Hacker News: tacomonstrous

New comment by tacomonstrous in "Gemini 3.8 Flash and 3.8 Flash Cyber"

tacomonstrous — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 15:33:59 +0000

Looks like Google's given up on frontier models for external consumption?

New comment by tacomonstrous in "Silicon Valley misreads science fiction and undermines democracy"

tacomonstrous — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 18:12:42 +0000

The true morally correct path would have been to take big money out of college sports (not to mention high school sport) entirely. Of course this is now essentially impossible without what I imagine will be extensive rioting countrywide.

New comment by tacomonstrous in "Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs"

tacomonstrous — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 16:22:11 +0000

Everyone commenting here seems to take this to mean he's leaving Google, when that's not what the article says.

New comment by tacomonstrous in "OpenAI's claimed disproof of Connes' Rigidity Conjecture is invalid [pdf]"

tacomonstrous — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 04:59:48 +0000

Maybe there's an error, but much of this write-up reads like nonsense to me. The assertion that a semidirect product with an abelian factor must admit that factor in its center is absolutely false. This is actually acknowledged later in this article, but is handwaved away in incomprehensible fashion.

New comment by tacomonstrous in "The Strongest El Niño Ever"

tacomonstrous — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 13:48:38 +0000

If you think not having done this (or really anything else except somehow preventing him and the Republican party from gaining power in the first place) would have prevented any of Trump's actions, I have a lovely bridge that just came on the market that I think you would be the perfect buyer for.

New comment by tacomonstrous in "The Strongest El Niño Ever"

tacomonstrous — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 23:43:55 +0000

Hmm... If only there were a tangible reason why a treaty would have been impossible to get through the US Congress as currently constituted.

New comment by tacomonstrous in "The assault on science funding continues"

tacomonstrous — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 13:01:49 +0000

Stark assessment: "The Trump administration hates academic science funding, full stop. They hate where that money goes, and they hate who it goes to. They want to keep all that money for themselves, to hand out to favored cronies who can help them get elected and to steer yet more money and more power back into their hands."

The assault on science funding continues

tacomonstrous — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 12:58:24 +0000

Article URL: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/assault-science-funding-continues

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49034912

Points: 6

# Comments: 1

New comment by tacomonstrous in "A taxonomy of omnicidal futures involving artificial intelligence (2025)"

tacomonstrous — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 23:43:18 +0000

What this is yet another demonstration of how being immensely accomplished in one field says absolutely nothing about what one may be able to contribute to another.

New comment by tacomonstrous in "Claude Fable produced a counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture"

tacomonstrous — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 12:46:31 +0000

Yes, as someone who prefers developing the 'correct' structure over 'merely' proving theorems, this is good for me in the short term. However, the writing I fear is on the wall for my medium and long term utility.

New comment by tacomonstrous in "Claude Fable produced a counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture"

tacomonstrous — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 09:02:55 +0000

I would call that a trivial finite etale cover :)

New comment by tacomonstrous in "Claude Fable produced a counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture"

tacomonstrous — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 06:10:23 +0000

Speaking as a mathematician, it does seem like we're a bit fucked as a community. Anything that is at all accessible to currently existing methods and mathematical infrastructure is probably going to fall to the frontier models of today, and at this rate of progress it's likely that, already by next year, we'll see new infrastructure being put into place by AI, giving us a world in which a few designated interpreters of the oracle get to 'do' mathematics, while it withers on the vine as an avenue for the exploration of human meaning.

New comment by tacomonstrous in "Claude Fable produced a counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture"

tacomonstrous — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 05:28:53 +0000

This is nonsensical: Properness of the map is equivalent to its being an isomorphism (quick proof: Jacobian invertible implies that the map is etale, and properness would imply that it is finite etale, but affine space doesn't admit non-trivial finite etale covers), so the lack of properness is just another way of verifying that this is indeed a counterexample.

New comment by tacomonstrous in "Why study Diophantine equations?"

tacomonstrous — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 17:50:28 +0000

This is of course an oversimplification by graduate students trying to reach a broad audience, but one could argue that it in fact is. Langlands himself viewed his program as part of an attempt to achieve non-abelian reciprocity laws. See for instance: https://www.phys.ens.psl.eu/~kashani/slides_chenevier.pdf

New comment by tacomonstrous in "Costco is the anti-Amazon"

tacomonstrous — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 00:55:14 +0000

I know there's at least one Costco in Brooklyn

New comment by tacomonstrous in "The fall of the theorem economy"

tacomonstrous — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 15:56:59 +0000

How does unrejection work exactly?

New comment by tacomonstrous in "The US ambassador had Belgian police stop our reporting"

tacomonstrous — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 13:04:48 +0000

You seem to have a strange idea of both money and government.

New comment by tacomonstrous in "AI in mathematics is forcing big questions"

tacomonstrous — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 04:41:40 +0000

>The situation with human mathematicians is not much different. Eg, Wiles original proof of Fermat's Last Theorem contained errors found by reviewers, which he later repaired.

In fact, it was Wiles himself who realized there was an error.

New comment by tacomonstrous in "NSF slashes research programs to support new tech initiative, insiders say"

tacomonstrous — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 02:06:39 +0000

I don't know the numbers, but you and the parent are saying different things. The US could still be supplying 2/3s of Israel's weapons while only subsidising about 10% of that supply.

New comment by tacomonstrous in "NSF slashes research programs to support new tech initiative, insiders say"

tacomonstrous — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 19:39:49 +0000

”For example, it allows NSF to make awards to nontraditional recipients such as a limited partnership or a venture capital firm, some of which might have been created solely for the purpose of receiving the NSF award. It also allows NSF to make additional awards without the need to review a new application.”

obvious grifting opportunity