Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
Making Chicken Transparent Using Dorito DustModifying the optical properties of biological tissues with tartrazine
CasualPhysicsEnjoyer walks through a Nature paper on making live tissue optically transparent with absorbing molecules such as tartrazine (the yellow dye in Doritos), then recreates and explains the physics at home: refractive-index matching, complex permittivity, and why a yellow dye can open a window into chicken meat.
15 min · 3,512 words
The math that OpenAI keeps for itself
Daniel Paleka on what OpenAI's flood of AI-proved math results conspicuously skips—especially cryptography—and why the gaps matter for research priorities before the field's incentives shift further.
5 min · 1,192 words
How worried should we be about extinction risk from AI?
Fields Medallist Timothy Gowers reflects on Jacob Tsimerman's pivot to AI safety and argues carefully about extinction risk, timelines, and what mathematicians can usefully do.
34 min · 7,782 words
Why are we even doing all this?A guest post on What’s new about the value of curiosity-driven work in an age of AI
Rikab Gambhir’s guest post on Terence Tao’s blog asks what research and learning are for when AI can already answer many technical questions—arguing for curiosity, taste, and the human practice of doing hard things even when tools get smarter.
6 min · 1,455 words
Brian Potter of Construction Physics looks at whether robotics can repeat AI's scaling playbook, explaining what robot training data is, how it is gathered through teleoperation, simulation, and other sources, and how large today's robot datasets are compared with those behind language models.
16 min · 3,630 words
Becoming a stranger in my own field
An industry AI researcher reflects on how the social contract of scientific work is changing and what it means to feel like a stranger in your own field.
8 min · 1,873 words
The quiet math revolution (and where do we go from here)
Marcus Johansson reacts to OpenAI’s dump of 722 model-written math manuscripts, asking what machine-checked proofs mean for mathematical practice, who still understands the results, and where Terence Tao’s “Math 2.0” idea leaves human mathematicians.
10 min · 2,396 words
We're missing an entire kind of asteroid
Signore Galilei explains why almost every gravitationally stable region of the Solar System has known asteroids—except one conspicuous empty niche—and what that absence might mean.
4 min · 866 words
Who Taught the Machines Mathematics?
Nisheeth Vishnoi reflects on OpenAI releasing more than seven hundred AI-produced mathematical manuscripts: on the human knowledge these systems were built from, credit and attribution, and what becomes of mathematics as a human practice.
10 min · 2,194 words
OpenAI, the Partition Principle, and mathematics
Set theorist Asaf Karagila responds to OpenAI's claim about the Partition Principle and the Axiom of Choice: why he will not send Sam Altman whisky, what formalization still misses, and what the episode says about math, AI and publicity.
5 min · 1,182 words
Scott Aaronson reacts to OpenAI's release of 372 AI-generated mathematical results, including a claimed proof of the Unique Games Conjecture his wife Dana Moshkovitz worked on for years. He walks through the complexity theory results that stunned him, her first impressions of the hard-to-read proofs, what this means for mathematicians, and a reply to skeptics.
10 min · 2,293 words
Alex Tabarrok examines a Harvard Environmental Health paper linking Costco density to cancer rates—and why the correlation likely reflects confounding rather than warehouse clubs causing disease.
1 min · 310 words
The Missing Model: How AI Agents Behave Over Months
Muhammad Hanzla argues labs lack a study design for how AI agents behave across months of real work, and outlines why that longitudinal model should be built before longer autonomy.
15 min · 3,495 words
Quo Vadis, Mathematics?Is Mathematics Over, or Just Graduating?
xAI co-founder Christian Szegedy asks whether mathematics is ending or graduating as AI automates theorem proving—drawing on Hungarian competition culture to argue AI will scale applied math as infrastructure while “high math” concentrates on deepest questions.
8 min · 1,877 words
Haunted by the ghosts of materialism
lcamtuf explores free will vs scientific materialism, brains-in-vats, Boltzmann brains, and the simulation hypothesis — arguing techie utilitarianism misses what philosophy is good for.
2 min · 498 words
A Minsky machine in ncurses terminfo
Nicolas Seriot shows how ncurses terminfo parameter expansion can simulate a 2-counter Minsky machine—hosting a Fibonacci program in your terminal, clocked by /usr/bin/top.
5 min · 1,222 words
Three AI Agents, Two Countries, and One Very Uneven World Wide Web
Roya Pakzad compares GPT, Claude, and Muse on multilingual research tasks across languages and jurisdictions, documenting gaps in source access, human-in-the-loop oversight, and observability.
5 min · 1,206 words
David Buchanan explores how C2PA content credentials handle time, and what it takes to forge or bend timestamps in the provenance chain.
4 min · 919 words
The Era of Programming Languages Exploration is upon Us
programming_languages research perspectives There was a recent thread on the TYPES mailing list with researchers speculating about the future of our field given the disruptive effects of AI tools on programming in general.
6 min · 1,374 words
Why consciousness is more likely a property of life than of computation and why creating conscious, or even conscious-seeming AI, is a bad idea.
34 min · 7,804 words