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A couple days ago, Levent Alpöge, a mathematician working at Anthropic, discovered a counterexample to the Jacobian conjecture using Claude Fable 5. I was curious whether most mathematicians were trying to prove or disprove the conjecture, so I asked Claude. Before a counterexample to the Jacobian conjecture was found, did most mathematicians believe it was […]

The post Locally everywhere does not imply everywhere first appeared on John D. Cook.

The git flag I assumed was an LLM hallucination

On January 2, 1975, Microsoft announced Altair Basic, their first product. It was a programming language for the MITS Altair 8800 computer, a product that let people write their own software for the new computer. The makers of the computer

The post The First Microsoft Product appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

I reckon this week's video on how Claude is tying together info from UniFi, Home Assistant and the Pi-Hole is an absolute ripper. Or at least the concept is - if ever there was an actual value proposition for AI it's taking lots of noise and

Today's links Dealing with dickovers: The web is an open platform, and that matters. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Broadcast's bad week; Congress v wifi; EFF v DRM law; Snowden and bunnie's smartphone smartcase. Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, S...

When we tried to get an intuition for the differences in distribution functions, we learned that children subjected to a treatment had greater variation in their score than the reference group.

(Continue reading the full article on the web.)

You've probably heard this one before. It might have come from a parent, a teacher, or a friend who bought an expensive item and wanted to justify it. It goes something like this: A poor man buys a cheap pair of boots for a few dollars. They fall apart within a year, so h...

This is an article I resisted writing for a long time.

I keep hearing anecdotes from people who used coding agents to reverse-engineer and automate devices in their homes. I think this is an interesting illustration of the impact of the reduced cost of writing code. Prior to agents, it was entirely possible to reverse-engineer h...

Who’s Afraid of Chinese Models? Interesting proposal from Ben Thompson that both addresses the hypocrisy of labs outlawing distillation against their models despite training on unlicensed data, and could help US open models compete more effectively with their Chinese counter...

Seven options, considered

The first time I saw Michelangelo’s David in person, I wept. Never in my life have I witnessed a more beautiful piece of content.

I wasn’t the only one who felt that way. Museum patrons all around me were looking up from their phones to admire David as well. Despite it being legacy content, David was so scrollstoppingly captivating that it generated stronger engagement than TikTok and Instagram combined, despite those platforms offering fresher, more personally relevant content.

The easy case is easy.

The post Making an agile version of a Windows Runtime delegate in C++/WinRT, part 1 appeared first on The Old New Thing.

The volume of a sphere of radius r is V = 4πr³ / 3 and the surface area is A = 4πr² and so the ratio of volume to area is V / A = r / 3. Surprisingly, the same ratio holds for all regular solids if r is the radius of the largest sphere […]

The post Volume to Area ratio for Regular Solids first appeared on John D. Cook.

I’ve written several posts about using Claude or ChatGPT to generate Prolog or Lean code to solve a chess puzzle. I didn’t think Grok would be up to the task, though I didn’t try it. I’ve heard good things about Grok 4.5, so I gave it a shot. It did great. Here’s the problem, a […]

The post Solving a chess puzzle with Grok 4.5 first appeared on John D. Cook.

Uplifting a lobsters comment for easier reference.

Sinds 2024 run ik OpenTK, met als doel zo goed mogelijk te laten zien wat er in de Tweede Kamer allemaal gebeurt. En, om daar ook nuttige email-notificaties over te versturen. OpenTK is begonnen omdat ik (vanuit de Internetwereld) ineens geconfronteerd werd met een wet die over DNS (mijn hobby) ging en over een paar dagen in stemming zou komen. Dat was heel erg schrikken en ik dacht, dat kan ons nooit meer gebeuren.

In the last year, I've been through over a dozen cities and used public transport in all of them. It is wild just how confusing and complex buying a ticket can be. While some cities obviously take a user-centred approach to ticketing, others appear to take a Kafkaesque delight in a bureaucratic maze of zones, apps, and intricate restrictions. One of the seminal texts in computer systems design…

On November 4th, 1997, MCI and Worldcom merged in a deal worth $37 billion. This was an attempt by two large telecommunications companies to to combine and rival AT&T, but instead it turned into one of the biggest scandals and

The post The MCI Worldcom merger, bankruptcy, and scandal appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

We have been having extensive discussions around open source strategy. We will discuss it more at our next board meeting, but one thing we’d like to do soon is to create a language model with the approximate capability of GPT-3 that can run locally on consumer hardware and release that. We’d like to do it soon, before Stability or someone else does. In general, we think this helps discourage others from releasing similarly-powerful models, and makes it harder for new efforts to get funded.

— Sam Altman, Email to OpenAI's board, October 1, 2022 - exposed in Musk v. Altman (2026)

Tags: ai-ethics, sam-altman, generative-ai, openai, ai, llms