kevinwang

Yeah but the Collatz probably has one of the highest man-hours of actual waste.

Ergo: > “This is a really dangerous problem. People become obsessed with it and it really is impossible,” said Jeffrey Lagarias, a mathematician at the University of Michigan and an expert on the Collatz conjecture.

and

“Collatz is a notoriously difficult problem — so much so that mathematicians tend to preface every discussion of it with a warning not to waste time working on it,” said Joshua Cooper of the University of South Carolina in an email.

(from https://www.quantamagazine.org/mathematician-proves-huge-res... )

Great article.

Could a syndrome so stealthy have lurked among us all along? Commins and van Nunen don’t think so. The surge in alpha-gal patients was too sudden and too great. Van Nunen has worked on Sydney’s North Shore for forty years. “Anyone who had anaphylaxis was sent to me, and I’ve talked to long-term residents,” she told me. “I know that patients didn’t have it before. It is an epidemic.” What triggered it still isn’t clear. Does the alpha-gal in a tick’s saliva piggyback on some virus or antigen that sensitizes people to it? “We lack a unifying hypothesis,” Commins said.

Very mysterious!

Nice! Also reminds me of https://minigolfle.com/

I use them because I know what I want to say out loud, but transcribing the pause with commas is incorrect because it's a comma splice, and I find that the semicolon often looks glaringly overly formal. So I've settled on the em-dash.

Good/bad news: you will definitely see more work by them -- this style of website is clearly the output of a coding agent, maybe Claude Code.

I hope that means it will improve now. There's such a rich space of features that they could do. Had some hope with their experimental Labs but I remember being underwhelmed and not seeing anything about it recently.

Just reread this comment and it's not easy to understand, but the edit window is passed.

What I meant is that they describe loglogn the same way you could describe O(n) or O(n^2) -- it "tends to infinity with n", even though my mental model for loglogn is to treat it as barely more than constant. See: https://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/148197/who-said-first...

Nitpicky/not important, but they say:

Since loglog(n) tends to infinity with n, the additional term in the exponent tends to 0, meaning these constructions achieve growth only slightly faster than linear.

Would anyone else describe the previous asymptotic behavior like that? I mean obviously loglogn to O(1) is a quantum leap, but wouldn't you describe loglogn as "grows so slowly it's almost constant", so the constructions achieve growth "almost n^{1+c}"? But I guess that might be overcorrecting too hard.

Well, I agree with you that the parent comment is wrong inasmuch as it suggests we can't tell from context that mitchellh is using the term to mean "a value judgment" instead of "a form of psychosis". We can tell.

But I agree with the parent comment in that we shouldn't use the term "AI psychosis" to mean "a value judgment" instead of "a form of psychosis", because "AI psychosis" has already been used for 2.5 years to mean "a form of psychosis".

Yeah, but AI psychosis can also be used to mean the stronger thing that the parent comment refers to -- something like AI-induced psychosis, which was how I originally understood the term:

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

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-spi...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/13/technology/chatgpt-ai-cha...

Learn by doing? Certainly helpful. But I feel like the real secret is to work with others who are good at software architecture. You can learn very efficiently that way.

Where's chapter 3?

You probably meant "conscience" instead of "conscious"

for hn comment-only readers:

paper link: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adt2981

---

Editor Summary:

Body size and metabolic rate are intertwined, a factor that is especially important to understand with regard to animals that live in aquatic environments, where heat loss is related to water temperature. Payne et al. developed a method to estimate routine metabolic rate based on measures from tagged fish, and combined the estimates with published respirometry rates to create a dataset spanning the entire body size range of extant fishes. Using these data, the authors found a scaling imbalance between heat production and loss that affects especially large, mesothermic fishes in warm waters. This imbalance both explains the distribution of these fish in cooler waters and suggests a special sensitivity to warming waters. —Sacha Vignieri

---

Abstract:

Body size and temperature set metabolic rates and the pace of life, yet our understanding of the energetics of large fishes is uncertain, especially of warm-bodied mesotherms, which can heavily influence marine food webs. We developed an approach to estimate metabolic heat production in fishes, revealing how routine energy expenditure scales with size and temperature from 1-milligram larvae up to 3-tonne megaplanktivorous sharks. We found that mesotherms use approximately four times more energy than ectotherms use and identified a scaling mismatch in which rates of heat production increase faster than heat loss as body size increases, with larger fish becoming increasingly warm bodied. This scaling imbalance creates an overheating predicament for large mesotherms, helping to explain their cooler biogeographies. Contemporary mesotherms face high fuel demands and overheating risks, which is a concern given their disproportionate demise during prior climate shifts.

Still down for me. (And still nothing on the status page!)

Even in your analogy, it's appropriate to reject the terms of marriage and not wed this person. But it's unprecedented to also vindictively ruin their life (e.g. by unilaterally putting them in jail)

From the link alone, it looks like the state actively funds cloud seeding research, not active practical cloud seeding?

Thanks. Link should be changed to this.

Edit: oh wait, this article isn't the source either. It references an article by "The Information", which I assume is https://www.theinformation.com/articles/salesforce-executive... There's also this follow-up: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/story-salesforces-de...

It's paywalled, so I can't verify.

The YXY problem?

It says:

We see potential uses in companionship and affective interaction. The robot’s ability to elicit spontaneous touching and positive emotional responses suggests it could serve in therapeutic settings or as a social presence for people who spend time alone. The quiet operation and gentle movement make it suitable for environments where noise and sudden motions would be disruptive.

Well said. I feel similarly despite being born about 15 years later.

Good idea! Anyone should be able to add it if it's in the public domain.

A little sad for me because I've enjoyed the global leaderboard aspect for years but of course my second reaction has to be to take a step back and appreciate all the joy that this one man has given us for all these years.

And he's made it clear from that start that he never intended the global leaderboard to be the point, plus AI the last few years messes it all up. All good things come to an end, and I gotta appreciate the good run that we had, and the voluntary work of one person that gifted it to us.

Not sure if you meant this because it doesn't cite the paper you mention, but it's a similar work: "An Investigation of Model-Free Planning", Guez et Al. (Deepmind) 2019 https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.03559

For problems that human teams eventually get correct, they seem to have submitted mostly 1 time -- occasionally 2 or 3. For problems that they did not get correct, there are some problems with up to 16 submissions.

Darn, I can't hear the music on iphone safari :(

Thanks, that was a fun read!

I remember reading an essay (probably from here?) about how a great way to build a game is to build it around a "toy" -- something that is pleasurable to simply interact with, even without objectives. I can't find it anymore -- the closest I can find is https://medium.com/@keerthiko/toys-to-games-25d35b40425d but I don't think it was that, although it's based on the book "The Art Of Game Design" which may have been a common inspiration.

Anyways, I've often thought about Super Smash Bros. (particularly, Melee) as a prime example of that idea.

Oooo, that looks a lot better than the initial designs!

A quick take:

reasonable possibilities are too many to analyze, one is forced to pretty much guess.

You could say the same thing about chess, but an experienced player wouldn't, because they know which candidate moves are reasonable and which lines to delve into through intuition shaped by experience.

Similarly, you might say the same about poker. The possible hands your opponent has are actually quite large, but an experienced player can have a reasonable idea of the possible hands and their probabilities, which may involve eg ignoring most hands as unrealistic and bucketing hands into classes.