You can look at Terence Tao’s blog instead if you’d like. Just from the last week or so, there are the following headlines:
What I’ve seen appears to indicate some genuinely new approaches by the AI, rather than putting together existing information. That blog post, for example, quotes some running commentary from a mathematician studying the proof of the theorem that she had been working on for years:
It feels like something written by someone who’s on psychedelics. So much unclear and doesn’t make sense. Lots of name dropping of previous work without discussing why it can be used despite impossibility results
Basically the paper is so horribly written that it’s impossible to read it without AI help
I asked Astra for reasonable completeness and soundness claims of the noise gadget and it gave them by combining claims from all over the paper
They also have direct optimal NP hardness of approximation proofs for the main applications of the UGC (Max Cut and all CSP) that bypass the UGC.
The UGC proof invents a completely new bizarre code with a noise test. It’s some crazy recursive construction.
It’s not the long code, not the short code – some alien craziness
I still think that there maybe is a proof that uses the half space code (which is natural)
The citations are often irrelevant and confusing
A possible future is a math world that’s heavenly if you have vision/creative ideas that AI could help check and implement.
And of course there’s a lot for us to learn from the aliens
Note that this particular proof is correct, according to that same mathematician.
The blog post was written less than a day after the proofs were released, and apparently they’re very hard for humans to follow. Now that a month has passed, there are human mathematicians’ explanations of how the proofs work up on the internet.
Well, I have my personal experience, but there are also all those math problems that AI has been solving recently… Here’s one mathematician’s discussion, with links to blog posts by other mathematicians who had spent years unsuccessfully working on some of those problems. He says:
Also, if you were wondering: apparently they tried the model on about 4,000 problems. So, right now it “merely” solves ~10% of the longstanding open mathematical problems that it’s asked about, the problems that whole communities have spent years on, after a single 3-hour attempt on them.
The AI can extrapolate, but even if it couldn’t, ultimately I need an idea that works, not necessarily a completely original idea that works (and most humans don’t come up with completely original ideas very often either).
I’m a senior developer. I haven’t written any code by hand so far this year, and the highly technical stuff I have on the resume is already done both faster and better by AI than I would be able to do it. However, I find that there’s still a lot of work for me to do because the AI has trouble maintaining coherence and working towards long-term goals in the absence of straightforward metrics. I end up herding a bunch of highly competent but easily distracted AI agents. It’s like being a manager, I think, although I’ve never managed humans myself. You still have to keep track of the overall goal and how the different agents are working (or failing to work) towards it in a way that requires human judgement and experience. I wouldn’t suggest becoming a junior dev in 2026 (because I would rather work with an AI than a junior dev) but senior devs aren’t obsolete yet although the nature of the role is changing rapidly and I don’t know what the future will bring.
don’t bring idea
In my experience the AI agents do if you ask them. Rather than giving them a problem and telling them to solve it autonomously, I ask them to give me feedback on my plan and propose potential alternatives before starting any coding, and often I get good suggestions from them this way.
I think this is Baccharis halimifolia.
Yet another reason why California’s ballot initiative system is a bad idea.
They say the bond spending would pay for itself, since Prop. 38 ensures that 10% of the revenue generated from research would go back to the state’s coffers. And cures funded with Prop. 38 money must be cheaper when sold to California residents — 20% less than the average national price.
Source. If that was actually a good investment then the private sector would have provided the funds…
In the words of a blogger I like,
The great thing about California is that it’s not just a state where a few big special interests can money-pump the public. Anyone, no matter how small or humble, if they try hard and believe in themselves, can become a special interest that money-pumps the public.
It’s called a beak.
I like the dog, but I feel sort of how I felt about my sister’s dog when I took care of him for a couple of months while my sister traveled. I enjoyed having him around and we had fun together, but the thought of giving him back to my sister didn’t upset me and I wasn’t sad after I did. If somehow it turns out that my new dog ran away from a loving family and they found out that I had her, I don’t think it would be difficult for me to give her back to them.
My little guy was generally a happy, friendly dog who didn’t appear to have any trauma (beyond whatever issues ending up in an animal shelter itself causes) although I was told that he had been adopted before and then returned to the shelter because he was rather high-maintenance. By “high-maintenance” I mean that he expected to share my food, sleep in my bed, sit on my lap (he wasn’t a small dog), and spend most of the day next to me, not that he had to be nursed back to health. But still whenever he saw something unfamiliar or scary, he would look at me and if I was calm he would be calm too. I could even go watch fireworks with him. It was always clear to me that I was special to him, even from funny stuff like how when we visited my grandparents, he would go sleep next to my grandfather because my grandfather went to bed early, but then when he would hear me going to bed he would abandon my grandfather and run to me.
Yeah, to be honest I’m not sure I should have gotten a new dog. I’m certainly not going to give her back to the shelter and it has only been a couple of months so maybe things will change over time, but we don’t have a bond the way I had with my old dog from day one. Some of that is because she has a different personality, and some might be because I’m just not as open to bonding.
My old dog freaked out when I just walked past his cage at the shelter; I hadn’t even been planning to get a dog, but it was clear that he had picked out me in particular. Then he always had separation anxiety from me for the rest of his life. My new dog is nice and I guess it’s good that she doesn’t have anxiety like he did, but I feel that if I just gave her to another person who also took care of her well, she wouldn’t be particularly upset.
Imagine if I had a collectible Lex Luthor action figure which you really wanted - you would be willing to pay me $100 for it. Then you stopped thinking that superhero stuff was cool and didn’t want the action figure anymore for more than $10. What has changed about the world is that I no longer have the option to get the $90 difference from you by selling the action figure, but only because you would keep the $90. No money went anywhere. However, market value was reduced. If my action figure and your money were all that existed in the world, then the world would no longer be a place with $200 of value. It would now only have $110 of value, and in that sense it would be a worse place to the extent that market value corresponds to happiness or abstract utility.
Wealth is not a conserved quantity. You can reduce my wealth just by wanting what I have less, even if afterwards we both have exactly what we had before.
https://www.bart.gov/about/financials/crisis
There are fewer than half as many total riders as there were before the pandemic.
Add public transit? BART is going broke because no one wants to ride the public transit they already have. They’ll be shutting down stations unless their new sales tax passes.
I lived in NYC for over a decade and I never heard anyone say “stand on line”.
Rather than assigning each finger the same value of 1, assign them values of 1, 2, 4, 8, and 16. Then there’s some combination of fingers that can represent any value from 0 to 1+2+4+8+16=31. It’s like using digits to count instead of tally marks.
Both can be true at once - it is coming up with original ideas but explaining them poorly. I’m not a mathematician but I find that in my field (software development) the AI is much better at writing code than it is at writing documentation - it will write documentation if you ask it to, but the documentation will be unfocused and difficult to read, with explanations of things that don’t matter and garden path sentences. I got this sentence from it recently:
That is actually not gibberish - it’s technically correct, but it certainly isn’t clear.