Alex Biryukov

Agency > Intelligence I had this intuitively wrong for decades, I think due to a pervasive cultural veneration of intelligence, various entertainment/media, obsession with IQ etc. Agency is significantly more powerful and significantly more scarce. Are you hiring for agency? Are we educating for agency? Are you acting as if you had 10X agency? Grok explanation is ~close: “Agency, as a personality trait, refers to an individual's capacity to take initiative, make decisions, and exert control over their actions and environment. It’s about being proactive rather than reactive—someone with high agency doesn’t just let life happen to them; they shape it. Think of it as a blend of self-efficacy, determination, and a sense of ownership over one’s path. People with strong agency tend to set goals and pursue them with confidence, even in the face of obstacles. They’re the type to say, “I’ll figure it out,” and then actually do it. On the flip side, someone low in agency might feel more like a passenger in their own life, waiting for external forces—like luck, other people, or circumstances—to dictate what happens next. It’s not quite the same as assertiveness or ambition, though it can overlap. Agency is quieter, more internal—it’s the belief that you *can* act, paired with the will to follow through. Psychologists often tie it to concepts like locus of control: high-agency folks lean toward an internal locus, feeling they steer their fate, while low-agency folks might lean external, seeing life as something that happens *to* them.”

Here's my conversation with Terence Tao, one of the greatest mathematicians in history. We talk about the hardest problems in mathematics & physics, and how AI might help us humans to solve them. This conversation was a huge honor for me. I can't quite put it into words, but once again I'm grateful for whatever simulation code resulted in me having the life I do 🙏 To further confirm simulation, podcast length accidentally turned out to be 3:14 (pi=3.141592). But it's not 3:14:15, because the simulation code has some bugs 🤣 Podcast is here on X in full, and is up everywhere else (see comment). Timestamps: 0:00 - Introduction 0:49 - First hard problem 6:16 - Navier–Stokes singularity 26:26 - Game of life 33:01 - Infinity 38:07 - Math vs Physics 44:26 - Nature of reality 1:07:09 - Theory of everything 1:13:10 - General relativity 1:16:37 - Solving difficult problems 1:20:01 - AI-assisted theorem proving 1:32:51 - Lean programming language 1:42:51 - DeepMind's AlphaProof 1:47:45 - Human mathematicians vs AI 1:57:37 - AI winning the Fields Medal 2:04:47 - Grigori Perelman 2:17:30 - Twin Prime Conjecture 2:34:04 - Collatz conjecture 2:40:50 - P = NP 2:43:43 - Fields Medal 2:51:18 - Andrew Wiles and Fermat's Last Theorem 2:55:16 - Productivity 2:57:55 - Advice for young people 3:06:17 - The greatest mathematician of all time

ChaCha8 will never be broken in a meaningful way (= a way that reduces the security of any real system) [ but academics might say it's broken if there's an attack in 2^200 "operations" and 2^150 "memory" requiring chosen nonces ]