pfdietz

Presentation given at NYU Courant Institute on Oct. 28, 2026.

"Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die." -- Mel Brooks

Mathematical ideas are not IP.

This reminds me of a 55 year old idea from software engineering, "egoless programming".

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

Like creating correct software?

WoW Midnight is really showing the strain.

What sort of nonsense is that? A computer being rationally designed doesn't imply society is or could be.

A cool thing about silicones is they complicate the processing of landfill gas. That gas is from bacterial decomposition of waste landfills, and is mostly methane + CO2. So burning it in small engines or turbines makes sense. But it also has silicon-bearing volatile compounds from decomposition of silicones, and if you burn those in an engine you fill it with particles of silica, which abrade surfaces and form glassy coatings on turbine blades.

An additional source of silicones in landfills is cosmetics, of which they form a substantial fraction.

That is the current incarnation of parchment paper, but before that it was impregnated with Quilon, which I understand is fatty acids stabilized with trivalent chromium.

You're assuming the people with the money care about credit.

A chromium solution?!

Notice I said how much management is willing to devote, not how much they have.

> It's a matter of how many fucks the devs gave about doing quality work.

It's more a matter of how much management cares about quality, and how much time and how many resources they're willing to devote to it.

And that's a function of how much the quality of the code actually matters in the market.

That analogy makes no sense to me. Wouldn't OpenAI have the incentive to release results that are incomprehensible, to showcase how beyond humans their models are?

> Are humans going to be able to recognize the things AI discovers?

They have been so far.

How do you reach the conclusion that society is something that admits rational design?

Plenty of these AI proofs have been accepted. On the most important result, on the Quasi-Riemann Hypothesis, there is no serious belief it's wrong. Mathematicians have already dissected and reformulated the claims.

The proof with the 11/12 constant, the simplest one, has already prompted what looks like chagrin from some. It's an unexpected combination of known results/techniques, a combination that apparently fell into a blind spot so it wasn't picked up before (even though it could have been, even 20 years ago).

I think these results are showing there was a lot of low hanging fruit that human mathematicians didn't have the breadth or mental bandwidth to find.

When We had a whole-house heat pump installed to replace an EoL gas furnace the installation also included an energy efficiency audit. There were some places (like blowing foam at the foundation/house joint to suppress air leaks, and insulating exposed ducts in the attic) that made a significant difference. And this was for a house built 14 years ago.

There never were nasty chemicals in silicon PV. It's not that you needed to update formerly correct information, it's that you've been lied to for decades.

My heat pump in upstate NY is doing great. Maybe you just had a bad one?

The telescope received minimal funding because stakeholders couldn't make a good case for more. The results the facility could produce weren't seen as justifying the expense. In that light, that it was operated at all was more than one might reasonably have expected. The alternative was to just shut it down earlier. They squeezed the last drops of output before the old thing was allowed to die.

Sometimes with facilities like this you have to make the call that it's over.

My guess is the safety factor here was lower than typical, causing the failure mode to occur.

I expect future bridges will design these joints even more conservatively because they were skating closer to the edge than they realized.

As I understand it, they had trouble coming up with food for the fruit flies that was low enough in bromine to cause the deficiency to occur.

Some of the QRH results, for example, weren't due to unpublished work. The AI pulled together a number of ideas that were known to people, but who didn't realize that connecting them would work. I detect more chagrin than outrage.

Previously the stock price was based on expectations, and if those expectations were not met the price could be expected to decline to reflect the actual performance.

> No, what is happening is that the AI is really good at connecting the dots and human mathematicians aren't.

I watched a Zoom presentation yesterday {10/28/2026) at Courant by Maksym Radziwill on the QRH result with the constant 11/12. It used four known ideas, but linked them together in a way that mathematicians had steered themselves away from. He gave a short sentence with four phrases that he said, if they had been sent to him by time machine, would have let him work out the proof years ago. All the details were straightforward once that high level plan was in place.

The advantage AI had here was, in his words, it lacks psychology. Humans had a prejudice that a certain approach would not be fruitful, but the AI didn't have that. The AI could explore superficially unproductive avenues at great depth, not having to do as much pruning to conserve mental effort. And as it turned out one of those approaches worked.

AI is going to fill in a lot of blind spots, I think.

I remember the Motorola Museum on the Schaumburg campus has an Iridium satellite hanging from the ceiling.

The entire museum was demolished a few years ago to make way for a Top Golf.

What's galling is how cheap iodine supplementation is, about $0.02-0.05 per person per year.

Maybe that's the problem. There's no Big Iodine making money to keep politicians paid off.