I've recently been talking a bit about how difficult it is to carefully check even well-written mathematics. I want to try to explain something about this by telling the story of some errors in the literature that (in part) led to the two papers below. 1/n

My wife always had this clever thing when our kids were young and fights would happen. Sometimes a kid would run crying to us saying "He hit me!" like they'd been attacked for no reason. My wife would always ask, "Ok, but happened right BEFORE that? Did you do something

AI laziness remains one of the wildest common failure states when you think about it. Also one of the great examples of how much pseudo-humanity comes from training on the corpus of all human writing. The number of emails and chat messages exhibiting laziness beats post training

Terence Tao, Javier Gómez-Serrano, and DeepMind reported more extended experiments with AlphaEvolve + DeepThink + AlphaProof. Many new discoveries, including some general constructions that inspired T. Tao to write two new papers. We live in the wildest timeline

The aether defines a preferred rest frame, it breaks a spacetime symmetry. The Higgs field doesn’t. The aether is an old concept born out of physics known in the 19th century. Like water carrying waves it is the medium carrying light waves It is widely misunderstood to what

Ilya Sutskever "Three lines of math can prove all of supervised learning" (4:33) "I have not seen an exposition of unsupervised learning that I found satisfying" (7:50) Optimization objective has little relation to the actual objective you care about! youtube.com/watch?v=AKMuA_…

When people are suffering because the cost of living is too high, and you (as a policymaker) intend to spend public money to fix this, there are two main routes: - subsidize demand, or - subsidize supply Subsidizing demand is "give people money to pay for the expensive thing."

The bridge collapsed because a landslide not engineering failure. The edge of Tibetan Plateau is extremely geologically active. Earthquake and landslide very common. Where bridge collapsed is near the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. It's actually quite difficult to build and

Despite disagreement, I do respect Lingling's work and her professionalism, but I must respectfully disagree again with several key points in the article below. I've lived in both countries too as a scholar. Reducing China's governance to "the Party controls everything" and

This is an all-too-common fallacy: the notion that because there's an "often vicious" public debate of ideas in the West, then the country is automatically better at "allocating resources" than the Chinese system which optimizes for harmony and consensus. First of all, even a

the very fact the "debate" took place is treated as sufficient "democratic" exercise - never mind that nothing actually changed. […] citizens can feel they participated in democracy - everyone performed their part in the performance but nothing changed.

All the great breakthroughs in science are, at their core, compression. They take a complex mess of observations and say, "it's all just this simple rule". Symbolic compression, specifically. Because the rule is always symbolic -- usually expressed as mathematical equations. If

Chris Murphy 🟧 You're being played by people who want regulatory capture. They are scaring everyone with dubious studies so that open source models are regulated out of existence.

Melissa Chen It's generally considered a good idea to read an article before ignorantly commenting on it Melissa. If you'd done so, you'd have seen this graph 👇 which compares mortality rates in China vs India during the Mao era. What it shows is that while China’s death rates briefly

It looks like Trump didn't understand the immensely consequential importance of his call with Xi. Or if he did, he's hiding it very well. This was the first call EVER requested by Xi to a U.S. president. It never happened before, all previous calls had been made at the

Conveniently omitted from the text is that many things China DID want to import were banned. As a reminder, before the semiconductors export controls of October 22, China used to import in value more semiconductors than oil, some $400 billion worth of it a year!

If you want to understand the universe, you can't just look at what's there. You have to imagine what isn't, but was. This is a picture of an arch. It's a marvel of primitive architecture. In fact, the similarity of those two words is not a coincidence. All of those stones

Taiwan is a merchant state, and it’s interesting to draw the historical comparison to medieval Venice - perhaps the most successful merchant state in history. A little post-turkey history lesson: For about 300 years (from 1300 to 1600), Venice (more specifically Murano) had an

Ideas in the West about "AI safety" are now becoming skewed in misleading ways, e.g. - average people who hear "AI safety" think it's referring to censorship like how image generators won't do NSFW or celebrities or copyrighted IP - they think China doesn't care about AI safety

This is the nightmare scenario for all professional AI “NotKillEveryone” doomers And also the (revealed) default expectation of everyone who didn’t buy into their doomerism