drivebyhooting

Do you build things for yourself? I’ve unlocked tremendous value just by scratching my own itches so to speak.

But taking those bespoke contraptions to market is not something I want to out effort into. Especially when anyone can just clone it with AI.

The AI revolution might not show up so easily in GDP.

Passive income? I need massive income.

Anybody seen those billboards? It’s disgusting.

I think so too.

Just now in 2026 we start to see glimpses of AI supremacy, e.g. navier stokes.

It’s similar to the deep blue moment. It took a while before consumer hardware could beat Kasparov, but the watershed moment was deep blue.

I reckon some private demos using far more compute than is available to us peasants convinced the tech oligarchs 3 years ago to pursue their seemingly coordinated AI push.

Maybe the trick is taking the question and writing lecture notes / delivering the explanation as a teacher. Surely explaining it is much better than just solving the question and tap tap tap.

It reminds me of Newton. You know, the guy who “invented” calculus. He lost a fortune investing.

Does math academy still start at 4th grade? How do you compare it to beast academy or AoPS? What incredible results have you observed?

I hadn’t heard of Mentava, how does it compare to Lexia Core 5? I’m a little skeptical of claims like “my 2nd grader reads at a 4th grade level”. I’m privy to the standardized tests and I found the grading super inflated.

Multiplication needs to be automatic for doing algebra: FOIL and factoring polynomials immediately come to mind.

Long division, at least conceptually, is also present in algebra and partial fractions.

When you say it follows common core, how did you get granular skills and competencies?

I’ve been doing similar things for math and language arts and I’m looking for curriculum creation hacks.

The best I’ve come up with is plagiarizing directly from books and wrap a dopamine loop around it.

How did you come up with the curriculum? I tried the third grade curriculum and it’s hard to know if it’s calibrated.

Have you compared the curriculum with Duolingo math, IXL, Kahn academy, etc?

I’m shaking my head in disbelief.

Reading logits is the cornerstone of ML. It’s almost like many of the people reporting on and fawning over AI have no technical background and never knew about ML classifiers or calibration.

I don’t get it.

Codex has full computer use capability. Surely such bans mean nothing even in the very near term.

Can you give examples of wrapped LLM logic?

API calls are expensive and slow, so I’ve shied away from integrating them into my personal projects. And of course there’s always the risk of hallucination.

Yes this would be very useful. Or at least being able to selectively compact a linear part and continue from before.

Often times I just sort of wish to undo.

Chat is only tedious because it’s slow. If models responded in 300ms it would be the ideal interface.

GPT Chat seems smarter for business questions or planning that does not require iteration or wrangling data sources.

But Work gives the model a computer instance it can use for programmatic data access, API munging, etc.

Success cases I’ve had: chat - read the reports in my Gmail and put a counter proposal together.

Work - cross reference all the options with commute time using traffic aware map data. Ground it on drop off / pick up times from each option’s stated rules and hours. Create a table with commute and idle time break downs.

That makes no sense. Do you think their plan is to spend billions of dollars and build infrastructure mega projects just to let it sit idle?

Did the rise personal computing make data centers and super computers obsolete?

Any advance in inference that allows local models to do the job will also benefit hyperscalers. Imagine the sheer amount of compute they could throw at problems if each 32GB of VRAM was enough for frontier reasoning.

I pay $200/month for ChatGPT. Maybe people should just pay for the service instead of relying of freebies?

It’s worth it. Already saved me more than $30,000 in a business transaction by negotiating for me.

I’m not going to use a CPA in the coming tax seasons either. I’m determined to not pay for any white collar labor if I can avoid it.

And sometimes that’s what trying to sound smart sounds like.

Mostly because it answers quickly and is more agreeable (too agreeable at times).

Meanwhile Claude and Astra like to couch all their agreements with caveats and provisos.

Why can’t agents QA it?

Could you share the prompts and workflow? I’ve tried this too, but with mixed success when it comes to creating custom tile kernels.

I would really appreciate your input!

Chess is even more mainstream and accessible now!

All “fields medalist” signatories - a rarefied and elitist group indeed.

I wish this letter could be more egalitarian and include the view points of those who AREN’T the beneficiaries of a highly competitive winner-take-all system.

Since the common narrative is that AI frees up labor to do other things (engineering -> trades), maybe we can celebrate that genius mathematicians will now spend time teaching children how to be as smart as them?

Palantir is in Lord of the Rings. Which is not a book for children. Maybe you were thinking of the hobbit?

Built a top a pyramid of failed math undergrads, grad students, and mediocre post docs.

That half a million total comp is the consolation prize for the disillusioned.

It’s a prisoner’s dilemma. A single mathematician working with AI while all others forebear will clearly outcompete.

If we put aside the idea of credit for a moment, it sounds like human/AI collaboration is indeed super charging discovery.

Math academia was not working well at all. Almost every single graduated from my PhD program wound up working in ads or finance.

The gatekeeping in math academia is extremely unfair, or should I say objectively fair but personally unfair. I won’t cry crocodile tears.

I was about to say something similar. If my cushy ad tech disappears (as it seems to be doing), I might as well join in with bringing about the end of all professions.

I’d rather that capability be wide spread and “democratized” than have all of humanity enslaved to the oligopoly holding control of the godhead.