Syzygies

America's Cup and Formula One races are won at the design stages. We praise the drivers, but what succeeds is the engineering.

If billions of dollars of IPO value were at stake, competing to use animation to convey an understanding to test subjects, this design would be toast. The model is cripplingly realistic, wasting most of its cognitive bandwidth on provoking a "Gee willikers, it really looks like someone built that out of wood!" reaction, leaving us to squint to see the balls or the parts of the machine implementing the logic. There's a particular genius to logo design, that needs to be applied here. If this were instead a cartoon animation, Walt Disney dosed the coffee one day at the studio to see what his animators could do, we'd get a visualization that better used its cognitive bandwidth to establish an icon language with the viewer.

The abacus is the T-shirt for this idea. Like a musical instrument, one can imagine operating an abacus without holding one, and some shopkeepers were able to leave theirs in a drawer after enough practice. Beads, like balls, leverage our brains' ability to manipulate physical reality, but the idea of counting became more vivid as the abacus design grew more streamlined. It not only became easier to build and operate, but it became a more effective "thought worm" implant into our minds.

We make contact with aliens, and in their museums they have an abacus for regular expressions. What does it look like?

This is important to get right, because soon AI will communicate with us using Pixar-quality 3D animation, generated in real time for each conversational turn. Many people still think of AI communication as exchanging "text message" prompts, but for my math research I'm already getting illustrated PDF slide decks as AI's responses to me in single conversational turns. One just has to ask; the form AI communication takes is only limited by our imagination.

Feynman diagrams and the like as rare exceptions, scientific communication is still mired in "telegraph" form, math symbols one reads along lines of text that once lived on physical paper. As future generations adapt to visual symbolic reasoning, the animations AI will use to communicate with us will evolve from representational to abstract art, for a "fatter pipe" pouring symbolic information into our minds. They'll find the "thought worms" that best hack our minds, make us smarter.

I'd love to see what your regex viewer would look like, if you were imagining this future.

...and I thought Go was standard C!

One of the high points of my acting career (such as it was, second only to doing a scene with Russell Crowe as math consultant to A Beautiful Mind) was MacBeth.

While Avatar actor Stephen Lang was still in college, he played MacBeth. I brought him news that Birnam Wood had moved, and he drew inspiration from every fiber of my being to deliver his "tale told by an idiot" spiel.

I can still feel the spit hitting my face!

My favorite nonfiction book in years is "Storia della pasta in dieci piatti" by Luca Cesari. The signature chapter explores the day in 2015 when celebrity chef Carlo Cracco stated on television that a clove of garlic is an ingredient that can go into amatriciana. Cesari explores the absurdity of the resulting uproar, given the actual history of the dish.

People like to make rules. Leave them be in their tree houses, unless you really like to play too. I thought it was a right of passage in high school to laugh at the French forming committees to tell peasants how to speak their native language. We haven't generalized from this example?

Who gives a rat's ass whether this governing body thinks Pluto is a planet or not?

I grew up in Greece, a suburb of Rochester, New York where Kodak Park and its research labs were located. Aliens would have spotted the labs in 1965 as the one place in the northeast still lit up during the great blackout.

Researchers bought nearby for great housing values and short commutes. My high school was typical working class weak except for an exceptional science program, to support the many "faculty brats" like myself. Half my friends had parents working in the research labs. One day in the 1960's I saw my first computer, sized like a ship's bridge where I played a primitive computer game, two dots orbiting a sun.

My Dad devised the "Bayer filter" for recording color in digital cameras. His best friend played a similar role in video. Long before the internet, the deepest facts about the world came home to me as tales told to my Dad by colleagues in the labs.

My Dad's first experience with a loop was punched cards of a different color, put them back in the hopper and make a mark on a blackboard. These stories prepared me for the inevitability of computerizing my branch of mathematics.

Still, reading this account, I'm surprised so much so soon.

This is helpful, proving this entire discussion is subjective.

I'm a retired mathematician with a primary research project, and too many tangential projects I fear revisiting; tokens be damned, will they burn all my time? Translate the K&R C computer algebra system that got me tenure to 64-bit modern C. Implement a no syntax macro language to support my Go60 ZMK keyboard. Realize my vision of how interlinear translations should work so I can read Flaubert in the original for an online course this fall. Rejigger my decades-overgrown .bashrc setup and my status, install scripts to manage Bash, Ruby, Lean, Tailscale and my Homebrew setup across four machines. And a waiting queue as these tasks clear.

Fable 5 (with Opus 5 as backup) on Zed with a $200 Max plan has been a sea change for me. Carefully alternating planning and auto modes, I manage all these projects at once using Zed's Threads Sidebar. I'm a virtual CTO taking intense meetings all day, relieved to go cook or run errands when credits stall. Anything I've procrastinated for months is now making steady progress; the translation project I feared taking a month is nearly done with several hours of my attention. My personal IT support is now more advanced and easy to use than I ever imagined possible.

My project creation has been a series of agentic "parenting" steps, so there are years of evolving cultural DNA. I had so hated agent comments that recent agents simply weren't commenting at all, instead recording all context in support documents. We had a "come to Jesus" meeting to discuss what commenting style would benefit both my failing working memory and future agents' token use.

It has taken me two brutal years so far to learn to use AI. AI is a dangerous and powerful Iron Man suit, an extension of our associative minds that is a different experience for each person.

One doesn't ride a surfboard by telling it which way to go. I would surely die surfing a big wave, but my experience with AI doesn't resemble other accounts.

Pub tourism is one of my favorite ways to spend a day in London. The pub "density" isn't all it's cracked up to be. To be able to make it to the next pub for a bathroom (and to preserve my ability to walk) I've found half pints to be ideal. Ideally, accompanied here and there by pub food.

Bar staff don't universally view half pint orders with respect.

Backup is way too important to trust to Time Machine. One should evaluate SuperDuper! and Carbon Copy Cloner side by side, and make a choice. Buy them both, or use both trials.

They both have decades of experience providing astounding support. I should know as an edge case that has tried to rip the wings off of both their programs (trying to migrate away from disastrous RAID software and ending up with duplicate UUIDs, the sort of thing that never happens to anyone else). This matters even if you never need support: Their software is battle-tested by decades of user experience that they understand.

This leads to software convergence, which this rewrite furthers. At first SuperDuper! appeared to me to be oversimplified to avoid trouble at all costs, while Carbon Copy Cloner appeared to be a collection of enthusiast scripts. One could in fact find the scripts driving either; I expanded SuperDuper!'s scope by directly calling an internal script for years.

Decades ago I used Retrospect. They were arrogant twits but they supported external tape drives and such. My breaking point came when when my life turned bicoastal, and their time zone bug forced full backups after every flight. No MBA stereotype could prepare me for the stupid brushoff I heard at a MacWorld show over this. External drives had become affordable enough to motivate a switch to SuperDuper!

More recently there was a macOS release that put the category into crisis, and Carbon Copy Cloner figured it out first. I switched and I haven't looked back. I loved SuperDuper! and I love Carbon Copy Cloner. How much control surface do you want? You have to see for yourself.

I thought this was how Nobel Prizes sickened fields.

Mathematicians believe we're lucky to have been spared the Nobel Prize. While some repeat a discredited story this was because Gösta Mittag-Leffler was sleeping with Nobel's wife, it is generally felt that mixing ego and the possibility of a Nobel Prize has toxic effects on a field.

We now have both the Fields Medal and the Abel Prize, but both pass over the midlife period when ego eclipses talent.

"In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they're not."

I tried this, long ago. I just wasn't getting Haskell, so I'd retype my programs from memory and reconstruction. Obvious for music, why not for code?

All these untested opinions? You'd think we were discussing BMWs.

It is mathematical folklore that one should attempt to prove a conjecture by day, disprove it by night. Jordan Ellenberg recently popularized this in his 2014 book. He and I both heard this from Barry Mazur, but it dates at least to Bing, if not antiquity.

What is the purpose of mathematics? To be the architect of new conventions by seeing clearly past the old? If so, believing that the entire point is proving statements is a poor start. Bill Thurston was a visionary who happened to prove a great deal of what he saw, but his influence was his vision.

For those of us who like to understand every line of code we generate, and have labored for years to learn how to make best use of AI, a factor of two is a reasonable estimate for our productivity gain.

For those of us who believe mathematics is about achieving human understanding, having machines decide what's true and what isn't makes a night and day difference. Again, about a factor of two.