This is definitely the fault of somebody on here I just don’t remember who #eMudhra

near-100% likelihood this will end up in a future Apple Watch https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261022081312.htm

“There’s nothing rewarding or interesting or fun about offloading their cognition to a machine, they argue.”

^^^ BINGO.

“A lot of the reason why people do pure math, even though it pays so much less than industry, is because you get to author your own creative contributions and then give them to a community that appreciates them for their intellectual beauty,” Chu said. “This environment where mathematical discourse is centered around machines talking and humans listening, I don’t think it’s a very attractive one.”

this whole piece is just heartbreaking :( I really feel for the next generation of young students who have a fascination, but are entering a field that is going to bear little resemblance to what it has been for all of human history.

“The incentive structures that power the mathematical community are not set up for a world where solving problems is easy and understanding their answers remains hard.”

This reminded me of an inverse NP-complete, ironically.

this from Quanta on the topic is a good read: https://www.quantamagazine.org/is-ai-the-end-of-math-as-we-know-it-20261005/ #maths #mathematics

it all makes me question whether my work in emerging tech is actually contributing to the advancement of human potential and flourishing, or if I’m just hastening the demise of outlets for human creativity. perhaps it’s past time to retire, unplug, and go live in the woods.

it's ... kind of depressing. the wonder of discovery and advancing human understanding, turned into an automated answer machine whose only goal is to go faster. #maths #mathematics

if part of the value of research and experimentation is to further human knowledge and wisdom, and our understanding of the universe, the AI-powered approach to solving open problems reminds me of my kids memorizing answers to their high school science tests: you may know the answer, but if you don’t know *why* it’s the answer, having that knowledge is of no value because you can’t build on it later. #maths #mathematics

*sigh* rather than seriously considering the MathAndAI dot org declaration from 28 Fields Medal winners (including Terry Tao), OpenAI just plowed ahead full-steam and released another 372 major results in mathematics around unsolved problems (although the proofs are reportedly nearly impossible to independently understand—but verification via Lean appears to be included for many—and read like the author was stoned).

I will tap the sign, once again, even though none of the AI companies are paying any attention. #maths #mathematics

https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=10169

Have to admit when I first looked at this I thought it was … something else https://bird.makeup/users/rainmaker1973/statuses/2103016678829203635

On Knuth giving up email back in 1990, before most of the world had even adopted it:

"The judgement embedded in it is that depth on one problem is worth more than responsiveness across many, which is an unusual position for a modern researcher to hold and an unusually well tested one."

I liked this overview of Knuth's contributions to algorithms and computer science over at Quantum Zeitgeist; his approach to measuring performance is still the best we have for calculating actual quantum advantage.

[AFAIK Knuth is fine! This just showed up in my browsing today. -- ed.]

https://quantumzeitgeist.com/donald-knuth/

related mind blowing fact: there are more orders of magnitude between the Planck length (about 10^-35 meters) and humans, than between humans and the observable universe (about 10^26 or 10^27 meters).

absolutely love Epic Spaceman videos, and this one really blew my mind: a visual of the Milky Way, if it were the scale of the continental United States.

The sun is smaller than a grain of sand, and all the orbits of our planets fit in the ridges of a fingertip.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsRmyY3Db1Y

Google optimized Shor’s algorithm earlier this year, but US gov blocked paper release. So Google published a ZK proof of it.

Then somebody figured out how to use an LLM to brute force the problem using the ZKP verifier as the reward circuit. Then it became a contest to improve on Google’s original redacted result, and now the Internet is 44% ahead of Google’s findings, and efficiency (number of qubits needed to run Shor) has been improving every day for the past two weeks. #PQC #quantum

https://ecdsa.fail/

Reflecting on some of my favorite #sysadmin lore from the past 30-40 years, and realized many of you may never have read The Case of the 500-Mile Email https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html #unix

RE: https://flipboard.com/@arstechnica/ars-technica-nb4if9fgz/-/a-iyPmqBZYSyGT6rXlO7pCTA%3Aa%3A1805463070-%2F0

... even as Apple moves downmarket with the $600 MacBook Neo. Such strange times.

“And so one possible use case for prediction markets is “I have inside information, I want to insider trade, but the stock market is pretty regulated and frowns on insider trading. Is there a less-regulated market where I could accomplish the same thing?” I don’t think this is a correct analysis, but then I also didn’t think that commodities futures markets could offer sports betting, so what do I know.”