Thanks! All I’m really hoping for is that it’ll be fun.

Edit to add: I just ran the stats on my redux.txt file, and my word count since Thursday is over 9000.

:-P

Years ago, I wrote a science-fiction murder mystery novel. One of the plot threads was about the invention of AI, in the Data-from-Star-Trek kind of sense. I’ve been spending the past few days planning how to rip out that whole notion and replace it with a subplot about a different scientific discovery. I’ve been writing scenes to get back the old character voices and figure out how they might have changed, and to sketch new fictional science based on the actual science I’ve learned since my first go-around.

So, that might be keeping me busy. Of course, I’ll still be around to ban people who deserve it and to cruelly mock them in the process.

Even supposing the technology worked as advertised—and that’s very much a supposition arguendo, one that flies in the face of the facts—it’s hard for me to think of any mathematical discovery that would be worth the cost of the AI industry. How many people in Memphis would I give respiratory cancer in order to prove the Riemann hypothesis? Zero, you absolute fuckers.

I distinctly remember being told that AI would help mathematics by providing a better way to search the literature.

If the math teachers start making rap songs about this jargon, and if enough youth pastors emulate it while sitting backward in enough chairs, we might yet kill it dead.

New random positivity thread!

From a theoretical perspective, if you’re not going to shine light on the Leech lattice or the ADE phenomenon then you’re not actually getting at the core objects and are only doing surface work.

I tried shining a light on the Leech lattice but all I got was this 23-dimensional shadow.

I’m trying a new thing where I replace “AI” with “the dried centipede powder from Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch movie”.

I only use the dried centipede powder to summarize documents!

Did you know you can get dried centipede powder in different flavors? You don’t have to stick with the default!

It sucks and I hate it, and I applaud the locals who rallied together to yell at that superintendent until he finally paused the implementation of this thing. This shit is not inevitable, and if one of these dolls does ever end up in a poor, underserved high school, I hope it’s one that’s a lot like the one where I went to school because it would be a smoldering pile of silicone in the corner of the girls’ room by the end of the first week.

https://skepchick.org/2026/07/i-hate-the-ai-robo-teacher/

Max Kennerly sneers the New York Times:

This opinion piece, written by someone with no relevant expertise, cites two sources, both of them blogs by people who also have no relevant expertise, one of whom is employed by a sham think tank funded by the “Effective Altruism” propaganda network.

Truly embarrassing decision to publish it.

Do you feel it? Do you feel incredible? Do you feel hugely positive? Do you feel awesome

Yeah, but that’s just the cocaine

Gene Ray actually came to MIT in person. I knew the people who invited him. They had a history of… performance-art kind of stunts on the boundary of good taste? Like calling attention to an obscure discretionary fund by running for student government on a promise that they would use it to bribe everyone who voted for them. One of them taught me to pick locks during rush week.

And the Movement Skeptics of the aughts looked at Kurzweil’s singulatarianism and asked what he was smoking, while basically ignoring that the Holy Sequences existed. I should know, I was there.

Barbara Rosenblat’s recordings of the Amelia Peabody novels are fun.

All the doves are dead, Dave.

We lined up by body count.

People using this term to mean their number of sexual partners will never not be funny to me. Not always in the same way, but it’s always funny in some fashion.

“And what would you say is your body count, Will?”

“I thought new couples were supposed to rise above that kind of contest, Dr. Lecter.”

After all, it was a workplace where many employees lived together, and had multiple overlapping romantic relationships with their colleagues, while also essentially acting as each other’s therapists

“After all, it was completely fucked”

Heavy is the head that wears the Spirit Halloween golden trilby.

“…meet it is I set it down, That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain” —some guy

neither left wing nor right wing but some secret third thing (batshit right wing)