Hacker News: ajs1998

New comment by ajs1998 in "Formalizing Fermat's Last Theorem"

ajs1998 — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 20:44:24 +0000

> What this work is, and is not

> I am currently being funded by the EPSRC to formalize a proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, and a naive reaction to the news above is that I no longer have any work to do. This is not the case. The work certainly achieves some of the aims of the EPSRC project, and indeed it goes much further in terms of what is formalized (I only promised the EPSRC that I would reduce FLT to the 1980s; this repo proves the whole thing). But I also promised several other things to EPSRC: firstly, that I would be making pull requests to Lean’s mathematics library, adding fundamental objects from modern number theory; this is ongoing. And secondly, and perhaps most importantly, that I would be creating a dynamic document enabling humans to explore the modern proof. My guess is that it is unlikely that Anthropic are going to do this; they will feel that their job is done with the formalization (and they did not formalize the modern proof anyway).

> Note that mathematically this work of anthropic tells us essentially nothing: I am on record as saying that I am 99.9% sure that the proof of FLT is OK, and most people in the number theory community are 100% sure (formalization has made me more paranoid about the mathematical literature than most). From my understanding of the argument, the formalization just faithfully follows the early literature on the proof and adds nothing.

https://xenaproject.wordpress.com/2026/09/04/flt-anthropic-h...

New comment by ajs1998 in "Formalizing Fermat's Last Theorem"

ajs1998 — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 20:39:31 +0000

ZFC is probably the biggest foundation, and only Choice is apparently controversial. The results aren't that weird, they're just different and occasionally more useful than using !Choice.

New comment by ajs1998 in "The most official water costs $120k a gallon"

ajs1998 — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 22:25:41 +0000

I get your point but unless you actually need tritium water the number still means nothing lol.

New comment by ajs1998 in "Politician reads AI prompt during assembly"

ajs1998 — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 18:01:44 +0000

It's a red flag. Even if they agree and understand whatever they copied from chatgpt, they were too lazy to clean up its output. Are they also too lazy to read the news or does chatgpt summarize their articles too? AI people are like emperors without clothes. Totally embarrassing to witness.

This is bad because it's only getting harder to trust people. This is not someone I would want representing me. Although I'm not thrilled about any of my representatives anyway.

New comment by ajs1998 in "Gleam Is Now on Tangled"

ajs1998 — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 06:03:29 +0000

That's your handle and it points to the server where your atproto account's data is stored. You can use this same login for other atproto apps and it will all be stored on the server at tngl.sh A username.bsky.social handle just means bsky set up that account and your data lives at the bsky.social PDS. You can migrate to a different PDS and change your handle if you don't trust them. You can host a PDS yourself if you like. I agree it's a little clumsy, but I'm sure friction can be reduced.

The idea is to give users control over their identity, network, and feeds instead of big social platforms like facebook or twitter that choose what content you see and lock you into their closed network.

New comment by ajs1998 in "We moved our Bluesky data to Eurosky"

ajs1998 — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 17:09:15 +0000

They made a transphobic joke 3 times and the bluesky users that enabled their intolerance filter never saw it. What exactly is the problem? The posts weren't deleted. Nobody liked the joke because it's a bad joke.

New comment by ajs1998 in "Steam Machine launches today"

ajs1998 — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 20:16:12 +0000

It's been a while since I built a PC but that price seems very fair

New comment by ajs1998 in "The state of building user interfaces in Rust"

ajs1998 — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 14:17:45 +0000

Looks pretty neat. I'm a little disappointed about a closed beta though.

New comment by ajs1998 in "Mathematicians issue warning as AI rapidly gains ground"

ajs1998 — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 19:19:14 +0000

Spoken like someone that has no idea why mathematicians are important.

New comment by ajs1998 in "Language Models Need Sleep"

ajs1998 — Tue, 26 May 2026 16:27:15 +0000

This is the struggle of naming papers. You could stretch definitions and make your own sexy headline or you could be precise and fewer people will read it.

New comment by ajs1998 in "Show HN: Audiomass – a free, open-source multitrack audio editor for the web"

ajs1998 — Mon, 25 May 2026 01:25:13 +0000

Could be pretty easy to do with atproto accounts. Users could save/share their music as a tangled.sh repo and other people could contribute or fork as they please. A nice UI could hide all of that and make it fun to collaborate on music.

Too bad I'm lazy. RiffHub looks neat.

New comment by ajs1998 in "CBS Radio signs off after nearly 100 years of broadcasting"

ajs1998 — Fri, 22 May 2026 19:23:08 +0000

It's not just the medium. Streaming from the internet is a totally different product than radio. There's no reason we can't have both.

New comment by ajs1998 in "What's a mathematician to do? (2010)"

ajs1998 — Sun, 10 May 2026 19:10:08 +0000

I simply don't care to gatekeep what counts as education. It has taught me things from videos I can still recall a decade later and pushed me to explore different areas of math I wouldn't have done otherwise.

It's education for whoever finds it educational

New comment by ajs1998 in "What's a mathematician to do? (2010)"

ajs1998 — Sun, 10 May 2026 16:27:13 +0000

This is why I think Brady Haran is one of the coolest living mathematicians. Numberphile is educating a new generation of young mathematicians for anyone with access to youtube. Accessible math communication is so important. So many cool things are buried in textbooks and papers the average person would never read.

New comment by ajs1998 in "10 years ago, someone wrote a test for servo that included an expiry in 2026"

ajs1998 — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 15:59:53 +0000

Randomness is useful if you expect your code to do the correct thing with some probability. You test lots of different samples and if they fail more than you expect then you should review the code. You wouldn't test dynamic random samples of add(x, y) because you wouldn't expect it to always return 3, but in this case it wouldn't hurt.

New comment by ajs1998 in "The simple geometry behind any road"

ajs1998 — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 21:24:41 +0000

:( but the math is fun And they went through all this effort anyways, and to blog about it.

New comment by ajs1998 in "DaVinci Resolve – Photo"

ajs1998 — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 13:58:33 +0000

Is it only in the Studio version? Or the 21 Beta release? I downloaded the free version of Resolve 20 and I don't see any evidence that I can edit my raw nikon photos. The "Color" tab looks like it could be helpful if I knew how to turn my images in the media pool into "stills"

New comment by ajs1998 in "All elementary functions from a single binary operator"

ajs1998 — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 16:57:33 +0000

Oh my god the PC history is hilarious

https://th.if.uj.edu.pl/~odrzywolek/homepage/personal/pc/pc_...

New comment by ajs1998 in "A perfectable programming language"

ajs1998 — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 03:59:44 +0000

It is verso. My understanding is that it's like really fancy javadocs that makes communicating Lean code easier for everyone.

https://github.com/leanprover/verso

New comment by ajs1998 in "Artemis II crew take “spectacular” image of Earth"

ajs1998 — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 22:11:18 +0000

It disappoints me greatly they're not raw :(