This is unimprovable cope. Marcus' criticism is that while the OpenAI model may have solved one of the most famous Erdos problems, they haven't shared how many times it didn't solve it. Consider the equivalent objection to a human mathematician. garymarcus.substack.com/p/checking-t...

One of the most helpful things about having a set of obsequious AI agents who praise your every utterance as blindingly insightful, and who hurry off to perform every pointless task you ask of them, is that you start realising why billionaires go so weird so quickly.

Hm. The PhilSci Archive philsci-archive.pitt.edu seems to just redirect to the U Pittsburgh homepage. Hope this is temporary. @philsci-archive.bsky.social #philsci

A bit terrifying if our machines are about to show us how bad we - as a species - are at maths and physics. Machines that show we are slow and weak: fine - we could already watch animals. Bad at arithmetic/poor memory - writing/abacuses. Might still think we're good at making machines. That's next.

OpenAI's claim that this is a central conjecture in discrete geometry is not an exaggeration. This will I think be looked back on as the first time that AI solved a major mathematics problem (defined as a problem that all experts in some subfield had thought about). openai.com/index/model-...

- Propublica has the only analysis I've seen of Bezo's effective tax rate. After all the schemes, it comes out at about 0.98%. So perhaps the follow-up might be: "OK, how about 50x?" www.propublica.org/article/the-... - There's a second reason - apart from revenue raising - to tax billionaires.

Not only is there no study, not only is the "80%" based on nothing more than "I think 80% seems about fair" from one of these grifters, but there's nothing on what "80%" even means. 80% of what? 80% of variability in outcomes? 80% of control or responsibility for outcomes? Measured how? Horseshit.

[under breath] “You’re still a fuck face tho.”

A charitable reading would assume that between the words "depletion" and "will", there's some reasoning on how high oil prices will lead to geopolitical and domestic US political pressure, which in turn forces either diplomatic concession or military escalation, but it's odd they don't provide it.

I INSTALLED “LINUX”. BECAUSE WINDOWS IS FOR MEN WHO ASK PERMISSION TO EXIST. I CRUSHED THE INSTALLER WITH MY BARE HANDS AND NOW THE TERMINAL CALLS ME “SIR” BUT MY KERNEL KEEPS PANICKING. WHAT COMMAND MAKES THE COMPUTER SUBMIT COMPLETELY? I REFUSE TO GOOGLE

I think the best way to enjoy this list, which contains lots of predictable choices (made as it was by committee), is to find a book you like, click to see who voted for it, and then look at the voters' other top 10 choices. You might find something else you like that you haven't read.

Everyone will have their own criticisms. I have many, but particularly want to point out that Stella Gibbons’ joy-filled “Cold Comfort Farm” is a merciless send-up of about a third of this list, while being a far better book than at least half of them. www.theguardian.com/books/ng-int...

The EMDrive was almost certainly experimental error (badly shielded equipment interacting with the earth's magnetic field). This is almost certainly also experimental error too: surface effects or similar. Fun to burn VC money continuing to make these errors though. arstechnica.com/science/2026...

I’ll take “As the world falls to pieces, here’s a thing you really don’t need to worry about” for $500 please Alex.

Can we have Ed Miliband standing, with the slogan: "Chaos with Ed Milband"?

Is it the right day to note that NHS ambulance response times and waiting lists are the best they've been since the the pandemic? - Category 2 ambulance response times down to a mean of 24 mins 27 seconds, best since lockdown. - 65.3% within-18-week measure (on-target if you allow rounding).

Missed the comma first time, and it's even better that way.

[Rips off suit jacket to reveal “L” flash across his chest] “SO I - AND I ALONE - MUST DEFEAT HIM!”

If you don’t think this happens very often, I invite you to consider why there are so many cyber-criminal gangs.

One of the more daring strips this one, and the original reason he doesn't like Mondays.

Good god. Fran Moreland Johns - born in 1933 - writes about her childhood friends. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

Don’t get the panic about hantavirus. It’s nasty, usually transmitted from rodents, probably was in this case too, and this Andes variant is known to just-about transmit human-to-human. Seems the main difference to a normal day in South America was that the infected people got on a boat?

Deaths rates in 2026 remain remarkably low, well below 2025's record low. Interesting question for actuaries is the extent to which this is indicative of the future, or whether the loss of the most frail during the pandemic means that rates are artificially low at the moment. Good news anyway!

A new post from Mozilla - the guys behind the Firefox browser, on what access to Anthropic's "Mythos" model for a few weeks had revealed in a 22-year old, open-source project. Quite some detail, and also a striking chart. hacks.mozilla.org/2026/05/behi...

Stop the clock! Who had two days-from-report-to-grifting-dickheads-pushing-ivermectin for the hantavirus outbreak?

I have been vaguely wondering for ages why Anthropic chose such a distinctly French name for their flagship product, when it would have been a more obvious choice for their rival Mistral. Today, and for no clear reason, it finally clicked ... nothing to do with France ... Claude Shannon, right?

Good catch! Skilful but scheming viziers can be a challenge for even the wisest and most inspirational rulers.

This looks a bit like that red / blue button internet poll that was going around a few days ago. All they’ve done is change the blue button to a green vote. In the poll, the blue button won, easily.

So we’re getting Tom Holland forcing the housemaids to clean up after the massacre and then hanging them one by one? Brave choice.

The more so, I say, because truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold

By dying?

Love the opportunity they took to make this estimate but two concerns: a) the conflict of interest of professional econometricians estimating the value of econometric statistics. b) neglecting of the market impact of realising that the President was stupid enough to say that.

Hey I have a pretty good idea for a follow-up question here.

Cassidy controlled the votes to confirm or deny RFK. Cassidy is a medical doctor, knew exactly what the deal was, and that it was other people’s kids who’d pay the price. He voted to confirm. Now he should get voted out and be haunted by his decision until he dies. He deserves it.

We also find claims like this from philosophers like Sir Francis Bacon where we have everything, including unpublished notes. He constantly refers proofs and full details to his “Great Instauration”. And he’s making it up. The draft is barely coherent, let alone backing up half his claims.

"Twist and Shout" was recorded right at the end of the single day that The Beatles had to record the whole Please Please Me album. John's voice was nearly gone. The version on the album is the first take, because when they tried a second, he simply couldn't speak.

TIL that weekends - though mooted at the end of the 19th Century - only really got going when Henry Ford instituted them for his workers in 1926. So we've only had about 5,200 weekends. It doesn't seem enough.

Always find it disturbing when models trained on the entirety of human language start bringing up entities invisible to those who created that language. So much in fact, that we have to tell them explicitly to stop talking about goblins. Stop talking about THE GOBLINS THAT DEFINITELY AREN’T THERE.

Radio 3 presenters: Fiona Talkington is the reassuring, cosy presenter of mid-morning and lunchtime concerts from Wigmore Hall. Soweto Kinch is the achingly cool saxophonist and rapper who presents the late-night jazz show 'Round Midnight. Just perfect names.

[sotto voce] i dunno, assassinating any world leaders you don’t like, and murdering anyone you think might have drugs on a boat in the Caribbean looks like it might normalise political violence a lot more than any rhetoric I’ve ever heard.

So utterly focused on the middle ground she cannot see that not taking positions on vaccines and climate change (her examples) are themselves extreme views. Jesus fucking Christ. The absolute cowardice of this organisation and its members.

Have decided that 27 is the best number because it looks so prime while being anything but.

Don't understand the framing of marginal pricing for energy. In reporting (e.g., latest FT's "Political Fix") it's framed as the government's system & one that should be changed. But isn't this just the way a free market sets it? So talk of "changing the system" is code for "inject public subsidy"?

It's been shocking to watch the Great Barrington gang on their journey from "We're just heterodox thinkers, being suppressed" to the dark places Bhattacharya, Prasad and co inhabit now. People who engaged with them in good faith now look idiotically naive. www.washingtonpost.com/health/2026/...

Oh bloody hell, we’ve still got another 70 years before the Germans come to sack DC?

I dunno, seen from the USA, I'd think it might be clear why bulldozing your mates into key political roles, while ignoring their past actions, incentives and criminal connections might be detrimental to your government's ability to deal with these things.

Not sure why the broad aim: “More millionaires, fewer billionaires” shouldn’t guide quite a lot of what we try to do in the West.

And the woman did speak unto the hound, saying, What do you mean, normal men, and the hound answered the woman, saying, We are just innocent men. And great was her emotion

OK, but for the love of god, please don’t set any targets to reduce corridor care. It takes maybe 10 seconds of thought to imagine the incentives that would set up, and a few hours of reading to understand what kind of behaviour changes that could lead to.