Skip to the Main Content

Note:These pages make extensive use of the latest XHTML and CSS Standards. They ought to look great in any standards-compliant modern browser. Unfortunately, they will probably look horrible in older browsers, like Netscape 4.x and IE 4.x. Moreover, many posts use MathML, which is, currently only supported in Mozilla. My best suggestion (and you will thank me when surfing an ever-increasing number of sites on the web which have been crafted to use the new standards) is to upgrade to the latest version of your browser. If that's not possible, consider moving to the Standards-compliant and open-source Mozilla browser.

June 2, 2026

A New Blog

Posted by Mike Shulman

Readers may have noticed that I haven’t been very active here for a while. That isn’t because I haven’t felt the “blogging urge”, but because I felt that the things I want to blog about right now wouldn’t be very interesting to much of the n-Category Cafe audience: they’re mostly fairly technical details about implementing proof assistants (because that’s what I’m mostly working on right now).

Accordingly, I’ve started a new blog! It’s at https://gwaithimirdain.github.io/blog/. (Gwaith-i-Mírdain is the github organization for development of Narya, the experimental proof assistant for Higher Observational Type Theory – and now Multimodal Type Theory as well – that I’ve been spending most of my time on, and will primarily be blogging about.) And I already wrote three posts (mostly about implementing multimodal type theory, with several survey questions for the reader), so you can check it out right now and see whether it’s likely to be your cup of tea.

Never fear, I’ll still come back here when I have more category-theoretic things to write about.

Posted at June 2, 2026 7:34 PM UTC

TrackBack URL for this Entry:   https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/cgi-bin/MT-3.0/dxy-tb.fcgi/3636



10 Comments & 0 Trackbacks

Re: A new blog

Is Gwaith-i-Mírdain a name from Tolkien?

(Sorry for such an irrelevant comment, but I can’t help wondering.)

A lot of my blogging urges don’t seem to fit into the n-Cafe either. Sometimes I decide to try anyway—but my latest post, which was on analysis, garnered no comments, so I decided it wasn’t worthwhile.

Posted by: John Baez on June 2, 2026 8:30 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: A new blog

Yes, the Gwaith-i-Mírdain were the elven smiths in the second age who forged the rings of power, including Narya, the ring of fire.

Posted by: Mike Shulman on June 2, 2026 8:36 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: A new blog

Pepperidge Farm remembers when this blog was about stuff that people called physics.

Posted by: Steve Huntsman on June 3, 2026 1:00 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: A new blog

Do you mean like the very last entry on this blog, and the one before that?

Posted by: John Baez on June 6, 2026 6:53 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: A new blog

I think a lot of people has departed from blogs in general towards other forms of social media like Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon, Discord, whatever, and category theorists are no different in this regards. So whenever there’s a new discovery or whatever, they no longer spend time writing a blog post to put on their blog; they instead go on Twitter or Bluesky or Mastodon and write a long series of threads about the topic.

Posted by: Madeleine Birchfield on June 4, 2026 4:35 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: A new blog

I have observed that as well, and I am rather mystified by it. It seems to me that blogs have a lot of advantages over those other platforms:

  1. A blog post can be as long as you want. If you have to break it up into a “series of threads”, that’s an indication that you’re using a platform for something it wasn’t designed for, with to-be-expected resulting annoyances like the pieces of the post getting disconnected from each other.

  2. A blog post has a permanent web presence at a fixed URL, and can be cited and linked to indefinitely into the future.

  3. The author has complete control over the appearance, formatting, and content of a blog post, and is not dependent on the vagaries of whatever social media enterprise controls the data.

  4. Anyone with a web browser can read and comment on a blog post, whereas social media is siloed into various platforms controlled by different corporations and organizations that don’t interoperate.

What is the attraction of (mis)using social media platforms to replace blogging?

Posted by: Mike Shulman on June 4, 2026 8:10 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: A new blog

I think I understand the pull of social media. On social media you feel like you’re part of a crowd rather than holding forth from an isolated outpost. You can easily see who liked what you wrote — and “liking” is a lower-effort form of feedback on the part of your readers than writing a comment. A post can “go viral” and you can see it going viral. It’s also feels fine to post something short that takes very little effort.

I am weird because I often start by writing something short and snappy on Bluesky, then expand it to a longish post or set of posts on Mathstodon (which allows 1729 characters per post), and then — if I like it — polish it up to a post either here or on my blog Azimuth. So I can’t be accused of using social media to replace blogging. But most people don’t want to do so much work. Most people like to chat, not write essays.

Posted by: John Baez on June 6, 2026 7:02 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: A new blog

Thanks for trying to explain.

Back in the day when people actually commented on n-Cafe posts, I felt like part of a crowd here. And I thought I could tell when a post was popular because there were a lot of comments.

I like to chat too sometimes, but I don’t see chatting and blogging as in competition. If you have something long to say, doesn’t it take more work to condense it into something short?

Posted by: Mike Shulman on June 6, 2026 7:10 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: A new blog

Seeing you talk about how the interaction with this blog seems to have diminished aligns with my personal feeling.

I can also personally say that, as someone who checks this site multiple times a week, the main reason I have never really interacted is a combination of the high level of complexity and the fact that everyone here is an absolute expert in the field, and as such, I always like I would not be able to contribute sensibly

Posted by: Nicolas Dewolf on June 11, 2026 7:24 AM | Permalink | Reply to this

Re: A new blog

Nicholas wrote:

I can also personally say that, as someone who checks this site multiple times a week, the main reason I have never really interacted is a combination of the high level of complexity and the fact that everyone here is an absolute expert in the field […]

I don’t know what “the field” is: people here post about about quite different fields of mathematics, logic, physics, and computer science, and many of these thing are hard for me to understand.

But I agree that it’s a very technical blog, which can tend to scare people off. It may not be obvious, but if anyone asks a question on this blog, there will be people out there who will be grateful—not just the person who wrote the article, but people with the same question.

Posted by: John Baez on June 12, 2026 1:06 PM | Permalink | Reply to this

Post a New Comment