Awaiting the referee reports. In the formal sense, a man of letters. Now in a million pieces, picked up for deliberation by the people reading at home.
Academia
Joined November 2016
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"P = NP but the best known constants are astronomical and nobody has any clue whether they can be brought down into the human realm" would be a funny outcome.
Papers posted after July 8, 2026, have little signalling value. I still don't know what academia intends to do about this -- maybe because nothing can be done.
Moderately Successful Geometer retweeted
Thank god we can find and intercept lost hikers as they mistakenly run away from rescue in dense forest!
Purdue University's IDEAS Lab built an autonomous drone that tracks runners through dense forests completely without GPS or cloud networks.
By running 3D LiDAR mapping and obstacle-avoidance AI entirely on-chip, it can weave under tree canopies and predict target movement through blind spots in real time.
Massive implications for next-gen search & rescue and edge AI.
I'm not a physicist by any stretch, but if I didn't hate gambling I'd be willing to bet a very large sum of money that it's AI psychosis.
You know what would be funny? If they spent a trillion dollars to displace mathematicians and software engineers and nobody else.
This isn't a prediction. I'm just saying it'd be funny.
the negative case against AI gets stronger every day; even Altman admits the problems are very serious with no obvious solution.
the positive case, meanwhile, looks weaker every day. a quote from Apollo’s Torsten Slok:
“Despite massive investments and widespread hype around artificial intelligence, the technology has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America outside of tech. Revenue per worker is… flat for the S&P 493…. Profit margins are… flat for the S&P 493…. No signs of AI boosting [measured] productivity growth…. Mainstream corporate America is pulling back and starting to view token spending… as a cost center…. Mainstream corporate America does not need the latest model and is unwilling to pay for it. As long as agentic AI and token spending are confined to a small part of the economy, the macroeconomic effects of AI will be very limited.”
apollo.com/wealth/insights-n…
Moderately Successful Geometer retweeted
In Récoltes et Semailles, Grothendieck also talks a lot about how the willingness to be alone is necessary for high quality math.
Moderately Successful Geometer retweeted
I texted my children that we got the puppy they’ve been begging me for and sent them a link with pictures. 🐶When they clicked on the link, it took them to a webpage that said YOU’RE GROUNDED. They’ll be spending the weekend retaking our family’s cybersecurity training course.
The thing is, walking around outside is great. I highly recommend it. I can't fault him there.
I drove across the country by myself one spring break during graduate school (two weeks, really). I got pulled over and questioned three times by police who clearly thought I was running drugs.
My freshman year of college I met these three people at a party who were going to drive to California over fall break but thought they weren’t going to be able to afford it because their fourth person had justdropped out, so I offered to go and they said yes.
My mom‘s boyfriend gave me $200 and I left with them like two days after we’d met.
We drove from St. Louis to north of San Francisco and then back through the Southwest and Texas in seven days.
The $200 covered my share of gas and whatever I ate. I don’t even remember ever thinking about food. There must’ve been many long stretches in which I didn’t eat.
They knew people in Nebraska and Boulder, where we stayed the night for free. And then we camped on “the beach” in California and in a state park in Texas. Those are the only places we slept. That means taking turns driving straight through from Denver to San Francisco and from San Francisco to Texas.
I brought a backpack with some clothes and a copy of On the Road.
I called a buddy of mine back home from a payphone in Death Valley. I don’t even really know why and I remember feeling kind of embarrassed to have done it.
I otherwise had no contact with anybody. No cell phone, etc.
This all seems completely crazy to me now. How could you do this on $200? How could you do that without stopping more often?
But we did!
This could be a problem. Thankfully, admissions officers at elite schools are widely known for their integrity and commitment to the public good.
Kalshi told federal regulators it's putting up betting markets on the admissions rate at top colleges, including @Princeton, @Stanford, @Penn, @DukeU, @UCLA, @WashU and others. This creates new insider trading risks at all these schools. (h/t @DustinGouker)