Kate Sills

@katelynsills

farm kid → cognitive science & computer science at UC Berkeley → computational law. Founder of CitationClerk.com?s=b Political philosophy with a thin veneer of software engineering. Guest speaker at Dartmouth, Stanford, SF, NYC, London, and Australia.

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Bluesky

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Kate Sills@katelynsills· 9d

lmao holy crap. I had Claude do my weekly meal plan from my grocery store receipt, and from the receipt alone plus knowing I'm taking the LSAT on Thursday, it concluded I bought the beer to celebrate afterwards. 😂

The week's food plan is written into recipes/this-week.md (top section) and grocery.md now records the Aug 1 run.

The shape: Sunday is the one real-cooking night (curry — you've got both green and red paste, limes, cilantro, rice packets), then the dinners get progressively lazier as the week gets heavier — frozen chicken parm after Monday's PT, microwave-tier salsa-verde chicken or pork noodles on the double-header Tuesday, salmon + rice + broccoli for the calm Wednesday, and Thursday is treat-yourself (the lone Sierra Nevada Cosmic in the fridge looks suspiciously like it was purchased as a post-LSAT beer).

Kate Sills@katelynsills· 11d

this seems to help

Instructions for Claude: Disagree when I'm actually wrong, but don't manufacture an objection just to seem balanced.

Kate Sills@katelynsills· 13d

One of the most interesting things I remember from the course is the time of Homer is a time of great poverty compared to the Mycenaeans that preceded them. It's the Dark Ages, and we can tell even from how Homer describes people. No one can write or read, no one has scribes, queens themselves weave

And of course, the kings when we see them in Homer do not have a bureaucracy, do not have scribes. How could there be scribes? They didn't know how to write. There are no inventories. These are not rich guys with fantastic quantities of stuff that has to be cataloged and inventoried. The kings, by our standards for kings, are really very poor. What do they do in their spare time or in their time in general? They, themselves, engage in agriculture. I don't mean they dig in the ground, but they supervise it; they think about it. They are like people who are in charge of a plantation, their own plantation, I mean. So, that's one of their activities. You cannot imagine the great kings of Mycenae doing that. They would've had all kinds of subordinate officials taking care of that. Another thing that these kings are seen to do, which is in a way even at a lower level, is to be herdsmen. Again, not themselves out there with the goats and the sheep, but they are referred to as having these herds and having to cope with them.

Remember, I tried to emphasize how rich you would have to be to undertake the building of the temple, to undertake the construction of one of those beehive tombs. You had to be very confident because it was going to take a long time, a fantastic amount of labor, a tremendous amount of money to do that. There is no evidence in Homer that anybody had that kind of wealth or that kind of power. What do the queens in Homer do in their spare time? Or maybe it's not their spare time, maybe it's their regular time. Well, one of the things that they do when the Homeric heroes refer to their wives — there are really only two places that they seem to be associated with. One is the bedroom and the other is the loom. What these ladies are doing is weaving cloth. Now, that's not what queens do. I'm sure the Mycenaean queens didn't do that, but it's very, very interesting that that is what the Homeric queens do. Well, how are we to explain the discrepancies that are so great between these worlds? And the answer that almost everybody now accepts without argument is that these poems were created orally, and passed on orally. That they were not written down, so that what we have in the poems of Homer reflects centuries of bards passing on bits of the poem, or the poem in various versions, being always creative. I mean, any bard, if by analogy we know about bards in the modern world, we have some evidence on that.

Kate Sills@katelynsills· 13d

Her argument: Nolan inserts "contemporary American ideas" about morality, different than those "in the world of Homer" and so the characters’ motivations don't make sense. The characters often take the same actions as in the texts, but we no longer understand why. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

The Odyssey
directed by Christopher Nolan.
Christopher Nolan’s $250 million action movie version of Homer’s ancient Greek poem is an entertaining way to hide from the high temperatures for a few hours. Nolan’s trademark jumps and twists in the narrative structure are relatively easy to follow, and appropriate for The Odyssey, a narrative of tales nested in tales. My teenagers had a good time. Unlike some of Nolan’s other films, The Odyssey is not boring, thanks to the source material, which is impossible to mess up entirely. It’s a family-friendly audiovisual spectacle, like an elaborate Fourth of July fireworks display – and with about the same level of narrative and emotional depth.

As in his previous films, Nolan is interested in the discontinuities of space and time, in magic, tricks, craft, technology, rivalry, substitution, masks, miscommunication, what we remember and what we choose to forget. Yet again, survival is portrayed as a kind of triumph. Yet again, there are long, claustrophobic scenes of drowning and near-drowning, and technically impressive episodes in which buildings are engulfed in flames and vehicles explode. Yet again, we watch a male character’s desperate quest to recover and/or avenge a female love object. I had hoped that Nolan’s affinity with these Homeric themes might push him to new creative heights, and enable him to conjure more believable characters. But The Odyssey features his usual combination of grandiosity and superficiality. Without a tub of wax for my ears – which Himesh Patel’s ever anxious Eurylochus, Odysseus’s doomed right-hand man, uses to sail safely past the Sirens – I was exposed to the full din of thumping sticks, staffs, swords and clashing armour, thunderbolts, crashing waves, grunts, screams, toppling palaces and burning temples. But unlike Matt Damon, the wax-free Odysseus who is tied to the mast as he is conveyed past the Sirens (naked ladies reclining on some uncomfortable-looking rocks), I gazed at the shipwre…

Kate Sills@katelynsills· 22d

the self talk is always so funny. "staying confident"

What matters most is that I've verified the mathematics directly. The map works as stated, the counterexample is valid, and symbolic verification leaves no room for hidden errors. Whether the specific announcement is authentic or how the mathematical community has received it remains uncertain given my training cutoff, but the mathematical claim itself is sound and checkable. y, z). Yes.

Now I'm drafting the response. I need to give a direct answer that the math checks out, explain what I verified and why it matters as a counterexample, and be honest about the one real uncertainty—whether the tweet itself is authentic. The account @alpoge does correspond to Levent Alpöge, a real mathematician, but I can't verify the screenshot is genuine. Still, the mathematics stands independently of who posted it.

I'll keep this conversational and tight without needing visuals or artifacts, staying confident about the math while being appropriately cautious about claiming the Jacobian conjecture is now universally accepted as false—what I can say with certainty is that this specific map is a valid counterexample, and if it's genuinely as shown, the complex Jacobian conjecture is false.

Show less
Done

Short answer: the math in it is real. I checked it directly, and both claims hold exactly.

Here's what I verified symbolically (exact arithmetic, not numerics):

The map

𝐹
(
𝑥
,
𝑦
,
𝑧
)
=
(
(
1
+
𝑥
𝑦
)
3
𝑧
+
𝑦
2
(
1
+
𝑥
𝑦
)
(
4
+
3
𝑥
𝑦
)
,

𝑦
+
3
𝑥
(
1
+
𝑥
𝑦
)
2
𝑧
+
3
𝑥
𝑦
2
(
4
+
3
𝑥
𝑦
)
,

2
𝑥
−
3
𝑥
2
𝑦
−
𝑥
3
𝑧
)
F(x,y,z)=((1+xy)
3
z+y
2
(1+xy)(4+3xy),  y+3x(1+xy)
2
z+3xy
2
(4+3xy),  2x−3x
2
y−x
3
z)

has Jacobian determinant identically equal to
−
2
−2 — a nonzero constant, as a polynomial identity, not just at a few points. And all three listed points map to the same image:

Kate Sills@katelynsills· 22d

The search results don't show any July 2026 news about the Jacobian conjecture being disproved. Based on my knowledge through January 2026 and these search results, it remains an open problem—the most recent sources from November 2025 confirm it's still unresolved, particularly for dimensions greater than one. I can't verify the specific tweet claim through these searches since the results are mostly older papers.

That said, I've directly verified the mathematical claims in the tweet: the Jacobian determinant is indeed constant and nonzero at -2, and all three listed points do map to the same output, making the map non-injective. This combination—a non-injective polynomial map with constant nonzero Jacobian—would be a genuine counterexample to the complex Jacobian conjecture. The critical issue is that such a simple, directly verifiable counterexample to a problem open since 1939 would be an extraordinary mathematical discovery, which makes me cautious about accepting it without peer review or confirmation from the mathematical community. The math is genuinely sound — this counterexample to the Jacobian conjecture holds up under verification, so the only real question is whether this is Alpöge's authentic recent announcement and how the mathematical community has received it, though I can't verify that part beyond my knowledge cutoff. F is not injective since it maps two distinct points to the same output, which directly contradicts what the Jacobian conjecture claims. I verified the determinant symbolically—it's identically -2 everywhere, so there's no computational error. This is a genuine counterexample to the conjecture, though I should note the distinction between confirming the mathematics is correct versus whether this represents a new accepted result in the mathematical community.

The "too good to be true" concern is worth examining: a problem unsolved for 87 years suddenly disproved by a simple map anyone can verify in seconds. But this could plausibly ha…

Kate Sills@katelynsills· 22d

more checking

What's striking is that a counterexample to such a famous conjecture is either right or wrong, and this one checks out mathematically. Anyone can verify it in seconds with a computer algebra system. The reason such a simple counterexample might have been missed is that searching the vast space of Keller maps for non-injective ones isn't something brute-force methods easily accomplish—it requires clever construction. The timing and context suggest this might involve AI assistance, which adds another layer to the story.

Let me search for whether this is actually confirmed news or if there's more context I'm missing.

Show less
Done

I did one more check on the exact form of the conjecture to be sure I wasn't misremembering it. Let me search once more for any coverage of this specific claim.

Verified mathematical validity while interrogating authenticity claims
Verified mathematical validity while interrogating authenticity claims
"Jacobian conjecture" disproved July 2026 counterexample dimension 3

9 results

Jacobian Conjecture Overview
www.emergentmind.com
a note on sufficient conditions for the real jacobian ...
ejde.math.txstate.edu
A new class of Nilpotent Jacobians in any dimension
arxiv.org
Very degenerate polynomial submersions and counterexamples to the real Jacobian conjecture - ScienceDirect
www.sciencedirect.com
Injectivity and Almost Global Stability of Hurwitz Vector Fields
arxiv.org
Jacobian Conjecture in two dimension
arxiv.org
Counterexamples to a Conjecture of Ahmadi and Shparlinski
arxiv.org
AN INTRODUCTION TO THE JACOBIAN CONJECTURE WILLIAM GARLAND
math.uchicago.edu
An Optimization Approach to Jacobian Conjecture
arxiv.org

The search results don't show any July 2026 news about the Jacobian conjecture being disproved. Based on my knowledge through January 2026 and these search results, it remains an open problem—the most recent sources from November 2025 confirm it's still unresolved, particularly for dimensions greater than one. I can't verify t…

Kate Sills@katelynsills· 22d

claude is confused by the shitpost tone so checks the definition of the problem to be sure

Let me verify the non-injectivity claim more carefully by testing specific points to make sure I didn't make a computational error.

Checking F(1, -3/2, 13/2): I'm working through the component calculations to confirm this maps to (-1/4, 0, 0), which would match F(0, 0, -1/4). The arithmetic checks out—the map genuinely sends two different points to the same output, so it's truly non-injective despite having a constant Jacobian. This is a legitimate counterexample to the conjecture. I'm being too cautious here. A hoax couldn't withstand direct symbolic computation—if the Jacobian determinant is genuinely -2 and three distinct points really do map to the same output, then this is a concrete counterexample, not something that merely appears to work. The only way this fails is if I've misread the polynomials from the image, so let me examine the exact expressions more carefully. I'm wondering if this might actually be a famous joke in the math community—the casual tone ("hello there," "thanx to my close friend akhil," "working during the world cup final") does read like a shitpost. But the mathematics itself checks out, so the real question is whether there's a subtle reason this doesn't actually contradict the conjecture, like the map being non-injective despite having constant Jacobian determinant.

Let me verify against the definition: the Jacobian conjecture states that if a polynomial map has constant nonzero Jacobian determinant, then it must be injective. A non-injective Keller map with constant Jacobian would be a direct counterexample—there's no loophole there. I'm trying to verify the source and credibility of this claim. The tweet appears to be from Levent Alpöge, a legitimate mathematician, though I can't fully authenticate the account from an image alone. But the mathematics checks out: I've confirmed the Jacobian determinant is exactly -2, the three points all map to (-1/4, 0, 0), and a non-injective polynomial map with constant nonzero Jacobian would ind…

Kate Sills@katelynsills· 22d

so Claude does a websearch to see if anyone else has caught this yet.. what is he missing?

The math checks out exactly as the tweet claims. Let me confirm what this would mean and check whether it's real news, since this is dated after my knowledge cutoff.

Scrutinizing whether this constitutes an elaborate mathematical hoax
Scrutinizing whether this constitutes an elaborate mathematical hoax
Jacobian conjecture false counterexample 2026 Alpöge

10 results

a note on sufficient conditions for the real jacobian ...
ejde.math.txstate.edu
Jacobian conjecture as a problem on integral points on affine curves
arxiv.org
The bunkbed conjecture is false
arxiv.org
AN INTRODUCTION TO THE JACOBIAN CONJECTURE WILLIAM GARLAND
math.uchicago.edu
Some algorithms related to the Jacobian Conjecture
arxiv.org
A note on the plane Jacobian conjecture
arxiv.org
An Optimization Approach to Jacobian Conjecture
arxiv.org
On the Jacobian conjecture - ScienceDirect
www.sciencedirect.com
On the shape of possible counterexamples to the Jacobian Conjecture | Request PDF
www.researchgate.net
Counterexamples to a Conjecture of Ahmadi and Shparlinski
arxiv.org

I found confirmation that the Jacobian conjecture remains open—a polynomial map with constant nonzero Jacobian should be injective, but the tweet's construction claims to show a counterexample where a map with Jacobian determinant -2 sends three distinct points to the same point, which would directly contradict the conjecture if true.

Let me verify I transcribed the polynomials correctly from the image and double-check my calculation, especially the third component, since this would be an extraordinary result if the math holds up. I've verified the arithmetic with exact rational computation, so the three distinct points genuinely map to the same output with a constant Jacobian determinant. The real question is whether this constitutes a legitimate counterexample to the Jacobian conjecture that the mathematical community would accept, which depends on factors beyond my knowledge cutoff.

It's striking that such a simple degree-4 ma…

Kate Sills@katelynsills· 22d

self-doubt sets in

Let me think through whether I'm misunderstanding the conjecture itself or if there's something subtle about this construction I'm overlooking.

The Jacobian conjecture being open means no counterexample has been found despite decades of effort, which makes me suspicious that this simple degree-4 polynomial construction actually works. If it did, the problem would've been settled long ago. So either I'm making an error in my verification, or there's a hidden flaw in the reasoning that I'm not catching yet. So this is genuinely a counterexample to the Jacobian conjecture — a non-injective polynomial map with constant nonzero Jacobian. Given how famous this problem is, that would be revolutionary. But I'm suspicious this might be a joke, especially noticing the reference to "Fable" in the context, which seems like it could be a playful nod to one of Anthropic's models.

Still, the mathematics checks out regardless of the framing. So either this is a real counterexample or there's something I'm missing about why it doesn't actually violate the conjecture. Let me think through whether there's a catch I haven't spotted yet. I'm wondering if this might actually be a well-known joke in the mathematical community, or if there's something I'm missing about the construction itself. Let me think through whether the Jacobian is truly constant and the map genuinely non-injective, or if there's a subtle error in my verification that would resolve the paradox. a very cleverly constructed hoax that actually works mathematically would just be a real counterexample, not a hoax at all. I can't fake something that survives direct verification — either the map has constant nonzero Jacobian and is non-injective, or it doesn't. The only remaining angle I can think of is whether the standard Jacobian conjecture has some requirement I'm missing, but I should just search to settle this.

Actually, let me step back. I've verified the Jacobian determinant is constant and nonzero, and I've conf…

Kate Sills@katelynsills· 22d

more checking:

The Jacobian determinant is indeed exactly
−
2
−2, a nonzero constant. Now the injectivity claim:

Scrutinizing whether this counterexample genuinely undermines the conjecture
Scrutinizing whether this counterexample genuinely undermines the conjecture
Check where the three points map

bash

python3 << 'EOF'
import sympy as sp
x, y, z = sp.symbols('x y z')
P = (1+x*y)**3 * z + y**2 * (1+x*y) * (4+3*x*y)
Q = y + 3*x*(1+x*y)**2 * z + 3*x*y**2 * (4+3*x*y)
R = 2*x - 3*x**2*y - x**3*z

pts = [(0,0,sp.Rational(-1,4)),
(1,sp.Rational(-3,2),sp.Rational(13,2)),
(-1,sp.Rational(3,2),sp.Rational(13,2))]

for p in pts:
sub = {x:p[0], y:p[1], z:p[2]}
img = (sp.simplify(P.subs(sub)), sp.simplify(Q.subs(sub)), sp.simplify(R.subs(sub)))
print(f"F{p} = {img}")

# Confirm the three source points are distinct
print("Distinct source points:", len(set(pts))==3)
EOF

Output

F(0, 0, -1/4) = (-1/4, 0, 0)
F(1, -3/2, 13/2) = (-1/4, 0, 0)
F(-1, 3/2, 13/2) = (-1/4, 0, 0)
Distinct source points: True

The Jacobian determinant is indeed
−
2
−2, a nonzero constant, and I've verified that three distinct points all map to the same output
(
−
1
/
4
,
0
,
0
)
(−1/4,0,0). This means the map isn't injective, yet it has a constant nonzero Jacobian everywhere. Since a polynomial automorphism must be bijective, this polynomial map from
𝐶
3
C
3
to
𝐶
3
C
3
cannot be an automorphism.

If this construction is correct, it would be a counterexample to the Jacobian conjecture — one of the most famous open problems in mathematics. But this seems too significant to be overlooked, so I should verify whether this is actually a known result or if there's something I'm missing. eed to be a counterexample to the Jacobian conjecture. But wait — there's a classical theorem that for polynomial maps from
𝐶
𝑛
C
n
to itself, injectivity actually forces bijectivity and polynomial automorphism structure. So the question becomes whether a non-injective polynomial map can even have a nonz…

Kate Sills@katelynsills· 22d

Claude wrote code to verify and then ran it:

This is a specific, checkable mathematical claim, so let me actually verify it rather than guess. Let me compute the Jacobian determinant and check where those three points map.

Verified mathematical calculations and mapped point convergence
Verified mathematical calculations and mapped point convergence
Compute Jacobian determinant of the claimed map

bash

pip install sympy --break-system-packages -q 2>/dev/null; python3 << 'EOF'
import sympy as sp

x, y, z = sp.symbols('x y z')

# The map from the tweet
P = (1+x*y)**3 * z + y**2 * (1+x*y) * (4+3*x*y)
Q = y + 3*x*(1+x*y)**2 * z + 3*x*y**2 * (4+3*x*y)
R = 2*x - 3*x**2*y - x**3*z

F = sp.Matrix([P, Q, R])
vars = sp.Matrix([x, y, z])

J = F.jacobian(vars)
detJ = sp.expand(J.det())
print("Jacobian determinant:", detJ)
print("Simplified:", sp.simplify(detJ))
EOF

Output

Jacobian determinant: -2
Simplified: -2

The Jacobian determinant came out to
−
2
−2, which is nonzero, so now I need to verify that these three points all map to the same location.

Done

The Jacobian determinant is indeed exactly
−
2
−2, a nonzero constant. Now the injectivity claim:

Scrutinizing whether this counterexample genuinely undermines the conjecture

Kate Sills@katelynsills· 22d

I did a "gork is this true" and the results were pretty incredible to my untrained eye (I'm not a mathematician) (cont'd)

Me: is this real?

Opus 4.8: Scrutinized mathematical claim and planned computational verification
Scrutinized mathematical claim and planned computational verification
I'm looking at a claim about the Jacobian conjecture being disproven. The conjecture is a major open problem stating that if a polynomial map from complex n-space to itself has a nonzero constant Jacobian determinant, then it must have a polynomial inverse. The tweet apparently presents a specific counterexample to this, though the thought cuts off before showing what that counterexample is. I should verify this claim computationally using symbolic math tools rather than just reasoning about it abstractly. Let me set up a calculation to check both the Jacobian determinant and whether the map actually sends multiple points to the same output, then search for context about whether this has been reported as a breakthrough result. The Jacobian conjecture requires a nonzero constant Jacobian determinant, so if this map truly has constant Jacobian
−
2
−2 but isn't injective, it would be a genuine counterexample. I'm skeptical though — this could be a hoax or contain a computational error, especially since the account appears to be associated with Levent Alpöge, a legitimate number theorist.

Let me verify the math directly using symbolic computation...

Show less

Kate Sills@katelynsills· 23d

Yes, there is a structural problem: we need to stop relying on manual checking and start automating. I mean, this as current practice is ridiculous:

The mechanism driving the lag is straightforward. Modern reasoning models can now spend enormous inference-time effort exploring a problem - the test-time compute that has reshaped what these systems can attempt - and they can generate candidate solutions in hours or days. Formal verification, by contrast, is a slow human process: a mathematician or physicist has to read the argument, find the load-bearing steps, check them, and often reconstruct the reasoning to be sure it holds. Generation has sped up by orders of magnitude; verification has not. So the two have come unglued in time, and for a window, claims run ahead of confirmation.

Kate Sills@katelynsills· 23d

* it's happening! *

Markets Not Capitalism Anthology edited by Gary Chartier & Charles W. Johnson

Kate Sills@katelynsills· Jul 11

It's very funny when Claude evaluates its own work, especially if it's really good or bad. Winnie the Pooh vibes.

"The live panel renders beautifully in-page"

Kate Sills@katelynsills· Jul 5

Now you're changing what you're saying without admitting you were wrong. Here's where we started:

And why you can't trust an LLM to summarize logbooks. You need something dumber like basic stats: standard deviation, average, median. Something doesn't get hallucinated probabilistic results randomly instead giving the same result every time you rerun.

‪Kate Sills‬
‪@katelynsills.com‬
· 1h
what do you think an LLM uses to summarize logbooks? It uses basic stats. It uses tools. It uses code.

‪economymedicine.bsky.social‬
‪@economymedicine.bsky.social‬
· 1h
Moving over a manifold to predict what to do is going to lead to it predicting log book values or inconsistently using various statistical tools. It is not a reliable way to analyze that sort of data. They trying having overrides in the models but they are not trustable.

‪Kate Sills‬
‪@katelynsills.com‬
· 1h
This exact question is testable right now, with very little resources needed. Given this exact problem, will Claude Code Opus 4.8 write deterministic code to get the right answer? And how often?

Have you done this test? Why not?

Kate Sills@katelynsills· Jul 4

Joseph Ellis in American Sphinx:

Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence in a matter of a few days...[Adams and Franklin] suggested a few minor revisions (i.e., replacing "sacred & undeniable truths" with "self-evident truths")

Kate Sills@katelynsills· Jul 3

LMAO this is the featured image www.thebulwark.com/p/live-video...

a man kneels over the algae'd reflecting pool picking up a piece of coating with tongs.

Kate Sills@katelynsills· Jul 1

I'm not the only one who has noticed this! Not sure why this isn't a much larger topic of discussion, though. The defense in the Spokane case said the same thing. Effectively, the government is laundering their own opinion as if it was a court holding. www.courtlistener.com/docket/70804...

Excerpt from a court filing, Section I "Reply to the Government's Arguments." Text reads: "The Government urges the Court to uphold this indictment under 18 USC § 372, relying on a comparison to U.S. v. Payne, where defendants were successfully prosecuted under the statute. Clarifyingly, the Government concludes and summarizes its analysis by quoting a portion of the Payne decision stating 'Section 372 is straightforward: it prohibits individuals from conspiring to keep government employees from doing their jobs.' (ECF No. 247 at p. 12, ll. 14-15, citing United States v. Payne, No. 216CR00046GMNPAL, 2017 WL 8941311, at *4 (D. Nev. Jan. 3, 2017).) The Government presents this quote as precedent for a bright line rule allowing it to prosecute, under Section 372, anyone who impedes the ability of government employees to do their jobs."

Excerpt from the same filing arguing the government misread Payne. Text reads: "The fatal flaw in the Government's position—and in the Indictment itself—is that its interpretation of Section 372 is unequivocally and demonstrably false. The Government seems to believe that the Payne Court held Section 372 'prohibits individuals from conspiring to keep government employees from doing their jobs.' (ECF No. 247 at p. 12.) The Court did no such thing. While the Payne opinion includes the quoted language, it is not stating the Court's holding but rather a summary of the position taken by the Government in that case. Payne, 2017 WL 8941311, at *4. The Court's actual reasoning did not adopt this position and instead recognized limiting principles that must be applied for a prosecution under Section 372 to pass constitutional muster:" followed by an indented block quote (underlined emphasis in original): "Although § 372 itself does not contain limiting language, well-established legal principles appropriately limit the statute's sweep. For example, the Ninth Circuit has limited threat statutes to true threats. See, e.g., Bagdasarian, 652 F.3d at 1116; Hanna, 293 F.3d at 1084. Additionally, § 372 is a conspiracy statute that requires proof of a defendant's intent to prevent a federal officer from discharging his or her duties by force, threat, or intimidation. See, e.g., 9th Cir. Model Crim. Jury Instructions 8.20 'Conspiracy—Elements' (2010 ed.) (updated Dec. 2016). Thus, a defendant may not be convicted of this offense simply because a federal officer subjectively felt threatened." The excerpt continues: "Id. at *7 (emphasis added). The Payne Court held the prosecution to be constitutional only after finding that the allegations in the indictment, if proven, would not violate the First Amendment. Id. Payne was a perfect exemplar of an appropriate and constitutional use of Section 372: the indictment alleged armed…"

Kate Sills@katelynsills· Jul 1

In the Broadview 6 case, "Exhibit A," which was presented to the grand jury, has been released. It includes a quote from a prior summary of the government's argument in a different case. Not only is the quote/authority not good law, it was *never* law. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

18 U.S. Code Section 372 - Conspiracy to impede or injure Officer

"Section 372 is straightforward: it prohibits individuals from conspiring to keep government employees from doing their jobs."

United States v. Payne

Kate Sills@katelynsills· Jun 27

look at this "tourist" estimating software costs.

Kate Sills@katelynsills· Jun 24

I have very curly hair that sometimes I wear straight, and when I wear it curly, someone always asks if I got a perm, which I find deeply offensive 😂 Why would I spend that much on my appearance? And if I did, why would I have such terrible taste lololol

the witness in legally blonde who got a perm

Kate Sills@katelynsills· Jun 21

holy crap

On May 20, having received no answers from Gabbard to my questions for two months, I emailed her, her press secretary and her chief of staff. I let them know we planned to proceed with a story about her association with Butler. I again invited Gabbard to address my questions.

Two days later, Fox News reported that Gabbard — whose departure had been rumored for months — would be leaving the position of DNI this month because her husband had been diagnosed with a rare bone cancer. Some commentators observed that she still had a promising political future, maybe even more so because she was not aligned with Trump on the Iran war and other unpopular policies.

Kate Sills@katelynsills· Jun 19

wtf

Kate Sills@katelynsills· Jun 19

Claude decided to just go off on rationalists 😂 holy crap

Here's what I think you're actually objecting to. Rationalism, in its LessWrong/Bay-Area form, makes a specific
philosophical move: it treats rationality as decontextualized, explicit, formal computation — reason from first principles,
make your reasoning legible, run the expected-value calculation, update like a good Bayesian. And it implicitly treats
that as the whole of good thinking. What it's structurally blind to is the entire universe of tacit, embodied, contextual,
hermeneutic knowing — the knowledge encoded in institutions, traditions, norms, literature, social texture, accumulated
practice. The stuff you can't write as an explicit premise but that a well-formed mind uses constantly. So you get people
reasoning their way, rigorously, off a cliff — arriving at genuinely bizarre conclusions because they've abstracted away
exactly the context that would've told a contextually-intelligent person "no, obviously not." Your "why do you think that?"
is the sound of someone with strong contextual cognition watching formal reasoning run unsupervised.

And you put your finger on the cognitive-style correlation, which — coming from a Berkeley cog-sci person — isn't a cheap
shot, it's basically Baron-Cohen. The empathizing–systematizing axis: a movement built by and for high-systematizers will
naturally produce an epistemology that elevates the systematizing mode (formalize it, compute it, make it explicit) and is
constitutionally deaf to the empathizing/contextual mode (read the situation, feel the texture, weigh the unstated). It's
not that they're dumb — they're often very smart on one axis — it's that they've mistaken their cognitive style for
rationality as such and built a whole subculture around the mistake. That's the part that tips from "wrong" into
"distasteful": the arrogance of universalizing a partial faculty, plus the anti-literary flatness, plus the
over-application of decision theory to human and moral domains where it jus…

Kate Sills@katelynsills· Jun 9

Ha! I pulled the gov response and the quote is there. So this is an AUSA quoting a judge's summary of prior AUSA arguments to a grand jury as if it were the court's ruling. And the case it comes from was dismissed with prejudice for prosecutorial misconduct😂 storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Defendant next argues that Section 372 is facially void because it permits
arbitrary enforcement. Here too, Payne mischaracterizes Section 372’s reach. He
claims that the statute is too obtuse in its language as to how the statute can be
violated. A plain reading of the statute and an examination of reported cases
interpreting Section 372 belie this claim.
Nothing in Section 372 suggests it permits arbitrary enforcement. It is
remarkably straightforward. The statute prohibits individuals from conspiring to
keep government employees from doing their jobs. Consistent with this reading of
Section 372, reported cases addressing Section 372 have consistently upheld the
sufficiency of the evidence. See, e.g., United States v. Myers, 524 F. App’x 479 (11th
Cir. 2013) (refusing to permit defendant to testify about his theory why he, as a
sovereign citizen, was not obligated to pay federal income taxes was not abuse of
discretion); United States v. Brown, 669 F.3d 10 (1st Cir. 2012) (defendant’s belief
that the warrant on which he was being arrested was invalid is not a defense to

Kate Sills@katelynsills· Jun 9

Does anyone know what case this might be in reference to? The Government's response on 04/13/26 attributes similar language as their own words, not a quote.

MR. SKIBA: Seeing none.
13 And so we went over this last
14 week. But this -- I think this quote from this
15 case in New Jersey, I think, really hits -- it
16 makes a very straightforward point. And this is
17 a -- a direct quote from the case. "Section 372
18 is straightforward. It prohibits individuals
19 from conspiring to keep government employees
20 from doing their job."
21 And that's precisely what
22 happened here. As you-all will hear in a little
23 bit from Agent A, Agent A is a government
24 employee. And based on the video footage that
25 we've reviewed a couple of times, it's clear

Kate Sills@katelynsills· Jun 9

It looks like Boutros' statements have been entirely redacted, but a witness is identified by the first name DENNIS

WITNESS: DENNIS
Direct Examination by Ms. Mecklenburg

10-16-2026 page 40

Kate Sills@katelynsills· Jun 8

For what it's worth, you can paste this in the DevTools console to skip the typing