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Brought to mind by Lego’s Smart Bricks.

Terry Tao has found them helpful in the past[0], and I’d trust him over Hamkins.

[0] https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2025/12/08/the-story-of-erdos...


They do different kinds of mathematics. Tao works mainly in analytic number theory & that's why he got a Fields medal. Hamkins works in foundations of mathematics, logic, & computability theory.

Tao has also used "Good Old Fashioned AI" (in the form of Mace4/Prover9) for math research.

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2025/12/09/the-equational-the...


For the sake of rigor it appears he found it interesting that someone else found them helpful in the past rather than "Terry Tao[himself] has found them helpful in the past."

> This was one further addition to a recent sequence of examples where an Erdős problem had been automatically solved in one fashion or another by an AI tool.[Aristotle] Like the previous cases, the proof turned out to not be particularly novel

He concludes:

> One striking feature of this story for me is how important it was to have a diverse set of people, literature, and tools to attack this problem. To be able to state and prove the precise formula for {c(n)} required multiple observations

Which looks like he wants to focus the praise for the solution on the "diverse set of people" relegating any "praise" for LLMs to the obfuscated and ambiguous category of "tools" behind literature.


Isaac Newton was deep into alchemy and occult. Even very smart people suffer from confirmation bias, Dunning-Kruger effect & co.

Reminiscent of Terence McKenna and his DMT elves…


I’ve never used either, but Waymos don’t need a safety driver, Tesla’s pseudoRoboTaxis do.



I wore out the elbows of quite a few shirts lying on my side in bed reading. This was during the time I would go to the local science fiction bookstore every Saturday and buy three or four books, ocassionally finishing them by Monday.


or switch to iOS 18 public beta and go to 18.7.3


This is no longer an option, Apple has removed it from the beta program.


On the other hand, if you ask me what five times six in base eight is, I can spend a second and repy thirtysix. Is there an LLM able to do that yet?



I recently found my ipad mini 2 (released in 2013) that had been boxed up when I moved a few years ago. After charging up the battery and booting it up, I checked for system updates. The latest system available for it was ios 12.5.7, released in 2023. It loaded fine, and I’ve been using the mini as an ereader ever since – the screen is fine, and wifi works.


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