matau

I think we are in the process of discovering that humans are bad at mathematics. A gibbon would scoff at an Olympic climber; the human body is not optimized for climbing. We're getting mounting evidence that our brain may be far from optimal for advanced math. No disrespect to mathematicians. I was a two-time IMO silver medalist; I'm just smart enough to appreciate that some people are much, much smarter. But it's starting to look like math is somewhere on the midpoint of Moravec’s paradox; between chess (computers surpassed us some time back) and cooking (probably many years to go, for general capabilities). It's fairly hard for us, and so it looks like computers are going to surpass us. AI math still has important weaknesses. For instance, AI systems have not yet shown any ability to identify interesting research directions, or develop new concepts on which further work can build. But they are starting to look superhuman in some respects. And once AI *starts* to become superhuman in some domain, we all know what happens next.

Hard Target. 1993 / John Woo

🪼

said this a million times but Apple are idiots for not doing a 25th anniversary iPod this year clickwheel, multiple colors, Apple Music, Bluetooth and AirPods support, a good DAC and storage up to 2 TB just to appease the audiophiles — boom, you have the product of Christmas 26

In March 2023, Claude had an estimated IQ of 64. Today, Claude Opus 4.6 scores 133 on the Mensa Norway test. GPT-5.2 Thinking hits 141. Gemini 3 Pro, 142. That's a jump from cognitively impaired to gifted in three years. No human population has ever improved that fast, the Flynn effect gives us ~3 IQ points per decade. AI just did 70 points in 36 months.

Douglas Adams predicting the future in his final interview just days before his death. We miss you.