July 6-12, 2026

Dissertation[26w28-diss]

First and foremost, my dissertation, for which a full draft of the second chapter is (informally) due as Fall falls. I have a skeletal but solid idea of what this chapter will contain/argue. But, as ever, there are books-and-books to read to flesh it all out in the open space of scholarly discussion. I found some (possibly) important texts that make arguments adjacent to the one I would like to pen regarding Marx’s mathematical manuscripts, and so I lined many of these up on my reMarkables to chew through in the coming weeks.

Some of this is reading in recent Marxist criticism (such as this); but much of it is more general education in the history and philosophy of mathematics, as this is not a domain that I have ever systematically studied. It is unfortunate for me that the “history and philosophy of mathematics” is such a sweeping body of literature that is often dense and particular. I have been reckoning with this wily character of the domain since at least 2024, when we started the Math(s), Philosophy, History reading group, which is roughly also when I started to think seriously about the history and philosophy of mathematics as an important lens for computationally inflected critical theory. The modern academic-historical sensibility—which still struggles under the weight of that ghastly postmodern apothegm; that everything has (nothing if it does not have) a specific time and place—often bristles at the conceptual scope of mathematical undertaking. The context for a proof sometimes swings from a seventeenth century insight (Leibniz, say), through progress made in the twentieth century, only to arrive promptly back in the present wherein some uncharted graduate student has unearthed a new way of looking at dots and lines. It is the broad-shouldered historicity of mathematical culture that makes it such a curious body of work to study in postmodern times: mathematical ideas seem to shrug off contextual particularity like water off a duck’s back.

Zeroing in on the mathematical developments that matter for my argument is the tall order on which I am currently at work. The overall aim is to link Marx’s critique of capital to the origins of computer science in the mid-twentieth century: hence my dissertation’s current working title, Mathematical Materialism: Capital, Calculus, and the Cradle of Computer Science.

Rheo[26w28-rheo]

In Rheo dev news, I have started preparing a 0.5.0 release, despite just last week releasing 0.4.0. This is another major version bump because it changes (in a breaking way) how spines work and how they are exposed to source Typst files.

This set of changes stemmed from my first serious attempt to build a zettelkasten-style linking system with Rheo, a project I’ve had planned since I started writing weeknotes. I thus set out to extend Rheo’s spine abstraction so that it included some notion of ‘blocks’, i.e. sections of text within a file. A spine in Rheo currently is essentially just a list of vertebrae, which have a one-to-one mapping with the files in a Rheo content directory. Typst documents, of course, are often broken up by headings, such as the one under which this text sits. The text that follows from each heading can therefore serve as a block, where a block essentially captures a select portion of continuous content in a Typst source file.

Following the pattern I have been using in these weeknotes, my first attempt was to get Rheo to track all labelled headings and to synthesize unique block IDs by concatenating the heading label with the spine vertebra handle. If the label <a> was attached to a heading in an ‘intro.typ’ file, Rheo would thus create the block ID <intro:a>, essentially extending the relative linking pattern to include blocks within files in the spine.

There isn’t a hard mechanical reason this couldn’t work, I don’t believe. But as I built out the implementation, the abstraction began to feel clunky and leaky. In order to synthesize such labels in Typst files in particular, Rheo would essentially have to edit the Typst source provided by the user, either replacing existing labels or inserting extra ones. Though there might be future features where it makes sense to do this, I realized that tracking blocks in this way is a feature that is somewhat specific to this zettelkasten use case, rather than a functionality that is likely to be used by other formats at this stage.

I therefore changed tack and worked out what would be necessary in order to do block synthesis downstream in a Rheo package, rather than in the core Rheo compiler. The required feature is one I’ve been meaning to add for some time, which is exposing spine information in Typst at compile-time. The way I decided to do this is to inject a rheo-context variable into every spine vertebra, where rheo-context is a dictionary that contains both a handle indicating the current file’s location in the spine, as well as a map of the whole spine. This latter map will enable an improved sidebar package, which will now be able to infer what to include rather than needing an explicit data structure, as well as for other code and packages that need a sitemap.

I also decided to incorporate the Rheo target info as part of rheo-context to limit the namespace that Rheo effectively reserves to just one variable. This means deprecating rheo-context, which is a breaking change, which is technically what is triggering the major version bump to 0.5.0. I don’t think Rheo has very many serious users other than me currently, so I’m not getting hung up about consistently staging releases or keeping backwards compatibility at this stage of development. I also started working on a more structured way to specify spines, which will amount to another breaking change, so jumping straight to 0.5.0 on the next release (sometime next week) will certainly be warranted.

Lastly, I added a justify package which operationalizes a demo Andy Matuschak sent us showing how you can get better Knuth-Plass spacing variance in the browser using pretext.

et alia[26w28-etal]

My wife and I went to our first condominium meeting this week, which was somewhat titillating. Though the stakes are small, all things considered, the seriousness and energy our neighbours brought to the table was invigorating. We hope to propose a more organized rubbish system (which includes horticultural accoutrements) for the common space at the upcoming meeting in September:

We also found a free, air-conditioned, and ambiently quiet workspace a stone’s throw from our apartment in (of course) the foyer of a bank. It’s nice to have this somewhere to go when home becomes that little bit too overwhelmingly regular.

I visited the Archivio Tipografico, and went to see an exhibition on the archaeology of Palestine at the Fondazione Merz. I also got caught in a small summer storm at the tail end of a gravel ride, causing a slide-out on a downhill from which I sustained minor injuries (scrapes on my right thigh and elbow):