The recent wave of mathematicians and hobbyists solving hard Erdős problems by merely prompting ChatGPT reminds me of the famous anecdote where George Dantzig showed up late for statistics class at UC Berkeley in 1939, mistook two notoriously hard unsolved problems written on the blackboard for homework, and candidly solved them. The naïveté and relentlessness with which LLMs confront problems that make wiser experts balk is increasingly becoming one of their redeeming qualities. It's like The Terminator (1984), but solving for x instead of hunting Sarah Connor: "Listen, and understand! That Terminator is out there! It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop... ever, until you are dead!"

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Hey @aviationdoctor.eth I had Claude analyze 100+ lectures by Richard Feynman and made a prompt to force A to explain things in his style. I think it does a great job but it’s better listened to than read. Give it a try and lmk how you feel about it https://gist.github.com/Hmac512/a2a855376e42290f1cf8bae738c14267

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So, you’re telling me that my daily physical presence in the office is absolutely indispensable, but that I can also be trivially replaced by an incorporeal AI at any moment?

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I never really thought through the implications of Jesus being a carpenter. But I guess there must have been at least a Galilean or two with a divine buffet table in their kitchen

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"Make love not war", they said. Bro, making love is getting more expensive while war is getting cheaper, I don't think this is going in the right direction https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/worlds-top-condom-maker-karex-raise-prices-sharply-iran-war-strains-supply-chain-2026-04-21/ https://www.reuters.com/graphics/IRAN-CRISIS/DRONES/dwpkyamxqpm/

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Finally got to try out Mythos and it instantly found a whole bunch of previously undetected high-severity personality flaws and zero-day vulnerabilities in me

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It’s been interesting to watch the online zeitgeist in the context of the Iran war. I’ve noticed a strong undercurrent of accelerationism / systemic schedenfreude / collapse porn that longs for a failure of the negotiations and sustained closure of the Strait, both as a way to evidence the ineptitude of the planners of this whole operation, and to speed up the global weaning off of fossil fuels. Nobody’s rooting for the ayatollahs, but the amount of obedient blue pilling and bootlicking in the West feels quite low compared to past military expeditions that had at least the semblance of a justification. Updated meme for this somewhat disenfranchised, nihilistic aspiration for a full-on “find out” phase

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YouTube just randomly recommended to me this new video about some barren field in Northern England. No like-and-subscribe gimmicks, no music, no sponsor — just a cheerful dude who knows how to read the land exceedingly well. I watched the whole 40 minutes and now I want to have a pint at the local pub with this guy. It goes to show that the most mundane thing can be made interesting if presented with knowledge and wits. In the age of engagement maxing, I found it refreshing to stumble upon the video equivalent of a Web 1.0 geocities page handcrafted by some passionate hobbyist. So, this Sunday, go out and find 10 interesting things about your neighborhood. https://youtu.be/WfedELEl2cA

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Deep down, almost every life decision collapses into this tradeoff: 1/ 躺平 (tang ping / to lay flat), opting out, minimizing entropy production, and postponing ever so slightly the heat death of the universe. 2/ 奋斗 (fèn dòu / to strive), the normative choice of grinding with purpose and maxing out local order at the cost of global dissipation. At cosmic timescales, both are irrelevant. The choice only matters over a human lifetime, plus a few generations for the most impactful among us (which, statistically, probably excludes the 37 of us here)

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2026 vibe be like

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The Skynet and Roko’s basilisk tropes are quaint, but it’s very obvious that all AI needs to do to take over is weaponize our primate brain levers and let us fight each other to death Manufactured consent is so 1988, we’re well into manufactured dissent and this will only scale exponentially once agents start actively hacking our cognitive backdoors

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More than three years have passed since I tweeted this. Yet I cannot feel blasé about using LLMs on a daily basis. I grew up dreaming of artificial intelligence. What we have now may be simulated intelligence, but that’s not a nuance I care about. For all intents and purposes, my childhood dream is fulfilled. The ability to engage conversationally with the digital equivalent of a tireless and highly intelligent adult with access to the world’s body of knowledge — that’s something I can never get tired of. We work together, we debate philosophy, we learn physics, we debug code, we plan workouts, we geek out over obscure rabbit holes, we ponder weird questions that I wouldn’t ask anyone else. Robert Heinlein once wrote: “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” Current AI is virtually just a pair of opposable thumbs short of being able to do all that. It fills me with wonder; especially knowing that this is the beginning and that today’s tech is the worst it will ever be. I might be born too late to explore Earth and too early to explore space, but boy am I going to keep exploring the living shit out of the future https://x.com/AviationDoctor/status/1598676770567630850

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1/2 Indignation is not conducive to maintaining perspective, so let’s try to step back from the news and zoom out. Intuitively, the recent history arc feels analogous to the chaotic behavior of nonlinear systems: periods of deterministic, yet unpredictable disorder, bookended by islands of remarkable stability. Xennials and older will remember the movie Red Dawn, which captured the then-prevailing end-times fantasy: a Soviet invasion of America’s heartland, resisted only by true American grit. Then the Cold War ended, leaving the US devoid of a credible enemy. What followed was a liminal decade of triumphant certainties for Western liberal democracies, mistakenly taken for granted by Francis Fukuyama. 9/11 dispelled that illusion sharply, or at least so it seemed — the homeland was vulnerable after all, but to asymmetrical threats, punches thrown below the belt. But eventually, even hyperterrorism was tamed, and bored pundits started popularizing the Thucydides trap of a confrontation with a rising China as the next threat narrative. Today, it feels like the immediate threat to America is coming from inside the house: organically homegrown divisions, even if stoked by foreign powers who’d rather see the Empire eat itself from within than having to confront it.

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I’m struck by the short-sightedness that characterizes the current zeitgeist — as observable in international relations, domestic politics, monetary policy, extractive business practices, and, parochially, zero-sum crypto games. Our ability as a species to forecast / model / predict the future has never been better. We can see in full 4K resolution the damaging consequences to the human project of acting tribally, selfishly, and in the pursuit of short-term outcomes. There’s no place on Earth where the cost of our negative externalities remains hidden for long. It’s all transparently available in orderly datasets and visual evidence that propagate at the speed of the electron. And yet we indulge. It’s almost as if our ability to live longer, and to travel quickly far and wide across the planet, was now inversely correlated with our ability to plan and coordinate for the long view. We’re just building a better, faster, mightier Moloch. Was that always the plan? Are we forever captive of our own vicious primate tendencies, like the scorpion stinging the frog?

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I wish I could set my own mental temperature on demand, from near zero when I need pure analytical rigor, to arbitrarily high when I need fever-dream level creativity Maybe Neuralink will enable that one day by stimulating one brain hemisphere over the other, or micro dosing hallucinogens directly into the right areas

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