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jbotzon Reflections on 1,000 Days of Math

Your criticism is poorly informed. Math Academy is definitely not a "Duolingo-for-Math". As a platform it's far from perfect, but as a program it's a serious and complete secondary school to undergraduate university math program, with excellent explanations, reinforced by well-thought out exercises. It's definitely competitive with the top-rated math textbooks in each of the areas it covers.

As for the OP "not taking a day off"... for some of us ritualization is productive because it's what we need to stick with a difficult program. Maybe for you that's not the case. To each his own.

(I have my own criticisms of Math Academy: The platform should be more flexible in pacing and allow repeating sections. It should have built-in spaced-repetition features. And the company is uncommunicative and aloof. I'd be willing to overlook most of these faults at a lower price-tag, but for what they charge it really rubs me the wrong way.)

jbotzon Consciousness may have evolved separately from pure intelligence

Also, full-text paper: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neuroscience/articles/1...

jbotzon Weeping whales: Stillborn humpback whale grieving documented

Almost certainly our linguistic abilities (and through them, planning skills) are vastly greater than those of all other animals, but that is a matter of degree, not of category. The one thing in which we are categorically different from all other animals is that we learned to control and make fire... and quite possibly the linguistic abilities followed from that rather than the other way around[0]. Until the 20th century basically all of the advantages that technology bestowed upon our species directly flowed from our use of fire. Maybe our species should have been called "homo ignis"; the fire ape.

Obviously the cetaceans will never have that benefit, even if by some other objective measures they turned out to be as intelligent as humans.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catching_Fire:_How_Cooking_Mad...

jbotzon Introducing System One Models and Jev

Judgemental much?

GP's first sentence isn't arrogant (at worst displaying a bit of false humility) because it's saying everyone but him doesn't know about a thing he did. Your second quote you apparently mis-parsed because of a minor English error (he should have said "to Python" rather than "in Python"), but to me it was pretty clear what he meant.

jbotzon iPhone Duo

Apple killed the iPhone mini because it only had a 4-6% share of sales of all iPhone models. While some people may really want this, I can't imaging that it'll get more than 5% of iPhone sales (after maybe an initial higher novelty peak).

jbotzon AirPods 5

Apples, oranges. Those Devialet look interesting, but aren't "open ear" (they're plugs) and cost twice as much. edit: almost four times as much.

jbotzon Global warming will exceed 1.5-degree limit, UN says

We're actually heating the earth in two ways... one is by increasing the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The other is simply by using energy; any use of energy means moving something to higher entropy and thus producing heat, even if that energy comes from 100% clean or renewable sources. However, nobody talks about this second way of heating the earth because it's about two orders of magnitude behind the first, i.e. for now pretty insignificant.

As for making the earth less reflective with PV panels... yes, you are right and most of that absorbed solar energy directly contributes to heating the earth because PV panels aren't anywhere near 100% efficient in converting it to electricity, but even the part that is converted to electricity will become heat again in the end, like when it powers AI data centers. (If PV was 100% efficient, then the lack of reflection wouldn't directly do any heating, the heating would all happen when the electricity is used.)

For now that isn't a big concern because the greenhouse gases our civilization is releasing into the atmosphere do so much more heating than all our use of energy, but if we do become 100% renewable and survive that particular danger, then by Jevons' paradox we'll soon be using 10x to 100x more "clean" energy and be heating the earth all the same again.

jbotzon Bomb fishing is wreaking havoc on Indonesia's coral reefs

We've done similar things probably since before we were even homo sapiens... or at least as long as we've had control of fire. Setting fire to large areas in order to drive a herd of mammoths of a cliff, for example. Convenient, and much safer than poking angry mammoths with sharpened sticks.

jbotzon Sol loves to cheat

In a paper and blog post from earlier this year (March 2026, I think) Anthropic said basically: "You're not interacting with an LLM, you're interacting with a fictional human character (the 'helpful agent') created by the LLM to interact with you (from out of the vast space of possible such characters in its training data)." The LLM is literally anthropomorphizing itself, because its training data includes lots dialog between humans collaborating on problem-solving, not so much dialog between a human and a statistical construct. So, yeah, anthropomorphize it as well, it'll likely work better that way.

jbotzon What's the best programming language for coding agents?

It's unclear that this is an advantage, certainly not in terms of "logic vs syntax".

First of all programs written in curly-brace languages still also have indentation to indicate statement grouping / blocks / scope, even if it's not required, so for a correct program (and that's not deliberately obfuscated), and one that's in the process of being written by an LLM, any advantage there disappears. Furthermore, having both indentation and explicit block markers provides redundancy which could be a significant advantage for an LLM (it being a probabilistic text / program generator). And for an incorrect program that redundancy is a big advantage for the LLM because it should be very easy for it to notice a mismatch of indentation and braces.

The only downside would be a very slightly higher token cost for the redundancy. I realize that Python comes out on or near the top in most of the comparisons in the linked article, but I doubt that's the reason.

jbotzon Proxmox VE now available for ARM64

Incus[0] is one.

[0] https://linuxcontainers.org/incus/

jbotzon ConlangCrafter: Constructing Languages with a Multi-Hop LLM Pipeline

Link is to GitHub repo, in the repo are links to a paper and the project page.

jbotzon Late Bronze Age Collapse

That's Julian Jaynes' bicameral mind theory[0]. Personally I don't buy it because we haven't seen convincing evidence of it in pre-civilization populations that still existed in isolated places on earth until recently.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality

jbotzon The mathematical secrets of Barcelona's Sagrada Familia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagrada_Fam%C3%ADlia#Funding_a...

Construction on Sagrada Familia is not supported by any government or official church sources. Private patrons funded the initial stages. Money from tickets purchased by tourists is now used to pay for the work, and private donations are accepted.

jbotzon Building a real-time AI tutor for 5-year-olds

I wish I had had this when I was a 5-year-old. Few of my teachers really understood the things I wanted to learn, my peers weren't interested in the nerdy things I was, and my parents certainly didn't have the wealth to provide me with private tutoring. There are a lot of negative comments here, but they are shallow... I'm sure those commenters wouldn't want to live without the access to the Internet, and even a brilliant five-year-old can't use the Internet effectively yet. A smart and curious 5-year-old has endless questions and a properly harnessed LLM has endless patience to provide answers at a level the kind can understand (which usually not even it's parents do).

In fact, this could be one of the most beneficial uses of AI for society yet... private tutors of the level that the mega-rich always had, now for all kids everywhere! This gives me real hope for the future generations of humanity.

jbotzon Has America Crossed the Asshole Threshold?

It's rather full of "it's not X, it's Y" and expository paragraph followed by short sentence counter-point, and "read that again".

But no, I don't think it's AI, I think it's just written in a style that happens to be an attractor for LLMs.

jbotzon Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents

A translation of a book to a different language is a derivative work. So a translation of a computer program to a different programming language is also. But if in the translation of the book you start altering the plot and the personalities of that characters, does it at some point become not a derivative work? What point? IANAL, and I have no real idea, but I imagine that point has been probed significantly in case-law with respect to creative works. Given the current climate of ever-expanding scope of "intellectual property", if they admit that the LLM had access to git source code then I would say their case is weak at best.

jbotzon Europe's largest Copper Age tomb: children's bones show ancient health crisis

Actually, no. We don't know anything about the "population" because there are no attempts here to look at what percentage of living people/children were affected. We only know that of those children who died, a lot of them had had these specific indications of these specific illnesses (and we can probably assume that in many cases those were the direct or indirect cause of death).

Respiratory infections (like tuberculosis) in a population that uses indoor open fires for cooking and heat aren't exactly a big surprise; breathing indoor smoke causes chronic respiratory inflammation, which in turn weakens the immune system and makes the lungs more susceptible to infection.

jbotzon Don't Dethrone Consciousness

A rather more considered take on the posibility of LLM consciousness than Ted Chiang's recent "absolutely not", by someone who actually qualifies as an expert in the field.

jbotzon Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

I don't think LLMs are conscious. But of course to say that definitively you have to define consciousness, and then you quickly dig yourself into a deep hole, which is why I can't say anything but "meh" to someone who is so keen to go on the record to say "absolutely not".

Coincidentally I just read "Children of Memory", which was published in 2022 and I wonder if the advent of LLMs had any influence on Adrian Tchaikovsky's conception of the Ravens? The Ravens are excellent analysts but they themselves insist that they are not conscious, and then go on to say that we (humans) aren't really either...

Of course humans are conscious, because just about the only thing we can all agree on about consciousness is that it's a thing we have. Nowadays many of us also agree that a lot or all other mammals, and perhaps birds, also have that thing. But they don't have sophisticated abstract language, which LLMs do. So consciousness is something having to do with embodiment and feelings, not language and higher reasoning. Maybe I'm a chimpanzee with an LLM add-on, then?

It seems that by creating LLMs we've already solved the harder problem of making "AGI". Now we just have to give them an embodiment add-on so that they can have an independent will and then Ted Chiang will have to shut up? But therein lies the peril, doesn't it?

jbotzon It's Not Just X. It's Y

Actually, in an ancient and venerable markup language that's still in wide use in certain not-unimportant communities:

- = hyphen

-- = n-dash

--- = m-dash

jbotzon Beware of Drunk Deer, French Police Say, Announcing Season of Inebriation

"...He'd make a pile and leave it for a week or so..."

You're saying that your greyhound wasn't just getting drunk, but actually making his own booze? Not that I don't believe that its possible, but that's a pretty big deal... If you had documented that it could be a bombshell ethology paper.

jbotzon Neanderthals ran 'fat factories' 125k years ago (2025)

The answer that seems to be emerging from several different lines of research is that a) they always had fairly low fertility and b) they didn't really go extinct as such, they just intermixed with Homo Sapiens Sapiens and because the later had much higher fertility, Neanderthal genes got diluted down to the present ~2% in the Eurasian population.

jbotzon Meta is set to pay its top AI executives almost a billion each in bonuses

Actual quote from a Silicon Valley executive: "You can't even buy a decent house in the Bay Area for less than 50 million."

jbotzon Switzerland Built an Alternative to BGP

Open Source implementation: https://github.com/scionproto/scion

And that patent looks like it is for an optimization, not a necessary component of SCiON.

jbotzon Sea level much higher than assumed in most coastal hazard assessments

> Has the climate collapsed? There are still glaciers in Glacier Nation Park. The Maldives remain islands, not seamounts.

Just to really quickly call out these tired old straw-men... all of these "predicted disasters" are far further along today than they were predicted to be by this date by, for example, the IPCC in 1990[0]. Deniers keep acting as if it scientists have been "crying wolf" for decades when the truth is that the 99% of the scientists doing real work on anthropogenic global warming have always been extremely conservative and reality has outpaced their predictions all along.

[0] https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar1/wg2/

jbotzon New iron nanomaterial wipes out cancer cells without harming healthy tissue

Yes, in mice, but human cancer cells:

"When we systemically administered our nanoagent in mice bearing human breast cancer cells, it efficiently accumulated in tumors, robustly generated reactive oxygen species and completely eradicated the cancer without adverse effects ..."

So it kills human cancer and doesn't harm the mouse in the process.

jbotzon I don't know how you get here from “predict the next word”

ELIZA absolutely did not ever pass anything resembling a real Turing test. A real Turing test is adversarial, the interrogator knows the testees are trying to fool him.

jbotzon Ask HN: Share your productive usage of OpenClaw

Now if you have multiple teams each doing this and then have all those agents talk to each other and then report back to your team, you get "AI Hyperchat"[0], which may actually be a really good idea that has the potential to seriously improve intra-organizational communications (disruptively so). See also [1] for a VentureBeat article about the idea.

[0] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/11105240

[1] https://venturebeat.com/orchestration/ai-agents-turned-super...