random3

thank you! that's nice looking! one thing from OP that's useful is the topic rather than the post. a mix between the two :)

I thought it's a collection of maps (what an atlas is). Instead it's a list, 9 items per page, 23 pages - it's an index. A map lets you see the full picture in a glance. It seems like a missed opportunity to actually make it an atlas.

one agent is a special kind of distributed system. It's a distributed system that is undistributed.

Two agents is a distributed system problem

Cocktails are margin error on drinking stats

I'm surprised the author is not panicking about the existence of customer support for decades.

This completely confused and misses the point of teleoperation vs following instructions/rules/protocols. Who set the GPS navigation destination?

Any sort of rule following is teleoperation by this definition then ⇒ the whole world is teleoperated.

Hospitals introduced intubation checklists to make sure protocols are followed and patients don't die. How about coding guidelines?

Indeed. I missed the top row. Thanks for pointing that.

> so this seems like missing the forest for the tree imo.

But is it? Again, regardless of the amount, what is the utility?

What's the end goal of academia (assuming broadly as research with humans) when the answers to the deepest questions become commodities at orders of magnitude higher speed and lower cost?

How are federal grants justified and, forgetting the current hierarchy, how is differentiation made? It's currently based on research output, once that becomes irrelevant what is it? We already have IMO, IOI as competitions and I assume just like Olympics this can be a thing, but it's very remote from research.

Take for example Rene Thom after Alexander Grothendieck overshadowed an entire field

> His technical superiority was crushing. His seminar attracted the whole of Parisian mathematics, whereas I had nothing new to offer. That made me leave the strictly mathematical world and tackle more general notions, like the theory of morphogenesis, a subject which interested me more and led me towards a very general form of 'philosophical' biology.

https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Thom/

Now amplify this a few orders of magnitude.

While I understand and emphatically with Tao's concern I'm afraid it's missing the forest from the trees. Unless you can make a claim that AI will never be able to perform intellectually at the same level as any human at a much lower cost, there's an outstanding utility problem that remains unaddressed. Sure enough, the AI may not have taste or goals, or many human traits, but that's irrelevant to the much thornier (and much broader than mathematics or even academia) question related to who's getting paid how much and for what.

Yes. It conflates a bunch of things

> TL;DR I claim that modern science is synonymous with open source software

That's a strong statement that's not supported by the arguments and IMO misguided.

I don't have a problem with "open", but rather with "software".

Both science and software deal with models, however the focus is quite different. I suspect you conflate theory with models.

The goal of science is to produce and test theories — that's an inductive/abductive process. A model, regardless of whether it's reified into mathematical formulas or software, is a means of making a theory operational enough that its consequences can be derived and confronted with observations.

Software often starts downstream of this: it's a reification of theories, models, algorithms, or findings that are the result of research. Of course software can also be used as part of the research process itself. The distinction is roughly the familiar one between research and development.

Science is open, but science is not software and software definitely not science.

It’s research happening privately without publishing, usually going into products

There’s also the other side of the same coin where maintainers ignore your contributions. I’m happily forking things permanently and will likely rewrite them on cleaner foundations. I’ve never loved my tools more than I do now when I can get them coded at the same pace I think of them.

On the other hand, it’s been clear for a while that software as we knew will end up at a close to 0 marginal value.

Dimensions, and hence surfaces and volumes are part of our “tooling” used to understand the world (epistemic) rather than being intrinsic to nature. So the befuddling is related to our own interpretation.

note HEAVILY

> The students heavily utilized AI assistants, specifically Claude Opus 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol, for computational exploration, proof idea generation, and editing.

this is a bit like Enhanced Olympics(https://www.enhanced.com), except that you have someone else compete for you.

My issue is that it makes it hard to distinguish real insight/work etc. from effectively null one.

An old instance of the same issue was with what was called "script kiddie" back in the 90-00s

this may a good deeper read on the subject [Yoneda theory for double categories - R Paré - Theory and Applications of Categories, 2011 ](http://www.tac.mta.ca/tac/volumes/25/17/25-17.pdf)

This (by definition) the reality of every normalization/proxy layer, standard, etc. There’s always a cost for flexibility/freedom. What’s traded is when and by whom it’s paid.

Likely Palantir built it already

The name/logo sounds/looks a lot like Rancher (https://www.rancher.com) which is "herding" (docker) containers.

You’re not serious about it if you only have one box

I got the same feeling today

It's not "personal" if it runs on someone else's machine

Nature has shown variety wins over inbreeding, I don't see how AI will change this

That’s sounds so cool! I wonder how they get to do high throughput contributions. Is the structure very flat, or plugin based? I’ve always admired this project from the outside and glad to learn it’s doing so well. Looks like they have something really good going on. Kudos to the team!

You could have said the same thing about building the Internet or the entire industrial control infrastructure. I mean, maybe they are negligent/incompetent, but I doubt that follows from your reasoning.

You have a simple tradeoff to let agents do their thing freely vs highly constrained. The constraints are good in theory but it's the same model that kept "classic" software dumb and unscalable (compared to what we're seeing now) for the past 50 years. You suggest that this tradeoff doesn't exist.

Then you have others like MIRI (Yudkowski) etc. swearing that there's no way to contain AI, and you argue that it's just incompetence.

At a certain level, it can be argued that's incompetence, but it's general meat intelligence incompetence against AI.

I don't understand what you're saying. Can you clarify your question?

So A16Z is the largest spender on politics, but Anil Dash's "momma is.."

https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/31/a-group-funded-by-andreess...

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/13/technology/andreessen-hor...

I canceled my Ultra subscription after realizing I had Sol constantly fixing anything I tried to do with Antigravity. The most frustrating experience and a waste of money. I’m sorry for Google and hope they manage to fix their disaster.

your argument suggests there's an opportunity for a trading strategy. It's also very common as a "technical analysis" investment strategy for any gullible person on the internet.

The problem is it looks "backwards" and tries to make the point something (in this case the argument made in the paper) is false because the backwards data doesn't support it. All while completely failing to address the crux of the point being made.

Bro, I’m not following. Can you elaborate? - concretely PIM is cope. And the argument that this is bad because rowhammer and how a wider bus would be better.