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In fairness this is the boring stuff for a lot of people. :-)

Turns out that humans aren’t great at comprehensively consistently searching known search spaces.

Can someone post an event poster that they think is incredible? These posters all look fine to me, but the comments seem to know much better ones - but at least in my memory I can’t recall any much better.

I mentioned this in a previous comment, but I really like this Fixit Clinic poster from the Boston area:

https://allevents.in/mattapan/fix-it-clinic/200026636930752

It's not a ground-breaking paragon of graphic design but it communicates what it needs to communicate: what, when, and where. And crucially, it has photos showing what the event looks like. Photos of real people fixing real things.


The deep dark uncomfortable truth is that art is subjective, and at best you can only ever get a general consensus

"How do people not understand that some laws only make sense at a certain scale? "

Honestly, this is because its something that is basically never discussed or reasoned about. The closest I can think of is "personal use vs commercial use". But I'd love to see more about how to reason about how laws change at scale.


Laws do consider scale and we can see that in everyday law.

4 friends walk together, it's just normal. 400 "friends" walking can and will be treated differently.

Moving around with a couple of bills is treated differently from carrying huge bundles of cash.

Those laws or exceptions were probably added later as a reaction to abuse of existing laws.

The problem with AI/scraping is that we can't afford to be reactionary because it may be too late by the time we realize what has happened and change the law.

It will be too late because governments and judiciary have been largely about maintaining the status quo and minimizing disruption when it comes to big tech related cases even when they have been found guilty of wrongdoings. We already see the too big to fail vibes with AI.


Laws are typically implicitly considerate of scale. Very rarely are they explicitly considerate of scale.

To wit, sharing music digitally, Google scanning books, or Uber/Lyft providing unlicensed taxi services.

It's pretty rare that laws consider what should happen if it were suddenly possible to 10x or 100x preexisting throughput.

And specifically where laws balance multiple, often-opposed, stakeholders' interests, that change can drastically upset the previously negotiated compromise.

Which is why piracy at scale, before it's banned, tends to be a successful foundation for many businesses.


Murder, terrorism and genocide.

Simple possession of drugs vs possession with intent to distribute. In jurisdictions that make difference base on quantity (so, scale) alone.

I'm sure there's other examples too.


Theft was historically very scale-sensitive. In England you'd face execution for "grand larceny" if the goods in question were worth more than twelve pence. This was on the books from the 13th century until 1832 (!).

Jesus Christ on a pogo stick, execution for stealing 12 pence worth of stuff? That's crazy! Adjusting for inflation[1][2], that would be the same as nowadays being executed for stealing £5!

[1] According to https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/education/education-resource..., 12 pence (1 shilling, or 1/20 of a pound)) in the old £sd system is equal to 5 pence (or £0.05) in the later decimal system.

[2] According to https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/in..., £0.05 (decimal) in 1832 would be equivalent to £5.02 in 2026 Aug.


When first introduced it was around the price of a sheep. The homicidal version of bracket creep [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bracket_creep


Damn, sheep were cheap back then.

> this is ABSOLUTELY not how actual mathematicians see their field

While this might be true, I think this is the big pivot that will need to happen. Math, as a human endeavor, will all be applied. We will use LLMs to do the math and discover the math, and humans will apply it to whatever problem they are working on (likely using another LLM to integrate it).


hopefully this attitude won't be whats going to do the decisionmaking

How does 1password get replaced with a Google search? I assume he built his own 1password system...

Bitwarden is free and in my experience does a better job than 1 password. Tho he could have vibecoded his own 1-password, I would be a bit careful doing that though

yeah I agree, bitwarden is really good, but since I'm the only one who uses it I didn't need all the features of it and just vibecoded my own, though I made sure it was secure (I'm a software engineer so knew what to secure). definitely wouldn't recommend anyone do that though if they don't know what they're doing

I assume this person heard about keepass [0] and accesses it from multiple devices with a dropbox or icloud style service. Or doesn't access it from multiple devices. I just synchronize my password database on a slow cadence or as needed.

[0] https://keepass.info/


There's a key phrase you may have missed.

"So the plants crossed over and started moving east along the coast and up into the interior. Beyond that point, there were no merchants. But when a woman married into the next clan over, she took cuttings from her family’s garden with her."

The key phrase is "Beyond that point", where that point is up into the interior where there were no merchants. That's when marriage took over.


If the point of math is understanding then maybe our incentive structure is wrong. Maybe it should be teaching the concepts to as many people as possible rather than just continuing to write papers that 10 people in the world understand, which is the current state of a lot of math.

But one of the things AI also excels in is summarizing and can do so hierarchically. One of my favorite things to do with a concept I'm new at is "ELI5" then "explain like I'm a high school student" then "explain like a bright undergrad in XYZ" then "explain to a working professional in this domain". It's a lot of steps, but I've found it very effective (for me) to learn with -- and I've done something similar with code and math (although not math proofs -- I'm not a mathematician). But my point is that I think we can use AI to also teach us these proofs they're building in a way that I don't understand today about human proofs.

If we use AI well here we could actually understand math much better than we do now.


It does appear there have been some people who have looked at this before but it’s unclear how many(here’s an example of a request from readers in 1927 https://toebes.com/Flynns/Flynns-19270813.htm).

That said there is another controversy brewing with this that is best summarized here: https://vera-wren.github.io/posts/2026-09-11-the-key-is-a-pr...


'Best' is putting it strongly for an autonomous claudish summary of an autonomous claudish rebuttal to a claudish write-up of the finding

Best is a relative statement of quality. And in this case reflects the lack of alternatives more than anything else. But if there are better please let me know.

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