Maro

Exactly. Every mathematician is "robbed" from knowing 1-2 things that they would specifically work on, for any given topic, 99.99% of mathematicians are not robbed, and for any given mathematician, for 99.99% of topics they are not robbed of anything. That's my feeling..

Maybe post-LLMs mathematicians will work on problems/topics that even ChatGPT can't solve? Like, P=NP remains unsolved, we can work on that. Sure, it's possible that it will get solved tomorrow by an AI or somebody else, but that possibility was always there.. Or, to be more practical, one of the claimed OpenAI results is that integer multiplication is sub n×log(n), so assuming it stands, now there's a new question: "What is the actual lower bound for integer multiplication?"

I have no proof, but I believe (i) LLM progress will converge at some point, (ii) that point will not be so far off from human intelligence, since they're trained on human intelligence, so.. not all problems will be solved/solvable by LLMs. But they'll be fast(er), like calculators are faster than us.

I am also not a mathematician, but I think this is an assumption that people are making. It could be that by reading the solutions/proofs of these AI-generated results, those methods could still be discovered, ie. the AI could be discovering new novel methods implicitly. It's not exactly the same thing, but when the Navier Stokes blow-up "solution" came out, there was a lot of hoopla around it being stolen and not novel, but then once the dust settled, we had this:

> But closer examination reveals that OpenAI’s proof builds its unnatural force in a totally distinct way. The proof’s similarities to Buckmaster and Alpöge’s progress are superficial...

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/openais-blockbust...

So I think more time needs to pass before a call can be made.

An interesting thought experiment is this: if we were to go back in time 150 years and tell our ancestors that Newton is just an approximation and give them a 5,000 page book about Special and General Relativity, QM and QFT, would we be robbing them? Initially the whole thing would be incomprehensible, but eventually they would chew through it and make sense of it. I don't really know the answer (and perhaps the analogy is not great since we're quite attached to our physics heroes from the last 150 years).

> It seems that all AI can do, it can just "replace the average".

That has not been my experience.

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Monte Carlo Simulations in A/B Testing

https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.06701

I think it's disappointing [1] for a group of people (however smart they are, whatever titles and fame they have) to think they are the gatekeepers of mathematics, the core of human knowledge. In this respect "mathematics is what mathematicians do" is no longer true, perhaps it was never a useful thing to say. Mathematics is (downstream) consumed in some shape or form by every human on Earth, and no elite, appointed group gets to decide how new mathematics is created. I feel this is a reaction to the sting of the reality check for these people, who are gifted with amazing genetics, and can think faster and deeper than other humans, that their gifts are relative to humans, and machines can still outdo them.. but this is already true for so many other areas, from physical strength to playing chess. Also, I feel this reaction is just non-sensical, it reminds me of when commercial software company CEOs [2] said open source is communism in the early 2000s, because they felt open source is threating their business model.

Lastly, deep down I don't really get what mathematicians are so upset about. All open problems, once solved, are not solved by 99.9999% of mathematicians, because it's solved by one or a handful of others, and the others just learn of the solution/proof. Mathematicians can now still organize conferences about these proofs, discuss them, digest them, think of new avenues of research, etc. They don't even have to invite OpenAI, in 6 months whatever model is available on chatgpt.com will be this smart anyway, and they can use it in the workshops for explanations, etc.

[1] I was going to write "I'm a bit disappointed by the response of the math community..", but then I remembered, whatever T. Tao writes is not the position of the math community, it's his position. Then I was going to write "I'm a bit disappointed by the response of T. Tao..", but then I remembered, I don't know Tao personally, so why am I disappointed?

[2] Steve Ballmer of Microsoft, I believe

I don't have insider information, but: if one of the AI companies really wants their models to become really good at this and publicly available datasets are scarce, they can probably just buy anonymized X-ray/MRI scans paired with the human doctor's diagnosis, and train on them. I don't know what the legal story is around this, but AI companies have near infinite money, so I'm sure they can buy their way around regulations (eg. by buying them from a less regulated country).

Recently I was at the doctor for a very minor sports injury ("tennis leg"). The doctor — who was in his 50s — was explaining the degrees of the injury to me, and quoted ChatGPT as the source, along the lines of "ChatGPT usually says you have to rest for.." I thought it's quite funny, but after thinking about it, it's really no surprise that doctors also use AIs to look things up / clean up their diagnosis.

This is well known, old news.

I would not call him a crank, he's just an "independent physicist". He is a very successful and wealthy businessman thanks to Mathematica, with $100Ms of wealth presumably, and he choses to do physics in his own way, pursuing subjects that he finds interesting, in ways he finds interesting. And he writes about his work and himself in grandiose ways, usually comparing himself to Newton and Einstein.

Nothing major has come out of his research, other then one of his co-workers proving that one of the simple CAs is Turing complete.

Most academic physicists ignore him, but that's fine. Personally, I think we need more people like Wolfram who are doing totally independent research, with their own funds. Statistically, something unexpectedly good could come out of it!

His latest research subject is Ruliology:

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2026/01/what-is-ruliolog...

Maybe I'm an oddball, but I've always thought this: if a cool company wants to hire me but isn't sure, give me a 3-6 month fixed contract and LFG. There's zero doubt in my mind it would work out. And if not, so what, I'll be okay.

Today I'm 45 with family and have a fancy VP title, but I would have no problem to do this for an interesting role at a cool company.

" .. the smartest mathematicians for running these scenarios .. "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann

> Claude Shannon called him "the smartest person I've ever met", a common opinion.

> Von Neumann founded the field of game theory as a mathematical discipline.

> .. leading him to a large number of military consultancies and consequently his involvement in the Manhattan Project.

> In 1950, von Neumann became a consultant to the Weapons Systems Evaluation Group..

> In 1955, von Neumann became a commissioner of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), which at the time was the highest official position available to scientists in the government.

> In his final years before his death from cancer, von Neumann headed the United States government's top-secret ICBM committee..

I don't get this.

Models have become a commodity, hardware not so much; why would Nvidia care? It's the models who are competing primarily, not hardware manufacturers.

Also, models are software, so easy to switch out. AI hardware otoh has a approx. 3-5 year useful life, I don't see how this affects hardware already running, or getting built.

This would be interesting if each of them had a high-level picture of the NN, "to scale", perhaps color coding the components somehow. OnMouseScroll it would scroll through the models, and you could see the networks become deeper, wider, colors change, almost animated. That'd be cool.

I'm a big fan of Amazon (UAE), in the sense that I buy stuff from Amazon almost every week. Having said that, in the last year or so, I found myself returning items more and more often. I get books damaged in shipping, wrong color items, wrong size shoes, empty boxes without the actual item, all sorts of weird failure modes. Marketplace sellers are definitely a big factor. As a response, lately I find myself thinking defensively when ordering from Amazon, like "what can go wrong", and pondering whether I should go out and find this in a store, buy from the brand's online store, get it off Ebay, etc.

Some thoughts, feedbacks, well-meaning critcism:

- on non-supported browsers (eg. mobile) don't render the app, show a message instead

- Shift + Home/End for selecting text doesn't work

- Ctrl + N for a new page doesn't work

- things like the above ^, while it may be trivial, will turn off people who will not spend more than 10-20s to evaluate

- you're refer the simplicity of text files, but the editor is not fixed width, it's more like a Markdown-ish editor, closer to Google Docs with its default styles

- when typing - it creates a list, but the list's left margin (where the - starts) is not aligned on the overall left margin of the page, it's very annoying to me

- to me, this is too far away from the simplicity of a text file — this comment, I'm writing it up in Sublime in plain text, and then I'll copy it to Chrome/HN, but I wouldn't do it in your tool — I love being able to Alt-Tab to Sublime, hit Ctrl+N to get a new "file" which is a temporary/ephemeral workspace for typing text, typing and getting sasisfying fixed-width readable text, and then copy/pasting it to my destination, which almost always has a less pleasant editor

- eg. I also write my non-trivial ChatGPT conversations like that ^

- one of the few exceptions is Google Docs, I can directly work into that

- the reason I ended on Google Docs: after a few minutes of playing around, it's not clear to me how using your product would be significantly better for me than using Google Docs for notes (which I don't) — I can use GDocs to write roughly Markdown-equivalent structure, and there's plugins to import/export Markdown — and GDocs is backed by Google, has a working editor, apps, multi-user support, commenting, Google ecosystem integration, etc.

> where 3 years ago they would have had to buy Photoshop and learn how to use it

This seems to imply that a significant fraction of Adobe revenues is from private individuals who pay monthly fees just to occasionally do image edits with Photoshop and similar tools.

I don't think that's true.

If you don't want to listen to the whole 3 hours, here's a summary based on the video transcript:

https://chatgpt.com/share/698c1dc4-3794-8013-ba21-2f05c2b3bd...

I didn't listen to the whole thing because it's 3 hours. I would listen to it if it'd be ~30 minutes, even though I'm a bit of a Feynman fanboy, so I'm not exactly pleased by it — but, as a physicist, we have to keep an open mind :)

Based on the summary:

1. Fair points overall.

2. Of course it's embellished! I remember reading the part in Surely You're Joking when he's asked to examine some architectural blueprints, and he doesn't, and then at the meeting he randomly points to some ducts, and gets lucky because there is some major problem there. I remember when I read that 20 years ago, it felt a bit made up.

3. Of course a lot of Feynman books are not written by him! This is kindof obvious though, you go to the bookstore, there are tons of Feynman books, most were published after he died.

4. The point on Maxwell: when I learned EM, it was said that Maxwell got the credit, but a lot of that knowledge, equations were already in the air. If not Maxwell, somebody else would have written them down in a unified way. Same was said for Special Relativity.

5. The point about "Feynman bro", I don't get it. I'm a physicist (working outside the field), I'm a Feynman fanboy (or at least used to be), have a lot of Feynman/related books, and I'm definitely not a "Feynman bro". Also, I've never met anyone I would describe as a "Feynman bro". In general, I've never experienced any macho behaviour among physicists [in Eastern Europe], it's a very different crowd/vibe.

6. Lastly, I feel like this video is doing exactly what its complaining about: monetizing Feynman, using him to get views & attention.

Quake book incoming from Fabien?

Working at a non-tech regional bigco, where ofc cloud is the default, I see everyday how AWS costs get out of hand, it's a constant struggle just to keep costs flat. In our case, the reality is that NONE of our services require scalability, and the main upside of high uptime is nice primarily for my blood pressure.. we only really need uptime during business hours, nobody cares what happens at night when everybody is sleeping.

On the other hand, there's significant vendor lockin, complexity, etc. And I'm not really sure we actually end up with less people over time, headcount always expands over time, and there's always cool new projects like monitoring, observability, AI, etc.

My feeling is, if we rented 20-30 chunky machines and ran Linux on them, with k8s, we'd be 80% there. For specific things I'd still use AWS, like infinite S3 storage, or RDS instances for super-important data.

If I were to do a startup, I would almost certainly not base it off AWS (or other cloud), I'd do what I write above: run chunky servers on OVH (initially just 1-2), and use specific AWS services like S3 and RDS.

A bit unrelated to the above, but I'd also try to keep away from expensive SaaS like Jira, Slack, etc. I'd use the best self-hosted open source version, and be done with it. I'd try Gitea for git hosting, Mattermost for team chat, etc.

And actually, given the geo-political situation as an EU citizen, maybe I wouldn't even put my data on AWS at all and self-host that as well...

I strongly think this is the wrong attitude. After a point, money does not buy happiness, job satisfaction or sanity.

Promotions are always discussed in the context of "How to get promoted?". In my opinion, an important angle is left out of these discussion and conversations: do you really want to get promoted? is it worth it?

To make it simple binary, I think there are 2 kinds of promotions:

A. the kind where you pretty much continue doing what you were doing before, but with a nicer title and more money

B. the kind where the new role will put you into a whole new situation, which may or may not be a good fit for you

People always assume it'll be like 1., but there are certain career inflection points where this is not true. Approximating these in 3 minutes of typing:

1. Going from junior IC levels (where others work extra hard to support you, and are doing much of the work with you, for you) to mid IC levels.

2. Going from IC to becoming a manager.

3. Going to executive level.

4. Going to board-level executive level.

Note: I'm putting aside the handful of tech companies where people can stay on the technical track and still get ahead; at most companies you end up going into management, if for no other reason to avoid an incompetent outside hire to end up as your boss..

In the above list, 1. is of course desirable and unavoidable, but the rest should be thought over hard, for many months, and should be considered a major life decision.

Eg. recently I'v been promoted from Sr. Director (a non-executive management role) to VP (an executive manager role) — I didn't ask for it, it was a result of a re-org — and it's been super tough. Completely new rules, new crowd, new worries, but with all the worries of my old job..

As a people manager I constantly have staff ICs telling me they want to get promoted to become a Director, and I always tell them — from the bottom of my heart — enjoy the "simple life" of IC-ship while you can, once you go over to management [at any bigco], things will be much less fun. Because, if coding and building things is fun for you, then managing PIPs, procurements, vendor engagements, and corporate politics in general will not be fun.

> This repo contains a version of Anthropic's original performance take-home, before Claude Opus 4.5 started doing better than humans given only 2 hours.

Was the screening format here that this problem was sent out, and candidates had to reply with a solution within 2 hours?

Or, are they just saying that the latest frontier coding models do better in 2 hours than human candidates have done in the past in multiple days?

Great point, thanks for making it. Following onward, NumPy has a non-profit called Numfocus who is behind it:

https://numfocus.org/

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/454...

Apparently they have an annual budget of ~$10M. From the contributors, it's easy to recognize the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (so Meta), Google, MSFT. This is great.

Having said that, I'd still say that $1-2M for a CSS library seems more than enough. Not everything needs to be "scaled"..

> the most popular UI system (especially for AI models)

Like others earlier in the thread I'm symphatetic to this company/project, but your code/project being referenced often in AI output in itself doesn't imply that the thing needs to be a business.

bash, curl, awk, Python code with numpy imports, C++, all sorts of code is constantly being generated by AI, doesn't mean curl or numpy should be its own company, or that the AI Labs need to fund them.

As other fave written, making $1M+ already feels like a lot, maybe this shouldn't be a company, just 1-2 people who have a great time supporting this thing. I wonder if curl or awk have that kind of funding even..

#zeraw on DALnet in the 90s, those were the days..

This blog post is not inevitable.

Manufacturing vulnerability submissions that look like real vulnerability submissions, but the vulnerability isn't there and the submitter doesn't understand what it's saying.

It's a cargo cult. Maybe the airplanes will land and bring the goodies!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult

Ferenc Krausz has almost the same degrees as me: ELTE Physics, BME EEng/Comp.Sci.

Katalin Karikó went to the same University as my sister (Szeged).

But yes, we have to leave the country if we want good opportunities.. unless we go into politics! Fidesz is easily the most successful startup in Hungary after 1989, possibly in Europe; Fidesz' CEO is one of the richest men in Europe.. unfortunately at our expense.

We're on fire!

2025 - László Krasznahorkai - Literature - for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art.

2023 - Katalin Karikó - Physiology or Medicine - for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19.

2023 - Ferenc Krausz - Physics - for experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter.

To be fair, there are only 2 others since 2000.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Hungarian_Nobel_laurea...

This is false: "There are no hungarian intellectuals over 40 who aren’t openly racist."

Yes, there is a fair amount of under-the-grass (sometimes over) anti-semitism in Hungary (and many other European countries), as well as racism towards people with darker skin, but certainly not every hungarian intellectual over 40.