No bladder issue. Probabilistically, when you load a bus up completely with people (the ideal situation for transit) one of them will have to use the restroom over the course of an hour and a half.
The solution is to make changes so that the bus doesn't take an hour and a half for a short distance. Like a dedicated bus lane during rush hour on a bridge.
I have a paper in JEMS and have solved 20 year old conjectures. I also know that math academia is a catty game which is mostly driven by politics and ego
Perhaps these Fields Medalists are coping that OpenAI made them look stupid, as you suggested. And perhaps you're coping because of some personal grudge you have against academia.
Man that top comment is such a combination of "sneering to show off" and completely wrong that I'm shocked I'm not on reddit.
Recommending The Jazz Theory Book to someone starting from scratch, especially someone self studying, is like recommending CLRS or TAOCP to someone who asks "I'm curious about learning the basics of algorithms and data structures, any good books for self study?" And of course that happens all the time too. Chapter 1 is "here's what intervals like major 3rd and perfect fifths are", Chapter 2 is "here's the major scale and all its diatonic modes and ii-V-I progressions", Chapter 3 is "here's how you might use the Phyrigian mode to play over a Sus flat-9 chord" (pg 48).
Recommending Schoenberg and Messiaen as steps to get a sufficient surface of topics covered for "music theory" is performance art in its own regard. Bravo!
Yeah, that guy tried to argue that Grade 5 ABRSM [1] is “very basic”. Like, excuse me no. “Very basic” is knowing the notes in a major key, and knowing the I IV V chord progression, as well as a basic 4/4 rhythm (8th note hi hats, quarter note kick drum, snare on alternating quarter notes).
I IV V chord progressions and major scales are basic enough I can explain them in a 400 word post from first principles (where no music theory exists except the assertion that the human ear finds the pitch ratios of 2/1, 3/2, 4/3, 5/4, and 6/5 pleasing to the ear, that the human ear wants at least three notes in a chord, and that the human ear wants at least three chords in a progression).
Those books get very complicated very quickly, and cover music that only a relatively few people actually listen to. It was pure gatekeeping, and I’m disappointed people pointing that out were voted down. Not a good moment for Hacker News. It would be like me recommending Lisp or Forth for one’s first programming language.
Having not really used these grading systems growing up, ABRSM is odd to me in general. Has a very very low ceiling for difficulty, at least for piano. I never really know what is appropriate for what grades, especially given that the UK grading system covers MUCH more complex material.
But yes, it takes an amazing amount of arrogance to look at a simple exploration of music theory from first principles and respond with "this isn't music theory"
>Can we say that since every real-life data structure size is bounded by some constant, it is O(1)? If not, why?
>>You may, yes.
Very powerful thinking coming from someone who is "a software performance expert. He ranks among the top 2% of scientists globally (Stanford/Elsevier 2025) and is one of GitHub's top 1000 most followed developers"
It's true you can. Just as you can say that you can enumerate all memory states in a real computer so it can be modelled as a finite state machine. These asymptotic models aren't real (our world as we experience it is finite and bounded) and exist as models from which to gain insights which we can transfer back. I love this argument BTW a classic that usually comes up in these discussions.
Asymptotic models are not a statement of how long it will take; they are classes of functions modeling the relationship between some performance outcome (run time most often, but sometimes memory or other things) and data coming in. These mappings from input to performance characteristics are not conditioned on physical limitations but are rather abstract tools for measuring that relationship.
If you have an instance (which is what I assume is implied by "real-life data structure") bounded by a particular size, then you could say that the runtime complexity is constant with respect to that bound. Whether that is a useful statement to make is another discussion entirely. On its own probably not. It can potentially be useful for analyzing the runtime complexity of operations in more complex algorithms that use this data structure up to a certain fixed size, e.g. as a buffer/cache of some sort.
The "runtime complexity" we're talking about is big-O. In computer science, which includes this discussion of it, that typically refers to a class of functions. Saying "this algorithm is O(...)" is the same as saying "this algorithm's performance can be modeled by a function belonging to the class of functions O(...), meaning that the size of some characteristic such as runtime, relative to its domain, is bounded asymptotically by another function g(x) = ..."
There's another level of imprecision here in common usage, which is that big-O is strictly an upper bound, meaning that Merge Sort is O(N!). What they really mean is big-Theta, a "tight" bound, in which Merge Sort would be θ(n log n).
But for simplicity's sake, let's use big-O to mean "tightly bound" like people do in casual discussion, and further let's say we're talking about runtime as the size of the function based on its domain:
There is no such thing as big-O performance bounded by a "real-life data structure". The entire point of big-O is that it is asymptotic analysis. You could define a number H, where H is the time to the heat death of the universe, and Python's sets and dictionaries would never be O(H). Because you could for your set/dict runtimes of f(n) still find a constant C and k such that f(n) > C*H for n > k. One example would be setting k to H*C + 1, and that works for either f(n) ∈ O(1) or f(n) ∈ O(n^2).
You can analyze algorithms with respect to real physical limitations, but at that point you are not talking about their "big-O" performance. So the author, despite being "top 2% of scientists" in his field, which is "software performance", seems to still be lagging behind your average freshman compsci student who crammed for their complexity analysis exam.
Yeah they are more than happy to allow my VPN traffic to access these donation pages, but the second I try to access anything, it's a blanket 429 to anything I try to go to. Why would I donate to something I can't access?
I'm surprised by this reaction to Claude's verbiage recently. I don't have any issue immediately understanding what it's saying, but then again I read regularly and a lot of the people I know complaining think it's an accomplishment in literacy to get through Dungeon Crawler Carl.
It's not that we can't understand what it's saying (for the most part) it's just when something is very jargon-dense, our brains have to pause or take an additional step to deobfuscate the actual meaning of the word or phrase. It's mentally draining.
I guess my point is that when people are regularly reading dense and challenging material, they can absorb information quickly. It's a literacy gap. Nothing about Claude's output should slow anyone down who did the readings in their upper and higher education coursework, particularly if they continue to read to keep their mind sharp. Based on the examples of "inscrutable" text I've seen, I would be shocked if the average Claude user complaining about this reads a single novel (that's not sci-fi/fantasy written for teenagers) a year.
If you really must have a counterexample, though I am afraid it will not reach you given your apparent stance about the other people, when I read Shakespeare I am constantly thinking of poetic ways to translate sentences and paragraphs into my native language (which, for the record, I consider to be great fun), yet Claude has been delivering the gibberish with increasing velocity, yes, even to me.
That said, I must confess that I have not been complaining per se—I assumed that Claude was getting better and better at mimicking the idiosyncrasies of Silicon Valley bro-speak. Judging from other comments, this may not seem to be the case after all.
It's a specific dialect of its own that comes from RL. Nobody on Earth talks about load-bearing honest caveat seams.
(Another strange thing about Opus 5 is that it will constantly re-mention things it thinks are important, probably a strategy to avoid losing them in the context history.)
Every single time Claude has confused me and I've asked what it's talking about, it's because it's got something completely wrong and has managed to obfuscate the wrongness behind never-introduced terminology, poor analogies and (what I can only assume is) exposure to wording it's used in its chain of thought reasoning.
A single question is enough for it to retract the error and correct itself. Suggesting that not understanding some of these messages is a lack of human comprehension rather than the agent being flat out wrong is...a bold take.
Typically a feature of good human technical communication is the ability to concisely explain key ideas so one can quickly identify any divergences between understanding. Opus 5 is dreadful at this.
The single saving grace is the intuition that if I don't understand it's probably wrong.
Being verbose, convoluted, and obscure does not make you intelligent nor more literate.
Often it’s exactly the opposite. True intelligence and literacy is being able to communicate effectively and to a broad audience in the simplest terms possible.
All four done, full suite green, and the earlier probes still pass.
P1-1 — the refusal is now a full transaction. This was wrong twice, each time more subtly: first it wrote the loser's stale tables and deleted the winner's issues; then it re-read issues freshly but still wrote one file stamped with the loser's generation, so headers split and the next writer overwrote the issue. Both versions shared one anomaly — a single-file write inside a store whose commit is an atomic directory swap. Now a refusal discards the writer's work entirely, re-reads the winning generation, adds one row, and commits it the ordinary way. Verified on the reviewer's exact four-step schedule: headers stay on one generation, and the issue survives the next commit.
P1-2 — every mutator takes the lock only after validating. It was fixed in put_claim alone; issue_key, retract_item!, resurrect_item!, set_item_status! and record_run all still grabbed it first. Five probes confirm each refusal now leaves the lock free.
P1-3 — one parse, shared. Gazetteer.implementation_status is now the single reading, defaulting an absent attribute to missing and rejecting anything outside present | missing. Validation and the store had opposite defaults for the same absence, which is why it wedged bootstrap: validation accepted, the store refused, and the adoption changeset had already committed. version=v999 is also rejected now — only the grammar version was ever checked.
P2 — the oracle's generation read updated, and that is the only line I touched in it: an interface read, not an expectation. It's running now; I'll have a number shortly. The code contradiction fixture is still built on an omitted battery cell, so it may well stop there — that one needs rebuilding around grammar growth, and it changes what the test means, so it stays the reviewer's call.
For the restart, the state is: G2's three cards closed on substance and evidenced by probe; the commit atomic via renameat2(RENAME_EXCHANGE) with a journal fallback; corpus at gazetteer/data/, run 1, 94 items and 1,154 claims. Outstanding: the oracle's fixture, and #206's exhaustive matrices, which you've descoped.
Crunched for 4m 34s
● Background command "Run the oracle with the corrected generation read" completed (exit code 0)
Ran 1 shell command
The oracle still aborts, at the same place as before — the code contradiction fixture, not the generation read I fixed. Certificate is still stamped 21:25 from two runs ago, so there is still no measured post-#207/#208/#206 number, and I won't quote the old one.
Final state for the restart:
Done this session. #207 (payload-aware total policy, 2000-cell matrix, all guards proven load-bearing), #208 (validation total over the declared contract, battery completeness, reconciliation fixes), #206 (atomic multi-file commit via renameat2(RENAME_EXCHANGE), lock moved beside the corpus, generation in the table headers), plus two rounds of review findings including today's four. make test green. Corpus at gazetteer/data/, run 1, 94 items, 1,154 claims, no open issues.
Genuinely unmeasured, and this is the honest gap to carry forward: every claim I've made about G2 rests on my own gates and targeted probes. The independent oracle has not completed a run since before #207 landed. Its blocker is one fixture that builds a corpus by omitting a battery cell — which #208 deliberately made invalid — and rebuilding it around grammar growth changes what the test asserts, so it wants the reviewer rather than me.
Two design consequences that aren't yet in gazetteer.md, both discovered rather than intended, and both worth writing down before they're rediscovered as bugs:
- Battery completeness makes §7.2's drift unreachable through a valid emission — a decider that answers nothing now produces a refused survey instead of a quiet drift issue.
- The same rule makes §5's conflict reachable only through grammar growth, since a human can never own a cell code always answers.
One open judgement I'd put in front of you early: whether to keep the journal fallback at all. It's now the sole consumer of that machinery, runs only on hosts this project doesn't target, and is the less-tested of two protocols precisely when things are abnormal. Deleting it leaves one commit path with one set of invariants.
That's a lot of system specific jargon. I can understand being befuddled by this if you are unfamiliar with system details, especially given that you don't always need to care; future agents need to care.
Little tip if you're vibe(ish) coding: Use some sort of memory system (be it markdown files, wiki, lightweight issue tracker, etc.) and tell it to put full context for feature work in the ticket, enough that a new session can work the ticket, including acceptance criteria. Then have the implementation agent do a /goal to drain the work items until they'll done/closed (only close when acceptance criteria is met) or blocking human interaction, putting all important context from the work into comments on the work item during closing.
It will pile all its dense verbiage into those work items when it closes them, and, in my experience, will only bubble up significant questions and notes to you the user if they are significantly important.
You don't have to think about all that shit you posted. Future coding agents do. So I also make sure it searches for related work items before creating a new one. I use Fable 5 xhigh to plan the work items (costs very little because there aren't many output tokens) and Opus 5 med/high to drain the work item queue.
I had it build a significant system at work last week in my spare time, enough that it would have been 4 or 5 sprints worth of work. Cost me ~$250 in Opus 5 credits (on my company dime, I would have used a subscription or cheaper model and it would have been much less) and ~$40 in Fable 5 credits. You know how much Opus 5 ruminating on system design I had to read? Literally none. I saved my time reading things for reading the code it produced in the places I knew would be need to be modular and extensible, so that I made sure future work wouldn't have a lot of tech debt to pay when it came time to extend it.
For me it's less about understanding, it's that I have to read this "vomit" the entire day, every day. Coding used to be fun, using AIs to code was fun to me, too, but this dense, pseudo-jargon language with many repetitive phrases, uninspiring grammar, all while being super inflated in length just gets to me, so any solution is appreciated.
Assume complaints are a sign of cognitive inferiority and offend a significant percentage of the other commenters.
Also, it goes without saying, but don’t actually engage with any concrete criticism.
Well played.
Thought terminating cope from people unwilling to accept that they live in a nation full of cruel oinking swine, enough to control the government at the moment. No, they must be foreign assets. Thinking that way makes it easier to ignore the fact that the American individualist (read: selfish and cruel) ideology is baked into every aspect of the country's propaganda. Much easier to ignore it, write hagiographies that have the greed that drove the smugglers and wealthy elite to found this country's morals replaced by rapping stage actors. Craft narratives that the crumbling of the fine character of a nation practicing racial segregation until only half a century ago is actually the crafty infiltration of the savage slavic mind.
Apologies in advance for off-topic but I couldn't help but reading your sentence with the tone of a rapper. Like Deltron 3030 or Aesop rock. I think it would sound great.
If there's a text to speech for rapping I'd really love to insert your sentence.
I have no idea what your personal background is but it's very interesting that without me saying it or even alluding to it, you jumped directly to what is your presumption of what nation-state ("slavic", presumably you're thinking Russia) that might be controlling foreign agents.
You know it's possible for some groups of people to be a mixed bag of cruel, venal, greedy, feckless, foolish and compromised, right? Of course it's not likely that everyone in the administration is literally a recruited foreign asset.
I believe their point is that the talk about foreign interference is a red herring. The current administration reflects a deeper rot in the culture.
"As democracy is perfected, the office [of president] represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."
I would say that the current maga goverment of the USA is the result of the culture, not the other way around. There might be _some_ funny business around the elections but overall the people that fall to/want exactly this government are not few
MAGA was just the normalization of politics which have existed within the American right and Evangelical Christianity since at least WW2, and which reached an inflection point with 9/11 and Obama's election. None of it is new and none of it is a foreign plot. Trump isn't a Russian asset, he's an avatar of America's hatred of itself.
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