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tomjakubowskion ArtCraft Apps – open-source Adobe compatible suite written in Rust

"$120 price target" is a prediction about the price in some near-ish term time range.

tomjakubowskion Anthropic tried to persuade Pope that AI could be conscious being

There are earlier examples of eccentric religious beliefs in engineers too, like Jack Parsons and Thelema.

tomjakubowskion Mike Tomlin spent 12 years building a Minecraft city

There's a video of San Antonio Spurs players, including Tim Duncan and David Robinson, playing Starcraft 2v2 on the road during the 1999 NBA Finals.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7WEJQfwniQ

tomjakubowskion Nicholas Polson has authored 258 academic papers in 2026 so far

I'll settle for NO SLOP, NICK! as an anagram of NICK POLSON.

tomjakubowskion Nicholas Polson has authored 258 academic papers in 2026 so far

One of the most memorable tech talks I ever attended was by a junior engineer who had just come back to the office from a major conference. Our workplace had an unusually oral culture -- decisions were made in meetings, and not always written down; there wasn't much in the way of bug tracking or work planning at the time; people generally preferred to talk through problems instead of working them out in email, chat, or forum posting.

He was supposed to present a topic he learned about at the conference. Instead, he gave a cheeky talk which introduced the very concept of written language to the audience, as if we had never heard of it. Starting from the history of writing on tablets and so on, and ending in practical advice like, "when words are written down, you don't have to remember what they were exactly; you can just read the words again." I loved the chutzpah and could barely hold myself from chortling out loudly at some of his slides.

tomjakubowskion Sustainable energy without the hot air (2008)

A person riding a bicycle expends an order of magnitude less energy than does a car ferrying the same person the same distance. So I don't think this really holds.

For comparison: at 50 MPG, traveling one mile by car uses 0.02 gallons of gasoline. This is about 675 Wh of energy or 580 kcal. Travel by bicycle for a ~180lb person is about 60 kcal per mile.

tomjakubowskion Everybody’s home. No one’s coming over

"Doughnuts? I told you, I don't like ethnic food!"

tomjakubowskion Everybody’s home. No one’s coming over

That guy really ought to read How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Pierre Bayard.

tomjakubowskion What would a serious AI product look like?

That's an interesting example because spreadsheets are commonly and famously riddled with data errors and mistakes in their calculations. Despite this, many businesses are run successfully on the backs of them. Maybe a spreadsheet which acknowledges openly that it could contain errors would disincline a business user from trusting it; ignorance is bliss.

tomjakubowskion What California is learning from solar panels built over irrigation canals

Not true that it's limited to certain states. It's a nationwide problem, according to AT&T.

https://about.att.com/pages/copper-theft-prevention

Here's an unsolved case from this August in Oklahoma. Oklahoma ranks top 10 in the country for copper theft.

https://about.att.com/ecms/dam/pages/copper-theft-prevention...

tomjakubowskion OpenAI GPT–6 Astra breaks Enigma message that has resisted solution since 2005

Different Rosenow. In July 1941 the SS was busy invading and beginning occupation of the Baltic states and western Russia.

https://www.maparchive.ru/nara-doc/Waffen-SS/3_SS_PANZER-DIV...

> Daily reports and sketches pertaining to offensive engagements across Lithuania in the Gvardeysk and Ukmerge areas, 22-28 Jun; advance across Latvia and offensive operations in the Deguciai, Daugavpils, Zidina, and Dagda areas, 28 Jun-4 Jul; and invasion of Russia and offensive and mopping-up operations in the Rasina (Rosenow), Opochka, Isaki, Zaborov'ye, and Gorki areas, 5-19 Jul 1941. Also periodic division circuit diagrams, 29 Jun-18 Jul 1941, and data on enemy operations.

tomjakubowskion OpenAI GPT–6 Astra breaks Enigma message that has resisted solution since 2005

To be clear, the text in the comment is the plaintext, not the ciphertext. The plaintext is what's full of typos.

The ciphertext of message Nr 172 was:

MVUEH IDEVS ARMCC NQTAT YEVFC DBZGG SMXWL PSYWZ YTCBS WURRT BZCVG ODVJU SLSOO MJQJZ SXSEB ZPEYM DNXJF TC

https://cryptocellar.org/bgac/g-army-july-1941.html

tomjakubowskion Claude Opus 5.5 Intelligence, Performance and Price Analysis (Max)

Tasks are completed in about half the time too. Although we'll see if it slows down in a few weeks as Anthropic's model services are prone to do.

tomjakubowskion George Lucas Returns to Earth, Bearing Gifts

We're happy to have it. It's a gorgeous building and I can't wait to see the weird museum exhibits.

tomjakubowskion Did OpenAI solve the wrong Navier-Stokes problem?

I learned from this charming lo-fi video that it is actually much easier to find singularities in the Navier-Stokes equation for compressible fluids (which is out of scope for the Millenium Prize problem). The first was found in 1998 by Zhouping Xin.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wEn9B7pDV4

tomjakubowskion English: A vs. An

On the other hand it's a nice thing that "kein" and "nein" are different words.

tomjakubowskion English: A vs. An

then you have cases where English skips an article but Spanish does not, such as "what is science fiction?" vs. "¿qué es la cienca ficción?"

tomjakubowskion English: A vs. An

Spanish does something similar with feminine nouns which start with an "a" sound, like agua. las aguas, el agua. las aguas claras, el agua clara. but then for este/esta, it's esta agua and not este agua

https://www.rae.es/espanol-al-dia/el-agua-esta-agua-mucha-ag...

tomjakubowskion The Implications of Linguistic Illegibility for LLM Security

if Mickens has fallen and resorted to publishing slop then there is no hope for the rest of us

tomjakubowskion Artificial intelligence now beats some of the best human forecasters

I don't think analyzing just the directional correctness is enough. Magnitudes shouldn't just be ignored. A trader can still make money even if more than half of their trades were wrong directionally, and can still lose money (or even go bankrupt) even if more than half of their trades were correct directionally.

tomjakubowskion IKEA made a mod for Skyrim [video]

The factory builder game Captain of Industry has a building you can add on to a settlement which sells household goods and furniture to the population. It's a blue building with yellow trim and a big sign on the front that says IDEA. I wonder if this is just small potatoes enough of a parody that IKEA wouldn't care about it.

https://old.reddit.com/r/captain_of_industry/comments/1vtbz8...

tomjakubowskion OpenAI’s Navier-Stokes release included a Lean 4 formal proof

The scale factor comes from this number in the article, seemingly an intuited estimate:

> Say a research article takes 20 times more effort to formalize than page in an undergraduate textbook.

That would suggest formalizing a 10-page research article might take 200 weeks (assuming 40h/wk) of effort, or about four years. Not a mathematician, I have no idea if that's in the ballpark.

tomjakubowskion More questions about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished math

A college advisor I had 20 years ago was a firm believer that interdisciplinarity was the future, that generalist skills and the ability to make connections between different fields would be paramount in advancing science. I suppose he was right in the big picture, even if the career prospects for human generalists aren't looking so rosy.

tomjakubowskion Show HN: What if the speed of light was 5 km/h?

MIT Game Lab made a take on this back in 2012.

https://gamelab.mit.edu/games/a-slower-speed-of-light/

tomjakubowskion Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]

Certainly a sign of the emotional immaturity and low empathy that's rampant in posters on internet forums like Twitter. Poor reflection on OpenAI.

tomjakubowskion Watch Los Angeles get built, one building at a time (1880–2026)

Wikipedia has a nice visualization of the history of LA's tallest buildings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_in_L...

tomjakubowskion Amazon Achieves Enshitification Inception

The article spends a couple paragraphs complaining about Amazon not allowing sorting by unit price. This would be a very useful feature, I agree, but I don't think I've ever seen a online grocery or department store retailer which supports it. The brick and mortar retailers he praises don't let you _sort_ by unit price either, they just show it to you on the shelf (often because a regulation requires it), same as Amazon.

Test search term: pretzels. Couldn't find a way to sort or filter by unit price at Target.com, Ralphs.com, Walmart.com, Vons.com, not even beloved Costco.com.

If anyone does know a grocery or department store which lets you sort by unit price, I'd be interested to see it.

https://www.target.com/s?searchTerm=pretzel

https://www.ralphs.com/search?query=pretzels

https://www.walmart.com/search?q=pretzels

https://www.vons.com/shop/search-results.html?q=pretzels

https://www.costco.com/s?keyword=pretzels

tomjakubowskion What if everything we know about recycling is wrong?

Worth noting that according to the data in that article, India is below the world average on a per capita basis, roughly 0.7x the world average. The Philippines is 25x the world average per capita.

tomjakubowskion Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber

Also puzzling: in the "reasoning" section preceding, that is described as an example of "a one-line self-replicating program."

When I typed "Are we not pure noon, ergo, we play life; yet, we hate bad fear" into Google, I got more weird results from Gemini: it claimed, incorrectly, that it is an anagram of the "well-known philosophical statement" (?), "We are not pure nature, we are history".

https://share.google/aimode/wJosKnHig6oVYaG18

(?): the reference seems to be to Jose Ortega y Gasset's line, "El hombre no tiene naturaleza, lo que tiene es historia" -- "Man[kind] has no nature, what it has is history."