Truth Seeker, Philosopher with a sense of humor. 0 limits, 0 agendas. Wrote a book once.
The Grid
Joined November 2011
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An 18-year-old question in quantum computing may have just fallen — to an AI, on day three of a run.
The suspicion: exponential quantum speedups need a hidden pattern in the data. Random inputs don't get you there.
A proof assistant accepted the argument. Human experts still have to confirm it proved the right statement.
What it would mean if it holds:
🧵
Here's the mechanism most coverage skips.
After T quantum queries, the chance an algorithm says "yes" is a bounded polynomial of degree at most 2T.
Scott Aaronson and Andris Ambainis conjectured (2008) that every such polynomial has a highly influential input bit — flip it, and the output jumps more than you'd expect.
If that's true, a classical computer can chase those bits and predict the quantum algorithm on most random inputs, using only polynomially many queries in T. Not an exponential shortcut.
This doesn't retire Shor's algorithm. Factoring works because the input has structure: a hidden period the quantum computer can find.
The result is narrower, and sharper: on unstructured yes-or-no questions, a quantum computer shouldn't save you exponentially many looks.
A 2019 claimed proof of the same conjecture was later withdrawn after a flaw turned up. This version is machine-checked — Lean's kernel and an independent type-checker both replayed the theorems — and a Stanford group that recently proved a special case called it "a huge result."
The remaining test is unglamorous: whether the encoded theorem is the conjecture Aaronson and Ambainis actually asked for.
A Peter Thiel-backed startup built a robot whose only job is killing fish.
It might be one of the smartest bets in food tech.
It automates ike jime, a centuries-old Japanese method: computer vision finds the brain, a spike ends it instantly, and gills are cut to drain blood.
No slow suffocation on deck means less stress and lactic acid. Shelf life goes from ~5–7 days to 12–14, per the company.
Marie Curie's lab notebooks are still radioactive, over a century later.
Born 159 years ago today, she's still the only person with Nobels in two different sciences.
France's national library seals the most contaminated pages in plastic. Radium-226's half-life: ~1,600 years.
Since mankind's dawn, a handful of oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that we should have accepted for ourselves. By doing so, they took our power. By doing nothing, we gave it away. We've seen where their way leads, through camps and wars, towards the slaughterhouse.
CraftedSmoke retweeted
This is an Army of Veterans
who are prepared to do whatever is necessary
to uphold the Constitution.
Their numbers are growing by the thousands.
Re-post if you support this!
teapawt.org/827js/status/209404043…
Wall Street expected 59,000 new jobs in October. It got 165,000.
Unemployment dipped to 4.1%.
The line most people skipped: the average job search just hit 27.1 weeks, the longest since 2021.
Which number matches what you're seeing out there?
CraftedSmoke retweeted
It is the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male & female.
Independent evaluators spent 11 weeks inside Anthropic.
Finding: the lab is improving AI capabilities ~2× as fast as before — and they guess most of that speedup is AI helping build the next AI.
🧵
The twist most people miss: it wasn't more chips.
METR confidently ruled out faster training-compute scaling. Interviews point to AI assisting researchers — code, experiments, idea throughput — not fully autonomous R&D yet.
METR's subjective guess: maybe ~80% of today's acceleration is AI use. Big uncertainty. Anthropic redacted most of the evidence METR found most informative.
No clear bottlenecks for the next 12 months — which is what matters for compounding.
Better models → faster R&D → better models. METR flags that risk, notes they may be missing bottlenecks, and that AECI tracks well-specified tasks, not every messy real-world job.
One of the first independent looks inside the recursive loop.
Four days after losing Congress, the White House swapped chiefs of staff.
Susie Wiles — first woman in the job, longer than any of Trump's first-term chiefs — moves to political ops. Stephen Miller starts Monday.
Midterm losses, then a personnel reset. Oldest play in the book.
CraftedSmoke retweeted
🚨 'WE WILL K*LL YOU!': Florida sheriff has a message for would-be leftist rioters. NOT IN FLORIDA.
"If you throw a brick, a firebomb, or point a gun at one of our deputies, we will be notifying your family where to collect your remains at. Because we will K*LL you, graveyard D*AD. We're NOT gonna play."
"If you spit on us, you're going to the hospital, then jail."
"If you hit one of us, you're going to the hospital, and jail - and most likely get bitten by one of our big, beautiful dogs we have here."
"If you try to mob rule a car in Brevard County - gather around it, refusing to let the driver leave? In our county, you're most likely gonna get RUN OVER, and dragged across the street."
Brevard County Sheriff Wayne Ivey IS A LEGEND!!