- 7 Posts
- 571 Comments
0·1 day agoWriting fiction and expository material to build emotional stability while looking for the next thing to do.
Not the most encouraging answer, I know, but so it goes.
I’ve been squeezed out of physics academia after years of ordinary career pressure and obstacles that aren’t very interesting or pertinent to this thread. The fact that the insitutions and the community have no resistance to slop, that’s why I’m not even trying to go back.
After the paper was written, the author learned that the same result was also proved independently and by a different method by Ningyi Li [7]. The result is also contained in a paper [8] released by OpenAI on October 6, 2026, in which the proof strategy and specific choices of notation are identical to a preliminary version of the present paper that was uploaded to ChatGPT on September 8, 2026.
Happy cake day!
There’s apparently an “Association for Human Mathematics” that has released the following statement:
Yesterday, on October 6th, 2026, OpenAI – which is currently defending lawsuits against accusations of illegal plagiarism, copyright infringement, and trademark dilution – released a repository of manuscripts purporting to contain solutions to a number of high-profile problems in mathematics.
Mathematicians did not ask for this work to be done. The Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, from whom OpenAI has claimed to derive its legitimacy, opened their initial advisory statement by saying that frontier AI corporations should not test advanced mathematical problems on internal models. In ignoring the central premise of the Advisory Group’s position, OpenAI has indicated total disregard for the norms of scientific research — norms that guarantee that mathematics remains trustworthy, ethically researched, and in the public interest.
Mathematicians have a particular vision of progress that is informed by history and field-specific considerations. We reject OpenAI’s assertion that this release advances our subject, and we urge mathematicians and the public to view the value of this publication model with due skepticism.
Releasing over 700 files at once is not a demonstration of scholarship, but a demonstration of power. We urge mathematicians to discontinue their work with OpenAI and to return to a vision of science that centers human understanding.
Straw for thee, steel for me.
I vividly remember encountering Eliezer Yudkowsky and his Sequences 20 years ago. I remember thinking: even if these people talk and act like crazy cultists, still, let me bend over backwards to be epistemically virtuous, and entertain their ideas on their merits, as very few academics would.
Scott Aaronson is an experiment to discover how many timeshares one man can afford on a professor’s salary. He has never in his life not bought the extended warranty.
Alessandro Strumia in the comments. Only the best hang out in the online home of Computers Scott.
Joe Rogan should ask Scott Aaronson about Zionism. It will be glorious (adjective over-enunciated with wild Gowron eyes).
I unironically wish there were a faithful prose adaptation of Fullmetal Alchemist I could point people to.
I guess the community has to do all the dirty work of figuring out any sort of understanding.
Hooray for the Denial of Service attack from the industry that wants to put a meter on thinking itself.
Unhappy thought: For whatever future we’ve got, the history of mathematics will be scarred by fashtech cocaine. The people with all the money have every incentive to make mathematics intractable as a profession. No time or resources to do anything but clean up after their DDOS attacks. No way to check the correctness of AI-generated proofs except by using more AI to formalize them.
You wanna shut the fuck up and fuck the fuck off?
Why does the kitchen in the “zen of instant coffee” strip have two stoves?
Also: needing Claude to make a pie chart. No, that is someone with a cognitive surrender fetish. I refuse to engage.
Boiling the oceans for a goddamn Nostalgia Critic-level “What if Batman met Mario?!” exploration of media.
The first of the aforelinked blog posts begins:
When I finished HPMOR, I immediately knew it was the best novel I had read in more than a decade.
Goddamn it, people
It continues
the HPMOR comic
No no no no
Oh, go away.
A lesswrong has a cri de coeur:
Are we a community who, when someone is thrown out of Lighthaven our response is to be like ‘maybe he should be given a free ticket to manifest’ and if I accuse someone of a felony, our response is ‘hmmm that’s probably free speech and cancellation’?
Tao is on fedi; a polite (because this is professional business) reply on Masto pointing out relevant earlier research would probably benefit the community discussions.