6 a month (https://nforum.ncatlab.org/discussion/13776/nlab-migration-to-the-cloud/?Focus=97893#Comment_97893). So securing funding is not a top priority.
Urs seems to be being overly dramatic about the whole thing. This migration was necessary to create the kind of robust technology for the nLab that we all want. It's now running on AWS; whereas before it was running on a single box in someone's office. The plan is also to open-source all the code.
Also, the search is now infinitely faster than it was before, which anyone who experienced the old search will know is an absolute blessing.
Cost of cloud renting is indeed negligible, no doubt about that. I was referring to the cost of hiring a sysadmin, which is not negligible at all.
Tim Hosgood (May 03 2022 at 13:59):> dig ncatlab.org
; <<>> DiG 9.10.6 <<>> ncatlab.org
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 13405
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 4, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1
;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 1232
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;ncatlab.org. IN A
;; ANSWER SECTION:
ncatlab.org. 60 IN A 54.230.99.79
ncatlab.org. 60 IN A 54.230.99.20
ncatlab.org. 60 IN A 54.230.99.4
ncatlab.org. 60 IN A 54.230.99.56
;; Query time: 198 msec
;; SERVER: 193.11.30.200#53(193.11.30.200)
;; WHEN: Tue May 03 15:59:10 CEST 2022
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 104
weird when I go through my French cell phone I get
dig ncatlab.org
; <<>> DiG 9.10.6 <<>> ncatlab.org
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 57763
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 1
;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 4096
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;ncatlab.org. IN A
;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
ncatlab.org. 3600 IN SOA candy.ns.cloudflare.com. dns.cloudflare.com. 2277071908 10000 2400 604800 3600
;; Query time: 10 msec
;; SERVER: 172.20.10.1#53(172.20.10.1)
;; WHEN: Tue May 03 16:00:56 CEST 2022
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 103
Fabrizio Genovese said:
Oscar Cunningham said:
Richard estimates that costs will be < $6 a month (https://nforum.ncatlab.org/discussion/13776/nlab-migration-to-the-cloud/?Focus=97893#Comment_97893). So securing funding is not a top priority.
Urs seems to be being overly dramatic about the whole thing. This migration was necessary to create the kind of robust technology for the nLab that we all want. It's now running on AWS; whereas before it was running on a single box in someone's office. The plan is also to open-source all the code.
Also, the search is now infinitely faster than it was before, which anyone who experienced the old search will know is an absolute blessing.
Cost of cloud renting is indeed negligible, no doubt about that. I was referring to the cost of hiring a sysadmin, which is not negligible at all.
Also I want to stress how the problem here is not renting cloud, but exactly that no sysadmin is getting paid for the job. :smile:
Henry Story (May 03 2022 at 14:06):From the german provider I get
dig ncatlab.org
; <<>> DiG 9.10.6 <<>> ncatlab.org
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 49505
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 4, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1
;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 512
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;ncatlab.org. IN A
;; ANSWER SECTION:
ncatlab.org. 3 IN A 18.66.192.97
ncatlab.org. 3 IN A 18.66.192.57
ncatlab.org. 3 IN A 18.66.192.43
ncatlab.org. 3 IN A 18.66.192.74
;; Query time: 20 msec
;; SERVER: 192.168.178.1#53(192.168.178.1)
;; WHEN: Tue May 03 16:05:17 CEST 2022
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 104
I hope this is not the beginning of a russian cyber attack on the DNS. They all seem to be giving different answers.
Reid Barton (May 03 2022 at 14:07):DNS results depend on the requester's IP for well over 20 years now.
Reid Barton (May 03 2022 at 14:11):These appear to all be CloudFront edge IPs (try entering one of the IP addresses directly in your browser) and there may be some amount of caching as well as client geolocation going on.
Henry Story (May 03 2022 at 14:11):yes, it can also take time for new dns results to propagate.
Henry Story (May 03 2022 at 14:14):This is the command to find the certificate I think
openssl s_client -showcerts -connect 18.66.192.57:443
with the ip address replaced with the one you want to test.
It works well on my server
openssl s_client -showcerts -connect bblfish.net:443
Google's DNS servers reports different results for who is in charge of ncatlab.org:
$ dig +short @8.8.8.8 SOA ncatlab.org
candy.ns.cloudflare.com. dns.cloudflare.com. 2277071908 10000 2400 604800 3600
$ dig +short @8.8.8.8 SOA ncatlab.org
ns-1407.awsdns-47.org. awsdns-hostmaster.amazon.com. 1 7200 900 1209600 86400
(These were a few seconds apart.) Which suggests the DNS provider is being changed from Cloudflare to AWS (or the other way around).
Cloudflare does not return any IP addresses, but AWS does
$ dig +short @candy.ns.cloudflare.com ncatlab.org
$ dig +short @ns-1407.awsdns-47.org ncatlab.org
54.230.206.35
54.230.206.9
54.230.206.53
54.230.206.5
Now the nForum is back, but the nLab is 404ing except for ncatlab.org which redirects to the forum.
Jules Hedges (May 03 2022 at 17:05):https://twitter.com/schreiberurs/status/1521516991344959489?s=21&t=H-yB2W4oCcZE72iIjFZTmw
Just to update: A minute ago nLab's pre-previous volunteer admin, Adeel Khan, has kindly jumped in and restored the installation in its latest state before shutdown on 29 Dec 2021 Right now the nLab is again accessible, under this slightly modified url: http://nlab.preschema.com/nlab/show/HomePage
- Urs Schreiber (@SchreiberUrs) Nathanael Arkor (May 03 2022 at 17:06):Richard Williamson has said that he is resigning from administrating the nLab.
Oscar Cunningham (May 03 2022 at 17:11):The nForum and nLab are both back online. I hope Urs' copy doesn't lead to a confusing fork in the project.
Nathanael Arkor (May 03 2022 at 17:13):The "official" nLab currently isn't in a state where it can be edited, so if Richard steps down now, it seems a fork is inevitable.
Oscar Cunningham (May 03 2022 at 17:15):Ah, it seems like Adeel has now reverted to official nLab to its Dec 2021 state. https://nforum.ncatlab.org/discussion/13776/nlab-migration-to-the-cloud/?Focus=98034#Comment_98034 Presumably the fork is now unnecessary.
Tim Campion (May 03 2022 at 17:36):I'm kind of surprised at how informal the organization of the nlab remains (at least officially?). For example, LMFDB seems to be of a similar age to the nlab, and seems to have a more formal sense of organization. (And they seem to do it basically with academic rather than industrial funding sources.) Am I looking at the wrong webpage about nlab organization?
Nathanael Arkor (May 03 2022 at 17:38):I think this is a correct understanding.
John Baez (May 03 2022 at 17:39):Why would you expect it to have a formal organization? It's mainly one guy writing web pages at a maniacal pace, together with about half a dozen others who write quite a few, and then some people who have volunteered to give tech support.
John Baez (May 03 2022 at 17:40):I'm always amazed by how people treat it as some sort of "establishment" - using the terminology there as if it were standard and didn't require explanation, etc.
John Baez (May 03 2022 at 17:41):Of course it's good that the terminology invented there is catching on, because generally it's quite well-chosen terminology.
Tim Campion (May 03 2022 at 17:46):Well, it's a testament to Urs et al's work that the nlab plays an outsize role in my professional life, anyway. On mathoverflow, for instance, it's listed right next to wikipedia and the arxiv as a "standard online reference" (see 4th paragraph at that link). By contrast, encyclopedia of math is not listed there :). Hmm... perhaps that's an oversight...
Nathanael Arkor (May 03 2022 at 17:48):John Baez said:
I'm always amazed by how people treat it as some sort of "establishment" - using the terminology there as if it were standard and didn't require explanation, etc.
The nLab has become such an important resource that I think this is an unsurprising assumption.
Tim Campion (May 03 2022 at 17:50):I suppose the Stacks project is also mostly the work of one person, and has a similarly "official" sort of status in its field.
Tim Campion (May 03 2022 at 17:51):Looks like Stacks governance is comparably light. For another point of comparison, consider Kerodon.
Valeria de Paiva (May 03 2022 at 17:51):well, I have never seen a list of project money donated to the nLab as you can see in the LMFDB link above!
Oscar Cunningham (May 03 2022 at 17:54):What nLab funding information exists is available here https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/funding+of+the+nLab
John Baez (May 03 2022 at 17:59):Nathanael Arkor said:
John Baez said:
I'm always amazed by how people treat it as some sort of "establishment" - using the terminology there as if it were standard and didn't require explanation, etc.
The nLab has become such an important resource that I think this is an unsurprising assumption.
I guess so. Since it's mainly some friends of mine, and my wife Lisa made up the name "nLab", I have a different view of it.
dusko (May 03 2022 at 18:19):it would be bad, and ominous, if nlab is lost. not just for the people who invested work into it but also for the web itself --- which evolved from a place to exchange CERN preprints and post CT blogs to a place where people are tracked, profiled, sold, and steered. the reason why we are offered this zulip service, tweets and so on is in exchange for carrying with us the cookies which these providers kindly leave in the browsers that they kindly provide, unless you use the onion...
so maybe this is a good moment to rethink the whole thing: what is the place of science in all that? suppose the nLab resurrects tomorrow. who will run it 30 years from now? if the nLab content is offered to elsevier or one of the angel or venture investors into science, they will happily throw money at it. alternatives?
the problem is not the operating costs but the incentive for persistence: some sort of entity that does not suffer from human shortcomings such as limited attention span or even limited life span.
the certificate thing (and the web browsers that protect you from the grave dangers of expired certificates) says that any web site that is not helping trackers track people nowadays needs a survival strategy, which may or may not be a business model.
Jules Hedges (May 03 2022 at 18:31):Nathanael Arkor said:
Richard Williamson has said that he is resigning from administrating the nLab.
Uh, now the nForum is back up it's clear this is an even more unfortunate situation than I thought yesterday
Jules Hedges (May 03 2022 at 18:34):Science is made of people, as I like to say
Jacques Carette (May 05 2022 at 16:22):Projects seem to reach a point in their lifetime when they need some kind of "administrator/organizer" whose job is to take care of the boring, non-technical bits of having a project "exist". Clearly LMFDB has that, but the nLab does not. The importance of that task is typically extremely under-valued, especially by technical people (in fact, the deeper the technical expertise, the more I see a lack of understanding of the importance of those managements tasks).
The Haskell Foundation is a good example of a community "waking up" to the need for such an entity.
Gershom (May 05 2022 at 19:57):I would hope that @David Spivak and the topos institute could step in with regular funding and institutional support.
Gershom (May 05 2022 at 20:02):"we need funds to maintain the central CT community resource on the internet" is a pretty good story to go to potential sponsors with!
Mike Shulman (May 05 2022 at 20:06):Urs doesn't seem to be here, but I'm in touch with him by private email, and I think I can reassure everyone that the nLab will pull through. Right now we are focusing on getting things stable again in the short term, but after that I hope we will be able to establish a more secure arrangement for funding and control moving forwards.
John Baez (May 05 2022 at 20:09):I hope so!
Valeria de Paiva (May 05 2022 at 20:17):me too!
Jacques Carette (May 05 2022 at 20:36):John Baez said:
Yes, but it's still extra work compared to having the nLab people take care of themselves.
The whole point is that the nLab people were not taking care of it. The cool parts (i.e. the contents, which is why it became so popular), sure. But the hidden, boring things? Clearly not, since this crisis would not have existed otherwise. This week is the first time I've heard the name "Richard Williamson" and "Adeel Kahn", even though I've been using the nLab for years. This shows you how hidden their work was, until it stopped being done.
Gershom (May 05 2022 at 20:42):Broadly generalizing, nobody really _likes_ working on the infrastructure of hosting a wiki and updating the software and ensuring backups happen, etc. They do it because they feel it is important. If possible, it is much better to pay people to work on such things, rather than relying on volunteers, and additionally, this ensures that what people other than the volunteers value is what gets prioritized (because the volunteers, by virtue of being the ones donating all the work, otherwise really get to set agendas however they see fit, and work on things only when they have time and energy, and also may be called away at any point due to paid job demands or family or a thousand other things). So I am less concerned about funding for hosting, and more about the larger funding required to get stable development and administration of the system itself. (I say this as someone who has been involved in infrastructure work as a volunteer for many years, and who is working with the HF on professionalizing chunks of such work into the hands of paid staff)
John Baez (May 05 2022 at 20:45):Jacques Carette said:
John Baez said:
Yes, but it's still extra work compared to having the nLab people take care of themselves.
The whole point is that the nLab people were not taking care of it. The cool parts (i.e. the contents, which is why it became so popular), sure. But the hidden, boring things? Clearly not, since this crisis would not have existed otherwise. This week is the first time I've heard the name "Richard Williamson" and "Adeel Kahn", even though I've been using the nLab for years. This shows you how hidden their work was, until it stopped being done.
Since I read the nForum I was aware of this stuff all the time. Anyone who contributes to the nLab instead of just passively using it is urged to note changes on the nForum, and then you see what's going on. It's just like Wikipedia: you don't notice the details of how it works until you start trying to contribute.
Folks at the nLab were trying to improve the software, but it was going slowly - you can read about it here.
Todd Trimble (May 05 2022 at 21:44):Jacques Carette said:
John Baez said:
Yes, but it's still extra work compared to having the nLab people take care of themselves.
The whole point is that the nLab people were not taking care of it. The cool parts (i.e. the contents, which is why it became so popular), sure. But the hidden, boring things? Clearly not, since this crisis would not have existed otherwise. This week is the first time I've heard the name "Richard Williamson" and "Adeel Kahn", even though I've been using the nLab for years. This shows you how hidden their work was, until it stopped being done.
As John was suggesting, it's clear from this that you weren't tuned into the nForum much, where the names of Adeel and Richard were very well known.
One thing the nLab folks were not good at is soliciting funding, whether institutionally or through private donations.
John Baez (May 05 2022 at 22:19):Maybe they didn't try very hard yet? One thing it took to create the Topos Institute is for a good mathematician, Brendan Fong, to almost give up on research and focus on building an institution and soliciting funds. It's kind of a sacrifice for the greater good.
John Baez (May 05 2022 at 22:20):Luckily the nLab should not require as much money or organization.
Mike Shulman (May 05 2022 at 22:27):No, I don't think anyone has tried very hard yet.
Jacques Carette (May 05 2022 at 22:29):Yes, @John Baez and @Todd Trimble you are quite right that I only dipped my toes into the nForum, every few years. The volume of posts was too high, I just couldn't keep up. [Same reason I left the Lean Zulip and unsubscribed to the proposals stream for Haskell.]
Ulrik Buchholtz (May 06 2022 at 05:48):BTW, The previous funding drive seeming to be successful, as hosted by the Topos Institute, see [[funding of the nLab]] with corresponding nForum thread.
(Apparently, the plan to update that page monthly fell by the wayside, but it seems there would have been enough money last December to have rescued the old installation so that it was usable while the cloud migration was ongoing.)
Ulrik Buchholtz (May 06 2022 at 05:50):And I just checked that on the Topos Institute donation page, you can still earmark donations to go to the nLab.
Georgios Bakirtzis (May 06 2022 at 06:19):I don't want to derail the conversation but I find it a bit confusing that whenever there is a problem with the community the new silver bullet is to say "Topos will fix it." But I can't bare but think _why_ is it Topos that should fix it, a large number of us are in huge established institutions, I vouch to claim that a large number of us are using the nlab. _We_ should solve the problem with some guidance from established people in this domain (such as John and Jacques). I am also concerned generally about this reliance (at least intellectually in our minds) on Topos, as John said it's a new institution, it needs time money and people to grow and establish itself. These problems we discuss here really don't feel suited or perhaps a good use of _their_ time (if imposed implicitly or explicitly by the community). I'd rather they make category theory more useful and applicable and establish it as a reasonable applied field.
Matteo Capucci (he/him) (May 06 2022 at 06:35):My impression of the whole ordeal is not that there were not people willing to volunteer for maintenance (there's at least two, and on the migration thread on the nForum I've seen a bunch more offering their services), but that migration wasn't well-planned nor communicated with the community. That, plus a lack of redundancy (Richard was alone in doing this when he started), was recipe for a disaster (that didn't happen at the scale it could have). It doesn't seem the case that paying Richard would have sped up things considerably, not that we needed a paid figure at all.
Of course having a paid professional would help tremendously, but I don't see the case (yet).
Matteo Capucci (he/him) (May 06 2022 at 06:35):Also, strong agreement with Georgios. Why should Topos fix this? It's not their project. Keeping the nLab running is something we, as a community, could and should manage to support and fund alone.
Matteo Capucci (he/him) (May 06 2022 at 06:37):Speaking of funding, it'd be very cool to have nLab merchandise around. Someone was selling t-shirts a while ago and they were amazing. I didn't buy them only because it felt like money should go to the project. (this proposal comes with a personal volunteering candidature attached)
David Michael Roberts (May 06 2022 at 07:53):@Matteo Capucci (he/him) I was going to be selling T-shirts and donating the $$ to the Topos-managed fund. It's a bit subtle to get the money to where it needs to do.
David Michael Roberts (May 06 2022 at 07:55):I have one design already, a very retro vapourwave-inspired design, a riff on the 80s Adidas logo and the current nlab one (since I designed that, and put it in the public domain, I guess anyone could do it, but I want to set up a T-shirt selling account anyway for other things...)
Jon Sterling (May 06 2022 at 08:22):Yes, I think self-reliance is a good direction --- and also considering ways to have tools that don't actually need regular volunteer maintenance beyond someone dropping in to kick the tires every couple years. The nlab had a single point of failure, and in this case, poor planning led to an immense failure.
Jon Sterling (May 06 2022 at 08:25):The thing that those of us with technical/computer abilities need to think about when we offer our volunteer work to help the mathematical community is: we should not go in directions that ensure _dependence_ on us, because we may have personal emergencies or just get tired of working on it. When we offer our services, we should be doing so with the aim of making mathematicians relatively independent. One consequence of that is, we probably should not be developing and planning amazing cloud services or things that are harder to deploy than "one click".
Jon Sterling (May 06 2022 at 08:27):It may seem like you are doing mathematicians a huge favor by putting in all this work, but the reality is more like "If I have a personal emergency, Urs Schreiber's research notebook gets held hostage for months". It is a very negative result of a very positive impulse to be of service, and part of our responsibility as engineers is to take that into account. Do no harm.
Jules Hedges (May 06 2022 at 08:31):Georgios Bakirtzis said:
I don't want to derail the conversation but I find it a bit confusing that whenever there is a problem with the community the new silver bullet is to say "Topos will fix it." But I can't bare but think _why_ is it Topos that should fix it, a large number of us are in huge established institutions, I vouch to claim that a large number of us are using the nlab.
Right...... I can't speak for the financial situation of Topos, but looking in from the outside I believe that they're partly existing grant-to-grant, they have some "regular" funding but not enough to guarantee to sustain them at the size they've already grown to, and definitely not enough to throw resources around. Compare the arXiv, which brings in lots of funding but is in the end maintained by people at Cornell
Fabrizio Genovese (May 06 2022 at 13:02):David Michael Roberts said:
I have one design already, a very retro vapourwave-inspired design, a riff on the 80s Adidas logo and the current nlab one (since I designed that, and put it in the public domain, I guess anyone could do it, but I want to set up a T-shirt selling account anyway for other things...)
I just wanted to say that I'll buy everything vaporwave. Like, right now. At least for me this is the best funding idea for this community I've heard in ages. But I'm pretty fixated with Vapor and Retro, so it's probably just that you hit my very niche interests.
Tim Campion (May 06 2022 at 13:26):(Apologies, the following comment might be better suited for an nforum discsussion, but I couldn't quite figure out the most appropriate thread to bring it up on the nforum.)
Tim Campion said:
I'm kind of surprised at how informal the organization of the nlab remains (at least officially?). For example, LMFDB seems to be of a similar age to the nlab, and seems to have a more formal sense of organization. (And they seem to do it basically with academic rather than industrial funding sources.) Am I looking at the wrong webpage about nlab organization?
Possibly I was looking at the wrong page for information about the organization of the nlab. The page I linked to, as well as this variant don't mention the "steering committee" named at this page and linked from this variant. Interestingly, although the Organization of the nLab page I linked does not refer to the steering committee, it kind of appears that the "steering committee" idea has at least been discussed years ago on the associated nforum discussion.
Tim Campion (May 06 2022 at 13:27):Todd Trimble said:
Jacques Carette said:
John Baez said:
Yes, but it's still extra work compared to having the nLab people take care of themselves.
The whole point is that the nLab people were not taking care of it. The cool parts (i.e. the contents, which is why it became so popular), sure. But the hidden, boring things? Clearly not, since this crisis would not have existed otherwise. This week is the first time I've heard the name "Richard Williamson" and "Adeel Kahn", even though I've been using the nLab for years. This shows you how hidden their work was, until it stopped being done.
As John was suggesting, it's clear from this that you weren't tuned into the nForum much, where the names of Adeel and Richard were very well known. (For instance, neither of them is named in any of the organizational nlab pages I linked above.)
One thing the nLab folks were not good at is soliciting funding, whether institutionally or through private donations.
I do think it would be nice if people like Richard and Adeel's contributions could somehow be more visible to the average nlab user, who probably never visits the nforum at all. (For instance, neither of them seems to be named in any of the organizational pages I linked above.)
Mike Shulman (May 06 2022 at 17:00):The nLab "steering committee" doesn't do very much; mainly we deal with the occasional hard-to-discourage crackpot. It's not really a directorial or technical body. As it happens, we are discussing right now the possibility of constituting a more technical directive committee.
David Corfield (May 06 2022 at 17:12):Did I miss that discussion, Mike?
I seem to recall Urs withdrew from the Steering Committee, and it relied on people often with tenuous academic jobs. Note also the massive imbalance in recent contributions on the nLab for those who don't realise:
Screenshot-2022-05-06-17.58.36.png
Mike Shulman (May 06 2022 at 17:18):Well, by "we are discussing" I really meant "the possibility was raised in an email". It hasn't really been discussed yet. I haven't had a chance to deal much with the whole thing beyond the immediate need of getting the server fixed up.
John Baez (May 06 2022 at 17:26):Georgios Bakirtzis said:
I don't want to derail the conversation but I find it a bit confusing that whenever there is a problem with the community the new silver bullet is to say "Topos will fix it." But I can't bare but think why is it Topos that should fix it, a large number of us are in huge established institutions, I vouch to claim that a large number of us are using the nLab.
I'd something similar in previous comments. Later I deleted those comments because they weren't quite phrased right: I'd forgotten that the Topos Institute already is helping raise money for the nLab. But only in a minimal way, I believe. Namely, they have a webpage where you can make a donation. That probably took just a couple person-hours of work to set up.
So I still agree it's not good not to think of the Topos Institute as a big powerful thing that can solve all our problems! Think of it as a small chick that may someday grow into a majestic eagle - but only if we help it.
I'm trying to help them develop a 'killer app' that they can wave around to show people that applied category theory is really useful. Right now this 'killer app' is software for public health modeling. (Yes, the quoted term is ironic.)
Jules Hedges said:
Right...... I can't speak for the financial situation of Topos, but looking in from the outside I believe that they're partly existing grant-to-grant, they have some "regular" funding but not enough to guarantee to sustain them at the size they've already grown to, and definitely not enough to throw resources around.
I'm not aware of any faucet that continuously pours or even drips money into the Topos Institute bank account. As far as I know, they get their money from donations from a few Silicon Valley bigshots together with grants that various people have been able to get, e.g. David Spivak and Evan Patterson / James Fairbanks.
Mike Shulman (May 06 2022 at 18:57):I want to make sure everyone knows that work is already underway on stabilizing the nLab in both the short and long term, both technically and financially. Thanks to everyone who's offered suggestions and help; we will be sure to reach out to the community if anything is needed.
I also want to say that while it's unfortunate that this drama is playing out publicly, it's even more unfortunate that only part of the drama is publicly visible. I don't think the solution to that is to try to make everything public, but I would like to caution all observers not to leap to conclusions based only on what you can see.
Gershom (May 07 2022 at 00:01):Let me try to explain why I suggested Topos play a role, and also why I do not advocate that Topos per se play a role given the useful comments here. The Haskell Foundation and the Topos institute were launched at relatively similar times. Of course the two communities are very different, but within that setting they seemed to share some similar goals. In particular, at least initially, my understanding was that Topos could act as a centralizing body for "general community infrastructure" much as the HF aims to do, and has a similar goal of stabilizing core resources for a broader group. Now, it may be that's not the direction Topos is going in -- fine! But, the concern is again that there comes a certain point in which relying on individual volunteer work reaches its limits, and the stopgap solution is to scale up a bit the existing thing, but the real solution is necessarily going to involve some more regular funding that can pay not just for hardware costs (relatively cheap!) but for individuals to have the time to responsibly and consistently put in effort, and further, to establish some publicly known chain of ownership and responsibility, which involves an institution with some legal standing, and ideally with a 501(c) so it can handle nonprofit status for donations, and also have enough infrastructure to organize paying people. Ideally, you save some work by not having too many institutions which have to replicate that structure. But again, maybe Topos is not going to be that. My opinion is simply that, at a certain point, which is perhaps near, perhaps not, _something_ should be that, or, through no fault of any hardworking individual involved, there will be sporadic frustrating messes for want of such a thing.
(and the point is not certainly that "topos should pay" but rather whatever centralizing institution is established can be a centralized conduit for funds and effort, in terms both of responsibility and synchronization, so that organizations can pay and know their funds are using in a fashion their administrators are comfortable is well accounted for)
John Baez (May 07 2022 at 00:17):Btw, how big is the Haskell Foundation?
Gershom (May 07 2022 at 20:06):2 full time salaried employees and a fair number of other people doing unpaid volunteer work in various ways including a 13 member board, and also various committees and working groups. (which sometimes are semi-formalizing things that would have existed anyway, but now have a more cohered structure -- and also independent projects have now loosely affiliated, which again is just a modest formalization of a relationship that offers sort of the promise of coordination and help in directing resources but without much official Teeth).
HF looks as though it expends relatively fewer resources -- fewer employees, no physical office, and no funding of research work. It seems the visions ended up being quite different, with Topos worrying about actually centralizing and driving research, while HF is focused on "filling in gaps" and coordinating administration and infrastructure -- but you would be much better able to explain the Topos side of things than whatever my inferences are!
Georgios Bakirtzis (May 07 2022 at 21:20):Topos is a research institute and there seems to be a misunderstand. That while Topos might be part of the community, we are not part of Topos. As any other institute it has goals of its own and researchers of its own, that draft a particular trajectory within ACT. It is not _for_ the ACT community, even if it does things to benefit us. It might be better to compare Topos to a research lab rather than HF.
David Michael Roberts (May 08 2022 at 07:10):@Fabrizio Genovese how about this?
https://twitter.com/HigherGeometer/status/1523136537868734465
Imagine being the envy of all your friends wearing this retro hat and also supporting the nLab financially at the same time... https://twitter.com/HigherGeometer/status/1523136537868734465/photo/1
- theHigherGeometer 💉💉 (@HigherGeometer)I'm happy for feedback on designs, I've not done actual market research or learned design in any formal way :-)
Henry Story (May 08 2022 at 10:56):It's actually quite a good idea to use git to publish a wiki as the mlab does.
Perhaps that would be safer long term, and allow for wide distribution of clones?
If am not sure how problematic math notation was on github, but it works on gitlab. That is why I started web-cats on gitlab.
Fabrizio Genovese (May 08 2022 at 12:56):David Michael Roberts said:
Fabrizio Genovese how about this?
https://twitter.com/HigherGeometer/status/1523136537868734465
I'm happy for feedback on designs, I've not done actual market research or learned design in any formal way :-)
I wat thinking more something along the lines of https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5e/%22Evolution%22_and_life_in_vaporwave_flavours._%2848475685782%29.png/640px-%22Evolution%22_and_life_in_vaporwave_flavours._%2848475685782%29.png
Fabrizio Genovese (May 08 2022 at 12:57):Or also this, that is arguably more retrowave than vaporware https://wallpaperaccess.com/full/1246974.jpg
Fabrizio Genovese (May 08 2022 at 12:58):As for feedback, personally the more absurd, kitsch and flashy you make it the more it is likely that I'll buy it :stuck_out_tongue:
Nathanael Arkor (May 08 2022 at 13:15):Fabrizio Genovese said:
Or also this, that is arguably more retrowave than vaporware https://wallpaperaccess.com/full/1246974.jpg
I think you mean vaporwave rather than vaporware.
Reid Barton (May 08 2022 at 13:57):Or, in the case of clothing that never actually becomes available, vaporwear?
Amar Hadzihasanovic (May 08 2022 at 14:08):A while ago I made this, it may have a niche market in the UK :grinning:
nlabour.png
Jules Hedges (May 08 2022 at 14:10):Absolutely incredible.
Paolo Perrone (May 08 2022 at 16:31):How about a shirt saying things like "a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors"?
Henry Story (May 08 2022 at 16:45):Paolo Perrone said:
How about a shirt saying things like "a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors"?
I used that recently to make a point about how being able to repeat a sentence or just knowing every single word in it does not amount to understanding. That requires something more. like watching
Bartosz Milewski's course https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmgoPd7VQ9Q
Tim Campion (May 08 2022 at 16:49):How did that become such a universal catchphrase anyway? Shouldn't it be "a monad is a monoid in the monoidal category of endofunctors and composition"?
Paolo Perrone (May 08 2022 at 16:54):Maybe it would be even more nlab to say "a monad is a lax point".
Oscar Cunningham (May 08 2022 at 16:59):And on the back of the shirt it says 'a monoid is an algebra of the list monad'.
Ralph Sarkis (May 08 2022 at 17:00):Paolo Perrone said:
How about a shirt saying things like "a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors"?
FTFY: a monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors
John Baez (May 08 2022 at 17:03):Yeah, the just transforms it from a fact into an attitude bound to set off arguments.
Paolo Perrone (May 08 2022 at 17:27):Let's pick the wording that sells the most t-shirts. Let's fund the nLab!
Todd Trimble (May 08 2022 at 17:35):John Baez said:
Yeah, the just transforms it from a fact into an attitude bound to set off arguments.
A long time ago on the Cafe, a post (I think one of John's) started off with a link to a YouTube video, no longer available AFAIK, where the narrator complains "The monads make my head hurt!" There seems to be a kind of myth, maybe especially prominent among students of Haskell, that monads are some sort of hurdle or rite of passage that everyone has to get through, typically after a struggle. [Actually, I think maybe they mean a strong monad on a cartesian closed category, but never mind that.]
I would like to think of the deployment of "just" not as a sign of arrogance and therefore a negative attitude, but more a positive attitude of trying to be helpful: "look here, it's not so bad, if you remember it like this". I think I can honestly say that I never had a problem with monads, having learnt about them from Mac Lane.
Max New (May 08 2022 at 17:43):Tim Campion said:
How did that become such a universal catchphrase anyway? Shouldn't it be "a monad is a monoid in the monoidal category of endofunctors and composition"?
The history of this meme is explained at the beginning of this stackoverflow answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/3870310/3016387
Mike Shulman (May 08 2022 at 17:43):Many years ago I recall a conversation about "category theory purity tests", that involved coming up with short statements like this that would only make sense to someone who was "sufficiently categorically impure". I think the best one we came up with was "the center of a set is 'true'".
Tom Hirschowitz (May 08 2022 at 21:06):Todd Trimble said:
I think maybe they mean a strong monad on a cartesian closed category, but never mind that.
Actually I think they mean a map from sets to sets with unit and bind (without axioms). There is no way to ask for more in Haskell, is there?
Jon Sterling (May 08 2022 at 21:44):Well, the Haskellers do care about the laws --- though without either an established equational theory for the Haskell language nor an actual semantic model (e.g. some proper domain theory), it is a bit unclear what exactly is meant by these laws in the context of Haskell.
Jon Sterling (May 08 2022 at 21:47):But I think if pressed, an enlightened Haskell programmer would say something like "I am imagining a XXX-enriched monad on the the fragment of haskell that can actually be modeled in XXX" where XXX is some variety of domains.
Henry Story (May 08 2022 at 22:00):Ralph Sarkis said:
FTFY: a monad is **just** a monoid in the category of endofunctors
I thought the sentence attributed to Wadler was:
"a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what's the problem?"
David Michael Roberts (May 08 2022 at 22:21):Fabrizio Genovese said:
As for feedback, personally the more absurd, kitsch and flashy you make it the more it is likely that I'll buy it :P
I think you vastly overestimate my artistic ability here :-)
David Michael Roberts (May 08 2022 at 23:14):All: I'd rather not perpetuate memes that only serve to cement the perceived elitism of category theory and/or the nLab. I'm making nLab merch, some of which will be humorous self-deprecation, but obviously so ("A moduli stack of elliptic cuvres is a moduli stack of elliptic curves" is too good to pass up as a mug quote...), not generic CT meme material. Anyone who wants to sell that can do so! I'm operating my own product account, and donating the money, so I'm aware of what sort of messages I might be choosing to send.
Fabrizio Genovese (May 08 2022 at 23:55):Imho aesthetics work better than catchphrases. I'd never wear a tshirt that says "a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors". But I'd wear a tshirt with cool colors and decorations. If there's also the nlab logo in it then it becomes a nice way to make the logo - and what it represents - cool and trendy :smile:
Fabrizio Genovese (May 08 2022 at 23:56):"I came for the art and stayed for the math" seems like a good strategy here :grinning:
Daniele Palombi (May 09 2022 at 08:01):Amar Hadzihasanovic said:
A while ago I made this, it may have a niche market in the UK :grinning:
nlabour.png
Just take my money
Daniele Palombi (May 09 2022 at 08:03):Paolo Perrone said:
Maybe it would be even more nlab to say "a monad is a lax point".
"A topological space is a relational β-module"
Tobias Fritz (May 09 2022 at 08:10):Paolo Perrone said:
Maybe it would be even more nlab to say "a monad is a lax point".
It just occurred to me that this is even a correct (informal) definition of the other notion of monad.
Dan Marsden (May 09 2022 at 09:18):Can it say a monoid is a monad in a one object bicategory on the back?
Alexander Campbell (May 09 2022 at 09:47):A monad is a monad in the 2-category of categories.
David Michael Roberts (May 09 2022 at 10:52):OK, the relational -module line is classic enough, and was (re-?)popularised on the n-category café, I'd definitely use that one. But in a format to be revealed...
Todd Trimble (May 09 2022 at 11:31):Where at the Cafe? There's the briefest possible mention here.
David Michael Roberts (May 09 2022 at 12:30):I think I was thinking of that, yes. Though that is a while before the current generation of students in CT were active, so I'm showing my age. But there might be another source, that went through and explained this (and maybe it was you, Todd!)
Todd Trimble (May 09 2022 at 14:15):It was mostly me writing about this in the nLab, although I think I remember Tim Campion finding a mistake (which I think was corrected?), and maybe Mike was involved too. The editing history will reveal all.
Tim Campion (May 09 2022 at 14:48):Todd Trimble said:
It was mostly me writing about this in the nLab, although I think I remember Tim Campion finding a mistake (which I think was corrected?), and maybe Mike was involved too. The editing history will reveal all.
Oh wow, I definitely remember thinking about relational -modules back then, but I had completely forgotten about the story of the nlab page! Interestingly, there are two nforum discussions on this page. As far as I can tell, the two of us ended up agreeing at the time that the mistake I caught was satisfactorily corrected. So if past Todd and Tim are to be trusted, the page should be sound :P.
Notes to self:
Joe Moeller (May 09 2022 at 16:39):Fabrizio Genovese said:
Imho aesthetics work better than catchphrases. I'd never wear a tshirt that says "a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors". But I'd wear a tshirt with cool colors and decorations. If there's also the nlab logo in it then it becomes a nice way to make the logo - and what it represents - cool and trendy :)
just to throw my 2 cents on this, just one person's preference: I wear graphic tees pretty exclusively, and I don't like ones with words beyond the name of a band or similar. So I'd buy one with "nLab" but not "a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors".
Oscar Cunningham (May 09 2022 at 17:45):Yeah, me too.
John Baez (May 09 2022 at 19:18):Alexander Campbell said:
A monad is a monad in the 2-category of categories.
To be really annoying:
A monad is just a monad in the 2-category of categories.
Fabrizio Genovese (May 09 2022 at 19:21):
Joe Moeller (May 09 2022 at 20:07):https://twitter.com/Joe_DoesMath/status/1394624957645197320?s=20&t=Jn4uZjD3MKHwpPnQ5eQtrw
Idea: the expression of a mathematical concept in categorical terms should be called "justification". A Lie group is JUST a group object in Diff. The term "justification" pairs nicely with "categorification".
- dr. pseudomonoid (@Joe_DoesMath) Matteo Capucci (he/him) (May 10 2022 at 10:47):John Baez said:
Yeah, the just transforms it from a fact into an attitude bound to set off arguments.
lol Nike-style logo saying only 'just'
Tim Campion (May 10 2022 at 14:24):On the algebraic topology discord server there is a custom emoji reaction which is the word "just", but crossed out.
Matteo Capucci (he/him) (May 11 2022 at 08:02):At MSP we have a 'just' jar where we are supposed to put money whenever we justify unjustifiably... incidentally, this might be a good way to fund the nLab lmao
Jules Hedges (May 11 2022 at 09:36):I vaguely remember Matteo is in debt to the just-a-jar by an infinite amount due to some infinite regress situation
Matteo Capucci (he/him) (May 11 2022 at 09:56):Jules Hedges said:
I vaguely remember Matteo is in debt to the just-a-jar by an infinite amount due to some infinite regress situation
Damn :face_palm:
Jason Erbele (May 11 2022 at 16:27):Is a justification printed with a ragged-right alignment justified? (and would it preserve limits?) :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:
Henry Story (May 13 2022 at 15:03):weird I also had a problem on all my web sites with a renewal of the https://letsencrypt.org certificate this month. Just fixed it now.
John Baez (May 14 2022 at 20:38):Some nLab news:
John Baez (May 14 2022 at 20:39):Some people here might be interested in helping out the nLab:
[....] if you are a technical expert on the required IT issues and would like to lend a hand with keeping the nLab installation alive and well, then please drop a note, either here or directly to one of the technical board members. (You don’t have to become a formal member of the “technical board”.)
Oscar Cunningham (Oct 01 2022 at 07:04):I'm getting this error when trying to visit the nForum:
image.png
Anyone know what's happening?
David Michael Roberts (Oct 01 2022 at 10:41):Not sure. I couldn't access it earlier today, either, but it's back now
Mike Shulman (Oct 02 2022 at 00:03):The nLab recently moved to a new server and DNS and there was a bug in the configuration, I think it's been fixed now.
Oscar Cunningham (Oct 02 2022 at 09:35):Nice to hear that work is ongoing.
Mike Shulman (Oct 05 2022 at 16:40):The permanent move to the new nLab server is happening at (UTC 13:00). At that time the nLab and nForum will temporarily be switched to read-only. During the move, which is projected to last "between 10 minutes and 6 hours", you will get an error message if you try to edit the nLab or post in the nForum. At the end of the migration, the nLab and nForum will be switched to the new server and editing/posting will work again. It may be that some things are broken afterwards; if you notice any, please report them on the nForum.