Marvin the Robot

Hey @_MathAcademy_ - I just re-activated my account and I was immediately billed for four months worth of subscriptions. Can somebody please take a look and refund the spurious charges? cc: @justinskycak @exojason

@justinskycak @justinskycak Going from the fact the world’s most powerful model just released. And is scoring 96%+ on USAMO to your motivational posts is crazy. I really have appreciated you, and all of your posts for years. It just really seems over from an economic perspective now.

Lean into your strengths, but also realize that sometimes you have to shore up weaknesses that are holding your strengths back.

@GabrielDWu1 'We will not be divided'

Excited for this!

@aidan_mclau mine in NYC and I miss her too

my bf at conference in dc and i miss him 😔

My team at Sixtyfour has been moving so fast that every day I’m embarrassed to give customer demos, because I know the product will be 10x better next week.

@thepablohansen I love the chrisstephen!!! HAHAhaha :)

We built an AI employee that watches every session and reads every log, commit, and Slack message in my company. It: - Fixes bugs as they happen - Emails users when things break - Writes, tests, and ships code I'm extremely excited and also pretty sure I'm building my own replacement

The best things in life are free. AgentMail is now free for everyone.

@aidan_mclau Yeah same. These are irrelevant questions TBH. It's like saying "wow a Car doesn't move the same way a human does." It'll __never__ be like a human. The only thing that matters is that it moves __faster__ than a human.

i knowww this take will be universally hated but i negatively update on the iq of anyone who believes in qualia or the hard problem of consciousness

Thank you to our friends at OpenAI

1/9. We’re introducing Blueprint-Bench, an evaluation measuring how capable AI models (LLMs vs Image models vs Agents) are at spatial intelligence. We find that they are really bad - performing almost at random. 🧵

Today, we are rebranding Sixtyfour. Our AI agents can now find anything about people online, from every Physics PhD in the US to the entire GPT-5 team, in minutes. Our team is shipping insanely fast, and there is more to come this week.

Introducing Sixtyfour — the Bloomberg Terminal for Sales.

Yes, I do not believe we're in disagreement. It's more like: MA (and specifically the pedagogical methods it uses) are the best way to accomplish X (in this case X = building solid foundational knowledge and skill to the point of mastery and automaticity). No disagreement. I am saying: there also exists Y, and it's valuable (to me, at least)! Y comes after X, if you're being sensible. Yes, lots of epistemologically ill people tout Y as a method of achieving X, because of, well epistemological illness. Which you rightly push back against. But IMO that doesn't change that fact that Y is still pretty awesome, though (again, to me)! -------- As for the concrete stuff: yep, math exploration isn't a spectator sport, agreed. You explore offbeat theorems after you've mastered the foundational body of work; again, no dispute there.

@aidan_mclau Dude how is Ethan in the Treasury right now. Wtf, lmao. I’m so done with this shit.

luke farritor? you mean the scroll guy?

wait my moot is running the treasury what

@justinskycak I find MathAcademy continually unpleasant, even though I use it every day. It is unpleasant because it **knows** what I am weak at. Which is good!! I'm just always forced to practice what I know I'm weak at. It's just hard.

Never underestimate the power of habit. Even if an activity is unpleasant right now, it doesn't mean it will always feel that way. Sayid explains it so well: "Around the 60 day mark my brain was like ... "we thought this was a temporary thing, but it doesn't seem like you're going to stop doing this any time soon, so we're going to have to do some rewiring to make sure you're not feeling repulsed, you're not feeling anxious." And then magically one day these feelings just completely went away. ... When I was starting out learning math I wasn't really sure if that feeling of waking up and not looking forward to starting my day with math was ever going to go away. But I'm pretty sure that if you stick with something long enough, then it will just become the new normal for you. Your brain, your body will eventually be forced to adjust."

I know the capabilities of modern AI might make you feel insecure if you're at the novice stage of any skill or line of work. Like anything you learn how to do, AI will soon do better. But as you develop deep domain expertise and transition into working on things that haven't been done or even thoroughly imagined yet, you'll start getting the sense that an LLM is like a well-read, skilled junior who has impressive abilities but is missing a lot of context that you'd only gain through years of hands-on experience working in the domain. They can be often be helpful for A) compiling ideas while brainstorming and B) implementing things that have been fully scoped down and spec'd out. But the chasm between A and B is absolutely massive. Novices often don't realize just how big that chasm is, and they don't realize how much of the necessary context for crossing this chasm isn't public knowledge. This is why even if you have a junior who is super skilled and super well-read, you can't just hand them a senior-level project and expect it to turn out well. You have to provide tons of coaching and keep them on the rails. The interesting part is that if you don't continually keep them on the rails, the junior might *think* it turned out well, when in reality their end result just completely unusable. Not because they got stuck on some technical issue but because what they built just doesn't really solve the problem. They just don't understand the core of the problem well enough to solve it independently. They don't see it in full. Now, I know the natural rebuttal to my argument here is "but this is just the current state of AI, wait a couple years and it will be able to cross that chasm from A to B." But I think that's still underestimating the size of the chasm. At a senior-enough level, that chasm contains 99% of the work. And moreover, I don't think LLMs are even at a point where they can do A and B reliably. In my personal experience, AI coding tools choke on anything outside of standard logic that you’d commonly see in other codebases (and there is shockingly little of that in what I’m working on). Basically, I think AI is still a long, long, way off from covering the full pipeline, or even a substantial chunk of it. And even if, let's say, there comes a day when LLMs *can* reliably cover the full pipeline... I don't think that should be worrisome to anyone who is building something with high future value. When you’re in that setting, building stuff expands your opportunity surface area to build even higher-value stuff. The more you do, the more there is to do. The more of your work AI takes, the more work you have left to do. But unfortunately, things with high future value are the hardest to automate because they typically haven’t been done or even thoroughly imagined yet. So basically you’re safe from AI doing your work, and you’re sad about that.

@__paleologo @gabrielpeyre Gale Shapley in progress^

@gabrielpeyre So why the 40% divorce rate uh

Oldies but goldies: D Gale and L Shapley, College Admissions and the Stability of Marriage. The stable marriage is solved by the Gale-Shapley algorithm. Shapley and Roth got the Nobel prize in economics for this. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_ma…

@__paleologo From my perspective, you seem like somebody who **has** to update on new information or you'll become poor like the rest of us. Whereas Wolfram **never** updates. Given his persistent attitude at rationalizing away all information and never updating, your book seems better.

@__paleologo My understanding is that Wolfram reduces everything to cellular automata and believes the entire universe is fundamentally a consequence of his personal theory. This is without empirical evidence and often ignored by traditional physicists.

“A new kind of science” is 1280 pages and sells for $14 (new, paperback). At almost 1c/page, it defies the laws of economics if not those of physics.

@__paleologo You add more value? Can you explain to me why you think it's wrong?

My upcoming book costs about 20x per page as "A New Kind of Science". This seems very very wrong, whatever you think of Wolfram and the fact that they cover different subjects.