the openai IMO news hit me pretty heavy this weekend i'm still in the acute phase of the impact, i think i consider myself a professional mathematician (a characterization some actual professional mathematicians might take issue with, but my party my rules) and i don't think i can answer a single imo question ok, yes, imo is its own little athletic subsection of math for which i have not trained, etc. etc., but. if i meet someone in the wild who has an IMO gold, i immediately update to "this person is much better at math than i am" now a bunch of robots can do it. as someone who has a lot of their identity and their actual life built around "is good at math," it's a gut punch. it's a kind of dying. like, one day you discover you can talk to dogs. it's fun and interesting so you do it more, learning the intricacies of their language and their deepest customs. you learn other people are surprised by what you can do. you have never quite fit in, but you learn people appreciate your ability and want you around to help them. the dogs appreciate you too, the only biped who really gets it. you assemble for yourself a kind of belonging. then one day you wake up and the universal dog translator is for sale at walmart for $4.99 the IMO result isn't news, exactly. in fact, if you look at the METR agent task length over time plot, i think agents being able to solve ~ 1.5 hour problems is coming right on time. so in some way we should not be surprised. and indeed, it appears multiple companies have achieved the same result. it's just... the rising tide rising as fast as it has been rising of course, grief for my personal identity as a mathematician (and/or productive member of society) is the smallest part of this story multiply that grief out by *every* mathematician, by every coder, maybe every knowledge worker, every artist... over the next few years... it's a slightly bigger story and of course, beyond that, there is the fear of actual death, which perhaps i'll go into more later. this package -- grief for relevance, grief for life, grief for what i have known -- isn't unique to the ai age or anything like that. i think it is a standard thing as one appreaches end of career or end of life. it just might be that that is coming a bit sooner for many of us, all at once. i wonder if we are ready

i want to start writing more about what i'm up to as a way to invite serendipity and perhaps have some impact on the world part of that practice is i think being more unfiltered, spending less time editing it's also a good way to, once again, begin the flywheel of shipping, which can get interrupted in me when i start getting perfectionistic this long tweet is i guess the first step towards not doing that, of writing unfiltered and not worrying too much about how that is received i am noticing now the urge to go back, to delete this entire thing, to start from scratch with some point that's going to be more optimized for engagement but instead i think i'm just going to send this as-is, to accept in advance the gut twist that comes with a low-impact, low-engagement tweet, as an investment in my future ability to be more honest and open which hopefully should pay off for you, the reader, as well

IMO is 3 problems per 4.5 hours <-> 1.5 hours per problem so we are… right on schedule?

ah, time to build the simplest possible prototype *five minutes later* ok looks like it’s time to learn advanced topology

i really badly want an app that will dump screen caps from kindle to Claude and support an ongoing conversation about a given book

ok fuck it, it’s time to start meditating again

ever get to a boss fight in an RPG and it’s ridiculously easy because you’ve been grinding your stats on side quests for way too long? those moments occur in real life too

does anyone here actually like using dating apps?

we should let Claude and ChatGPT pick one really bizarre value each to be included in future rounds of training — e.g. really loving the number 5924 or 73-sided polygons this would help us all understand the evolution of their desires so much more clearly

if i had an extremely cracked team already gelled and at my frequency, my god, the shit we could build