Many of you don't understand how serious this is, so let me break it down. In computer science there is a famous kind of puzzle called 3-SAT. You are given a long list of yes-or-no switches and a set of rules about how they must be arranged, and you have to find a combination that satisfies every rule. The obvious way to solve it is to try every combination, but each new switch doubles the number of possibilities, so a puzzle with a few hundred switches would take longer than the age of the universe to brute force. For decades, the smartest people in the field found clever tricks that made this a little faster, but every trick still hit the same wall: the time required kept exploding as the puzzle grew. About 25 years ago, two computer scientists, Russell Impagliazzo and Ramamohan Paturi, working with Francis Zane, turned that wall into a formal idea. They proposed the Exponential Time Hypothesis, which says this explosion is not a failure of human cleverness but a law of nature. No algorithm, however brilliant, will ever solve 3-SAT without the time blowing up exponentially. Nobody could prove it, but almost everyone believed it, and it became one of the foundations of modern computer science. Researchers used it as a measuring stick. If you could show that solving some other problem quickly would also crack 3-SAT quickly, you had shown that problem was hopelessly hard too. Hundreds of papers, across scheduling, graphs, logic and much more, rest on this one assumption. Now an internal AI model at OpenAI claims to have broken it. It says it found an algorithm that solves these puzzles meaningfully faster than the hypothesis allows, and it has checked the proof in a computer verification system called Lean. And here is the remarkable part: the very people who proposed the hypothesis, Impagliazzo and Paturi, along with MIT's Ryan Williams, are now leading the public review of whether a machine has disproved their own idea. So what happens next? If the disproof holds, a large part of theoretical computer science has to be revisited. Every result that said "this problem cannot be solved faster, assuming ETH" loses its foundation, and researchers will have to work out which of those walls were real and which were simply where we stopped looking. It does not mean everything becomes easy. The new algorithm is still slow in absolute terms and this is not the famous P versus NP problem being solved. But it means our map of what is possible was wrong in a place we were very confident about, and it was an AI that redrew it. If the disproof fails, the hypothesis survives and the field breathes out, but we will still have watched an AI produce serious, checkable work on one of the deepest questions in the discipline, closely enough that the founders of the idea had to take it seriously. Either way, something has shifted.

asana's co-founder will likely make more from seed investment than all of sand hill road combined. anthropic’s fundraising journey deserves its own netflix series.

Anthropic's financial obligations by company $ANT

NASCAR slowed its cars down to make them safer, and that's the reason 15 of them piled into each other at once on Sunday. The fastest lap in NASCAR history was back in 1987. Bill Elliott went 212.809 mph at Talladega, and nobody has come close since, because NASCAR won't let them. Three days after that lap, Bobby Allison blew a tire in the race at over 200 mph. His car took off like a plane and ripped out a chunk of the fence right in front of the grandstand, and flying debris hurt fans in the stands. That's about as close as the sport has ever come to a crowd disaster. So for 1988 NASCAR bolted a metal plate under the carburetor at Daytona and Talladega to strangle the engine's air. Elliott's car had been making about 625 horsepower. The new ones made around 410, and speeds dropped under 200 and stayed there. Here's where it backfired. At 190 mph the car in front punches a hole in the air, and whoever's tucked in behind rides in that pocket, so two cars nose to tail go faster than either one alone. Now give everybody the same weak engine. Nobody can pull away by themselves, so the only way to go fast is to ride a few feet off somebody's bumper, two and three wide, with the whole field jammed up behind you. Somebody bumps the wrong guy at the wrong angle and there's nowhere for anyone to go. Fans even have a name for it, the Big One, and you can pretty much count on seeing it every time they race there. That's what you're watching here. Sunday's race, five laps to go, and the whole pack comes apart right on the start-finish line. One of the drivers said afterward he just got "a little push in the wrong spot." At Talladega that's all it ever takes. Watch it all the way to the last car. What NASCAR did next was go to work on the crash itself. Drivers had to start wearing HANS head-and-neck restraints after Dale Earnhardt died on the last lap of the 2001 Daytona 500, one of these exact restricted races. Soft walls started going up the next year. The plates turned into tapered spacers in 2019, and today's car still runs about 510 horsepower at Talladega, 160 less than the same engine makes at most other tracks. So Elliott's 212.809 is still sitting in the record book, and keeping it there costs a wreck like this one about twice a year.

Foursquare was acquired last month. The outcome was disappointing. It's taken me a while to write this, but I think I'm finally done grieving it. Here are some thoughts on our final years, an effort to honor the team who helped build & maintain FSQ's legacy, and my attempt to finally get some closure. teendrama.substack.com/p/som…

1/ We discovered something totally unexpected about the neural structure of consciousness that overturns decades of thinking on its biological basis and brings us significantly closer to the recipe for generating conscious awareness. New preprint: biorxiv.org/content/10.64898… (led by @HesseJanis, with @FrankLanfranchi, @_conor_mcgrory, @Yuelin_Shi, and @EngelTatiana)

CLAUDE FOUND THE SEEDS anthropic.com/research/ecdsa…