Fuzzy Dunlop

@GaryMarcus Comments from a number of mathematicians here on the significance of this: cdn.openai.com/pdf/74c24085-1…

nor do we know how the (new) model works nor how it does on anything else nor how it was trained. scientists wait for facts; cheerleaders (over and over) rush to judgments that have often been wrong. let’s see what we actually have here.

A very Happy 92nd birthday Roy! @RoyPKerr

@Grady_Booch The Church-Turing thesis doesn't say this. It's about effectively calculable functions. You are making a stronger claim about physical realisation of non-computable functions (eg Turing's o-machine) being impossible, which is not known to be true.

The brain is a dynamic complex physical system. Every effectively realizable physical system is computable (the Church-Turing thesis). Ergo, the brain is computable. QED

@JoelMacManus “Meanwhile” is an interesting choice of word. Since that clip was published in 1945 it must have been written by an unusually precocious boomer.

Boomer journos love lecturing young reporters about how they used to write 3-5 stories every day. Meanwhile 20th century New Zealand newspapers were full of stories like this:

@heygurisingh "Just showed" as in "showed nearly a year ago"? youtu.be/ysPbXH0LpIE

Anthropic just showed a 24-minute workshop on how to actually prompt Claude. Taught by the people who built it. Free. No signup. No paywall. I've watched $300 courses that don't cover what they teach in the first 8 minutes.

@GaryMarcus Hardly the latest. Tao has been evaluating and talking about AI for some time, and that snippet is from 2024: youtu.be/_sTDSO74D8Q?si… A more recent paper is here: arxiv.org/abs/2603.26524

@nic_rawlence_nz Disabling JavaScript on that page works for me. Or the wayback machine has a copy. web.archive.org/web/2026042010…

Does anyone have a copy of the MIT Review's article on Colossal Biosciences and their cloning of red/ghost wolves they could email me? technologyreview.com/2026/04/20/113…

@MeMargaretKerr That’s a lovely photo. And many congratulations. Now I can’t stop wondering what that metallic stuff it’s made of is.

Congratulations Roy. Unfortunately he was unable to receive the Dirac Medal in person. It arrived safely in New Zealand last week from Trieste.

@3YearLetterman Can confirm. Also applies to cyclists.

I have never met a mentally stable person who is a recreational runner

@fesshole I still have mine. OTOH, on a couple of occasions it has got bond price calculations wrong by the odd cent, thanks to the vagaries of HP's floating point implementation.

I've decided I want to be buried with my HP 12C financial calculator. I've had it since 1982, which is longer than I've had my family. It has never failed me, annoyed me, or put demands on me. It is my friend, and I don't want it going to the trash once I'm gone.

@JamesSurowiecki "I actually sympathize with what Bessent is trying to say here". What the fuck is wrong with you people?

I actually sympathize with what Bessent is trying to say here, namely that people say the economy is horrible but keep spending as if things are fine. It's just funny to see Trump's people saying the exact same stuff Biden's people said in 2024, given how badly that turned out.

Whacko. "facts and anaysis straight from academic experts". Experts in what, and what is the nature of their expertise?

@JamesSurowiecki It's not remotely good from Trump. What the fuck is wrong with you people?

This is good from Trump, mocking his own PR people for being cheesy. It's always interesting when you get these little moments of self-awareness from him.

@JamesSurowiecki Oh FFS. "Little moments of self-awareness from him."? He doesn't do self-awareness. What's wrong with you people?

Here you go. "In mathematical language, a knot is an embedding of a circle in 3-dimensional Euclidean space, E3". en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knot_theo…

Hey @tmurphyNZ, re your story on Eden Park I've been struggling to understand "To untie a multi-dimensional knot". Did you just mean "To untie a knot" or are you a devotee of knot theory?

@truereckons1 The reality is that those fuckers at the Eden Park Trust Board have been gouging money out of the public purse, especially for the RWC, at the expense of those of us who don't give two short smegs about rugby and cricket.

The reality is that exiting Cricket and Rugby representatives from the Trust allows Eden Park and its surrounds to be asset stripped and exploited by Council and central government. nzherald.co.nz/sport/cricket/…

@BristOliver As they said before AI: "The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, and the Holy Spirit incomprehensible."

@unclebobmartin The separation of powers is where the US president is found guilty of rape but still gets to bomb foreign civilians?

With AIs “distance” is important. One AI that writes tests, and another that makes them pass, sets the two at odds with each other and prevents either from cheating. This is very much like the separation of powers in a democratic constitution. Another form of distance is semantic. I have the AI create a parser that parses gherkin into an intermediate representation file. Then I have it write a generator that reads the IR file and produces executable test code. That semantic distance interposed so many intermediate goals that the AI cannot reach through them in order to cheat. Or, to say that differently, the intermediate goals become higher priority than the overall goal of making the test pass, making reinforcing the test higher priority than cheating to get green.