That is a brutal take down. Did Dyson and Wolfram have a math-beef going or something?
He's an interesting character, and rare in that is his both obviously very intelligent, and yet not nearly as intelligent as he thinks he is.
I suspect he's the sort of person who can't stand the idea that he is not the smartest guy in the room - in perception or reality. He may well have constructed his career as an "outsider" to reduce the occurrences of this, perhaps not intentionally.
https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2019/02/seeking-the-prod...
My view- put the work down and take a darn walk.
This is not the behavior of a man in balance, or someone who is truly "here".
I mean, he certainly does not seem in balance, because he is very full of himself. But his working setup is interesting.
For $500 on amazon one can get a decent sit stand desk (not the thing that sets on a desk, that's not nearly as ergonomic), a under desk treadmill or stair stepper, several monitors and a stand. It would be better than his setup.
To me, this blog post is a microcosm of his broader work.
See, for example: A Rare Blend of Monster Raving Egomania and Utter Batshit Insanity (2002) http://bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/
I met Wolfram some 20 years before that review when he was on a world tour promoting the earliest iterations of Mathematica, the first iteration post his symbolic differentation work.
This was the period when cellular automata, Mandelbrot sets, and symbolic math were pretty hot topics about math departments - computer assisted proofs on monster groups in symbolic algebra were recent, Cayley (the first iteration of Magma) was being written at Sydney University, etc.
Even then he had many of the traits that Cosma Shalizi described in the linked review above and was already dismissing various people for their 'poor ideas' and later claiming those ideas as his own.
He's a smart guy. He swam in waters filled with smart people, some smarter. He was never, IMHO, as smart as his own legend, as authored by himself.
[1] Four, to be exact, and that number includes my own.
My favorite quotes:
when provided with some of the responses from other physicists regarding his work, Wolfram is singularly unenthused. “I’m disappointed by the naivete of the questions that you’re communicating,” he grumbles. “I deserve better.”
“There’s a tradition of scientists approaching senility to come up with grand, improbable theories,” the late physicist Freeman Dyson told Newsweek back in 2002. “Wolfram is unusual in that he’s doing this in his 40s.”