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ajs1998

73 karma · joined September 23, 2024

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ajs1998··on Show HN: JevBench, a reproducible benchmark for typed decision models
I asked free chatgpt to give me some essays that will fool a slop detector and they all fooled this slop detector. Its best guess was "6% slop probability 87% confidence answered in 0.5 s for $0.000027" and yet it was 100% slop.

I am very skeptical slop detectors will ever work.

ajs1998··on Formalizing Fermat's Last Theorem
> What this work is, and is not

> I am currently being funded by the EPSRC to formalize a proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, and a naive reaction to the news above is that I no longer have any work to do. This is not the case. The work certainly achieves some of the aims of the EPSRC project, and indeed it goes much further in terms of what is formalized (I only promised the EPSRC that I would reduce FLT to the 1980s; this repo proves the whole thing). But I also promised several other things to EPSRC: firstly, that I would be making pull requests to Lean’s mathematics library, adding fundamental objects from modern number theory; this is ongoing. And secondly, and perhaps most importantly, that I would be creating a dynamic document enabling humans to explore the modern proof. My guess is that it is unlikely that Anthropic are going to do this; they will feel that their job is done with the formalization (and they did not formalize the modern proof anyway).

> Note that mathematically this work of anthropic tells us essentially nothing: I am on record as saying that I am 99.9% sure that the proof of FLT is OK, and most people in the number theory community are 100% sure (formalization has made me more paranoid about the mathematical literature than most). From my understanding of the argument, the formalization just faithfully follows the early literature on the proof and adds nothing.

https://xenaproject.wordpress.com/2026/09/04/flt-anthropic-h...

ajs1998··on Formalizing Fermat's Last Theorem
ZFC is probably the biggest foundation, and only Choice is apparently controversial. The results aren't that weird, they're just different and occasionally more useful than using !Choice.
ajs1998··on The most official water costs $120k a gallon
I get your point but unless you actually need tritium water the number still means nothing lol.
ajs1998··on Politician reads AI prompt during assembly
It's a red flag. Even if they agree and understand whatever they copied from chatgpt, they were too lazy to clean up its output. Are they also too lazy to read the news or does chatgpt summarize their articles too? AI people are like emperors without clothes. Totally embarrassing to witness.

This is bad because it's only getting harder to trust people. This is not someone I would want representing me. Although I'm not thrilled about any of my representatives anyway.

ajs1998··on Gleam Is Now on Tangled
That's your handle and it points to the server where your atproto account's data is stored. You can use this same login for other atproto apps and it will all be stored on the server at tngl.sh A username.bsky.social handle just means bsky set up that account and your data lives at the bsky.social PDS. You can migrate to a different PDS and change your handle if you don't trust them. You can host a PDS yourself if you like. I agree it's a little clumsy, but I'm sure friction can be reduced.

The idea is to give users control over their identity, network, and feeds instead of big social platforms like facebook or twitter that choose what content you see and lock you into their closed network.

ajs1998··on We moved our Bluesky data to Eurosky
They made a transphobic joke 3 times and the bluesky users that enabled their intolerance filter never saw it. What exactly is the problem? The posts weren't deleted. Nobody liked the joke because it's a bad joke.
ajs1998··on Steam Machine launches today
It's been a while since I built a PC but that price seems very fair
ajs1998··on The state of building user interfaces in Rust
Looks pretty neat. I'm a little disappointed about a closed beta though.
ajs1998··on Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground
Spoken like someone that has no idea why mathematicians are important.
ajs1998··on Language Models Need Sleep
This is the struggle of naming papers. You could stretch definitions and make your own sexy headline or you could be precise and fewer people will read it.
ajs1998··on Show HN: Audiomass – a free, open-source multitrack audio editor for the web
Could be pretty easy to do with atproto accounts. Users could save/share their music as a tangled.sh repo and other people could contribute or fork as they please. A nice UI could hide all of that and make it fun to collaborate on music.

Too bad I'm lazy. RiffHub looks neat.

ajs1998··on CBS Radio signs off after nearly 100 years of broadcasting
It's not just the medium. Streaming from the internet is a totally different product than radio. There's no reason we can't have both.
ajs1998··on What's a mathematician to do? (2010)
I simply don't care to gatekeep what counts as education. It has taught me things from videos I can still recall a decade later and pushed me to explore different areas of math I wouldn't have done otherwise.

It's education for whoever finds it educational

ajs1998··on What's a mathematician to do? (2010)
This is why I think Brady Haran is one of the coolest living mathematicians. Numberphile is educating a new generation of young mathematicians for anyone with access to youtube. Accessible math communication is so important. So many cool things are buried in textbooks and papers the average person would never read.
ajs1998··on 10 years ago, someone wrote a test for servo that included an expiry in 2026
Randomness is useful if you expect your code to do the correct thing with some probability. You test lots of different samples and if they fail more than you expect then you should review the code. You wouldn't test dynamic random samples of add(x, y) because you wouldn't expect it to always return 3, but in this case it wouldn't hurt.
ajs1998··on The simple geometry behind any road
:( but the math is fun And they went through all this effort anyways, and to blog about it.
ajs1998··on DaVinci Resolve – Photo
Is it only in the Studio version? Or the 21 Beta release? I downloaded the free version of Resolve 20 and I don't see any evidence that I can edit my raw nikon photos. The "Color" tab looks like it could be helpful if I knew how to turn my images in the media pool into "stills"
ajs1998··on All elementary functions from a single binary operator
Oh my god the PC history is hilarious

https://th.if.uj.edu.pl/~odrzywolek/homepage/personal/pc/pc_...

ajs1998··on A perfectable programming language
It is verso. My understanding is that it's like really fancy javadocs that makes communicating Lean code easier for everyone.

https://github.com/leanprover/verso

ajs1998··on Artemis II crew take “spectacular” image of Earth
It disappoints me greatly they're not raw :(
ajs1998··on Artificial-life: A simple (300 lines of code) reproduction of Computational Life
Awesome. I've been meaning to play around with this more after first hearing about this paper. I tried a similar automata with an even simpler representation for turing machines and there wasn't an abiogenesis moment. I guess the many no-op characters in the original paper allow for it to explore a bigger space of valid programs or to hide data without completely overwriting itself.

I would like to try alternative character encodings, including ones with fewer no-ops where most bytes are valid BF characters. Are more no-ops better? Is self replicating goo the best we can do?

ajs1998··on US Tech Force
If you scroll to the bottom there's another image of the robot with lights/dark stripes flipped. And his head is different.

This government is a joke.

ajs1998··on Schizophrenia sufferer mistakes smart fridge ad for psychotic episode
I would not go back. YouTube is a wonderful thing that I can't afford to pay for, and I don't want to live without. There are so many creators I love that would not be able to create and share beautiful things if they didn't get ad money. It's not all bad.
ajs1998··on Google Antigravity just deleted the contents of whole drive
Not defending the software, but if you hand over control of your data to software that has the ability to fuck with it permanently, anything that happens to it is on you.

Don't trust the hallucination machines to make safe, logical decisions.

ajs1998··on Confessions of a Software Developer: No More Self-Censorship
Remote work is great (for the reasons you gave and more) and saying it "sucks" made me roll my eyes, and it's reductive in the same way as saying office work "sucks." I wouldn't have had a job if in-office was the only option. It certainly didn't suck for me.

Being bad at problem solving with people far away is just another problem you can solve with practice. Same as being bad at problem solving even when help is right next to you.

ajs1998··on Affinity Studio now free
Yeah this is driving me crazy. It must be a bug because it says "a new tab has been opened in your default browser" but my default browser is not Safari.
ajs1998··on Formal Reasoning [pdf]
Join the Lean Zulip. There are many people interested in this.

https://leanprover.zulipchat.com/

ajs1998··on My first week of vibecoding
I don't think there's a clear distinction between vibecoding and AI assisted coding because there's black boxes EVERYWHERE no matter how knowledgeable you are. Compilers assist me to not have to think about machine code. Web libraries and frameworks assist me to not care about networking details. AI, vibe coding or not, is all just another thing to assist the user by reducing distractions.

I think it's valuable for developers to understand more of their code rather than less, but who cares to precisely label how much they understand? If they're happy with the passing tests, comfortable making it public, and others want to contribute, then that's what matters.

ajs1998··on Tangled, a Git collaboration platform built on atproto
After learning about ActivityPub and ATProto, people that talk about them literally cannot agree on what decentralized means.
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