AlanYx

Thank you for pointing this out. Dahl is not really an Akkadian-focused scholar, though he teaches it; he's more well-known for his work on proto-Elamite. Still, probably more than capable to assist. I wonder if any Akkadian experts have weighed in on this translation?

Cuis is the easiest entrypoint into modern Smalltalk. All the others have so, so much stuff (great stuff, just a lot of it). Cuis takes the approach of paring things down to something minimal. You can understand everything from top to bottom fairly easily.

A surprising amount of people use the back camera for document scanning.

One things Kimi is useful for is accessing/querying websites that have paywalls or try to prevent use by AI agents. It is aggressive and persistent for that, though not always successful.

The payphones aren't really all that anachronistic. Cue Phoebe Bridgers' 2020 song "Kyoto": "They still got payphones / It cost a dollar a minute".

That last point might change as you get deeper into the novel.

Still such a great novel; has aged very, very well.

North Korea does this too, actually (and like Israel, for both genders). It's probably one of the significant reasons why NK has such a comparatively effective offensive cybersecurity group, despite how unlikely that would seem given their overall industrial capacity.

NK likely also gets a bit of a boost because of the extended length of mandatory service. Males on technical teams have to serve for 13 years.

Russia has historically not had mandatory universal conscription.

Specifically Unit 8200, which really has no counterpart elsewhere in the world given Israel's mandatory universal conscription. Imagine if you could systematically screen every young adult in a country, identify those with the strongest math/quantitative skills or promising deep tech skills and divert them into one single security special ops org for several years. You'd get the concentration of skill that Unit 8200 has been producing.

Dentistry is an interesting field because it's the only major profession where you can still routinely get hired as a full professor without a PhD. (This used to be more common in other professions fifty years ago.)

As an outsider, perhaps this is one reason why there seems to be more of an applied and subjective judgment-based element to the profession, and significant divergence in professional norms/treatment choices internationally (some examples where norms differ quite substantially: value of silver diamine treatment, rates of general anesthesia use for pediatric treatment, attitude towards "immediate loading" in implant treatment).

Is this really a good solution for cooking though? The grid of holes for the speakers in the main column are going to get clogged with food spatters in no time, and they wouldn't be easy to clean. An iPad I can understand, since you can just wipe it off.

Anthropic did throw the UAE government under the bus in their "Detecting and countering misuse of AI: September 2026" report, specifically GTG-84002, which is framed in the report as a single misuse but bundles together a half dozen separate previously confidential projects from the UAE government, not all of which were unlawful/unethical (some were though).

Not trying to compare Anthropic to Meta, they're different beasts. But Anthropic is an unusual company in that it is willing to throw paying government customers under the bus if Anthropic unilaterally decides what those governments are doing is inappropriate.

The discourse around "gatekeeping" is so poisonous. I think a lot of non-mathematicians are looking at this situation as if this was a guild of medical doctors or some other profession with a regulatory monopoly trying to "gatekeep" access to math from a new upstart in order to preserve their own pricing power. That's not how the math community works, it welcomes all and there is no barrier to contribution.

Mathematicians do have some vested interest in keeping the profession from collapsing into an intellectual oligopoly, where one or two commercial players with early access to their own internal models continuously scoops everyone else and pollutes the field with externalities, and the profession itself collapses, only leaving AIs and hobbyists able to stand. At that point it'll be the AI firms who become rent-seekers. That's not really "gatekeeping" in any conventional sense of the term, it's protecting a healthy economy of ideas and the long-term development of mathematics.

Only a subset contain Lean formalizations. And even for that subset, there's the potential that the formalization is semantically off (that is, it's a formalization for a slightly different problem).

The reaction/fallout would have been substantially improved even if OpenAI had just made a commitment to not scoop external researchers using an internal model until X months after the model had been made available to the public.

That would have given grad students who've been grinding towards a PhD for years a fighting chance to see if they could leverage the model to push their work forward, rather than watching years of work potentially turn to dust via a tool they don't even have access to.

It wouldn't delay the progress of mathematics by any meaningful amount in the long run (an X month delay is nothing) for OpenAI to take this approach, and would help somewhat to preserve the health of mathematics as a field. Without it, the motivation for any young mathematician to devote years to a new problem must be sapped knowing there's an uneven playing field... an OpenAI team with access to colossal tools months before they'll ever be able to get access, willing to scoop anyone as soon as they can, perhaps without even taking the time to completely understand the proof.

I don't see any long-term benefit to OpenAI with their current strategy. This is an internal model; it's not available for sale at the moment. They've said they're not even going to bother claiming the Millenium Prize money for Navier-Stokes. It feels like kicking over hundreds of other people's chessboards just because they can.