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I’ve been thinking the same thing. How many mathematicians are actually just upset _they_ didn’t get to find some result. Or why prior work wasn’t properly cited, etc. It’s pure ego from top to bottom. I’m not saying this is wrong, whatever I do not care it’s not my field, but man the cut is going to be so deep when the whole universe has you at the center of it. I imagine it must be like force feeding a narcissistic prick 10g of shrooms and watching the word “I” become unintelligible.

What if you could solve this bottom up, e.g.: Math -> Physics -> Chemistry -> Biology. I'm assuming that's how it would in theory play out.

> Coq (renamed Rocq last year)

This is lamentable.

Ok? Why is this significant?

I’ve always been dumbfounded by programmers who believed they were being paid by business to “write code”. Maybe get your head out of your asses and sit in a few meetings where the requirements are being generated from. You’d quickly realize no one has ever cared about “the code” that was always an inconvenient time and money wasting means to an end.

It’s an assumption, with the LLM it is a fact. There is only one source of entropy, whatever the seed value is to any pseudo random number generator used for stochastic operations. Given those values, everything is deterministic. For the brain, it’s not at all obvious that this is true.

Have no idea why you’re being downvoted as this is a very valid point.

Also, in principle everything a GPU does could be done on pencil and paper. You could distribute the entire forward pass to the whole of humanity and have them write it out. Even if it took millions of years, the point is it’s computationally reducible to hand calculation. Is that entire process now “conscious” as well? The only difference would be the clock rate.

I don’t think Chinese models care one iota about any of these advisory groups. Even if they’re one year behind the curve, a year or two is a piss drop in the grand scheme of things.

Where do you see a list of which languages it supports?

I don’t know what’s wrong with Opus 5. I’ve been using Code since November 2025 and Opus 5 is the first blatant regression I’ve seen. Like you said, it just goes off into an endless loop doing random busy-work type of stuff. That’s the best way I can describe it. It’s doing stuff, but it seems mostly like busy-work to me. I’m not saying the model is “dumb” it’s most certainly capable, its vision is better than 4.8 but however they post-trained it is a fuckup.

Also whole heartedly agree with the Opus 5 output being incomprehensible. It’s written in a way that I’d call spaghetti-tech-English. You can unravel it but it’s painful. Fables explanations is effortless and smooth. Opus 5 is user hostile.

> without a better model in the wing

I believe Astra is the next model beyond Sol? They used it for https://openai.com/index/ten-advances-in-mathematics/

I found Linear Algebra by Friedberg, Insel and Spence to be excellent. Very clear, modern notation, great exercises. It's also what Tao lectured from in 115A: https://www.math.ucla.edu/~tao/resource/general/115a.3.02f/

Yeah I do something similar and Claude (well OpenAI too) just refuses to transcribe anything related to slavery and pederasty in Ancient Greece.

Two thoughts on someone who went out of their way to learn math:

1. If you can already program, the worst thing you can do is think of mathematics as learning a programming language. It is not, and you will waste your time being frustrated with things like syntax and notation. You get “used to” mathematics by doing it, and it’s something on its own. Just go with it. It’s ok to be confused.

2. Do the exercises, and stop asking for “solution manuals”, the point is to get you thinking and the struggle is most important part, not whether you got it “right”. Again, I think this is a programmer centric way of looking at things: “how do I know it’s right if I can’t compile it”.

Maybe that’s why programmers like the foundations of mathematics. Like if somehow they could just go to the bottom of things, the assembler/machine code of sorts, the whole enterprise would make sense. Counterintuitively, the really great mathematicians of yore, did mathematics before it was anywhere close to formalized.

I regularly do a “go to DynaTrace, look at how this service gets used in production then use a profiler and see if there’s any low hanging optimisations we could make” on stuff. LLMs are really good at doing everything that was fun about software development.

You are correct on all counts. This is the IKEA phase of software development. Disposable shit. Need something new and ask an LLM to summon it into existence. I guess you could compare it to this hand-crafted desk I’m sitting at that my great grandfather built himself. He was a carpenter. It’s still here, decades later. To be honest, my next desk would be some IKEA shit, because it’s cheap and I can replace it every few years as fashion changes. But I get the emotional attachment.

I’m going to check that out. My personal favorite is the variant of New Athena Unicode they use in the Cultura Classica books (it’s like Lingua Latina per se Illustrata but for Attic). They made some modifications on some of the characters, noticeably sigma. I might get Claude to clone that font for me so I can use it in my projects.

Look I get it. I completely emphasise with the feeling. My undergrad is Computer Science, I often dreamed about writing my own compiler and spent years learning low level performance optimization, loved design patterns, re-factoring code to be more elegant, all that stuff.

I just feel like after years in industry and how I’m steering something like Fable now that all of this is irrelevant and the writing is crystal clear on the wall: Writing software by hand is in its death throes. There is no future for it besides some very niche areas. When last have you actually looked at what your high level language is actually being compiled and optimised to? We’re moving up the abstraction ladder with software.

To your point: People care about the actual output, the interface, whether it does what they want it to do, but in no way do they care about the internals and how it’s built. That’s an implementation detail. And that’s where all the fun of the craft actually sits.

This is not unique to software engineering though, go take a look at the maths and mathematics subreddits. There are guys doing PhDs in maths who are too afraid to run their dissertation topics through the latest models because it might just solve the problem they’ve spent the last few years working on in a few hours. They absolutely hate that problems are being blown away where people have spent years trying to figure out. It feels like the same psychological pain software engineers are going through.

It’s great to care about the craft as long as someone else is paying for it. I think most software developers are waking up to the reality that they were always just holding business at ransom with their craft. Software is a grudge purchase for businesses. No one has ever cared about the craft except the craftsmen.

Interesting project. I would love if you could switch fonts to something like New Athena Unicode.

I built something similar to this by cloning the Diogenes repo and getting Claude to re-implement it in Python (it’s a very old battle tested Perl code base, so a great reference implementation) and using the TLG database for the Greek and Latin texts. You can take this even further by integrating it with the Barrington Atlas (there are scans on Anna’s Archive) for looking up ancient place names, so you have dictionary + map lookups. If you’ve read any of the Landmark series books you’d known what I mean.

Also better if you can generate chapter by chapter critical apparatus on difficult grammar and Anki decks. It’s an annoying part of learning these languages to have to stop and look up words, I like spending a few days learning vocab before reading and it makes it so much more pleasant than having to stop and look things up the whole time.

Obviously all this stuff is copyright so it can never be shared, but I don’t care it’s for my own personal use. I also bought like 6 hours worth of Ionnis Strattakis’ recordings where he reads a bunch of Ancient Greek in reconstructed Attic pronunciation and fine-tuned a text to speech model (styletts2) with full accent markings and breathings. It’s extremely natural sounding. My long term goal is to have a personal tutor that I can speak Attic to and basically have lessons with everyday (speech to text -> llm-> text to speech). All the pieces are there to actually do this.

LLMs have been an absolute game changer for me who is a hobby classicist but also knows how to build software. They are so amazingly good at Attic Greek and Latin, it’s like having the best teachers in the word at your fingertips for some really niche topics that it wouldn’t be possible with otherwise. Also extremely good at managing, building, cleaning up, deduplicating Anki decks.

I don’t trust point estimates like 14%. It’s like calculating an average salary and saying it’s $120k. Completely meaningless. What does the actual distribution look like that this was pulled from? No standard deviation. Is it even symmetric? What’s the 10th and 90th percentiles? Just giving a statistic on its own tells me nothing.

I’m personally hoping for the next big AI gangbanger to be theoretical physics. Boy does that field need a good reshuffle. I think when any novel mathematical theory can be done by AI you’ll see simultaneously theoretical physics getting wrecked as hard as pure math is. At that point we might see new physics or paradigm shifting technology emerging.

To “be” in a body. What is “in” your body? You could also say “wow it’s really weird to be a body”. The whole self thing seems to be the illusory part. Something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_contour. You see that white triangle, you experience it, but looking deeper you realise it’s not really there at all. That seems to be what we call “self”, as if it’s a real thing, but it’s not. These experiences are kinda like looking at that triangle, for a brief moment, you “get” it.

The great thing about these mathematical mopping up type operations is that no person will waste their time trying to prove it to be true anymore. If anything that’s a win.

It would be great if an LLM could settle the Collatz conjecture next, god knows how many man-years have been burned on that by unsuspecting victims.

Based on my usage of Fable on the max plan, Anthropic is going to have to at least double the usage limits for it to be a viable option in the near future. And without Fable, the value proposition quickly drops to zero.

Even Neanderthals? Were they also made in his image? We interbred with them. We can go all the way down the evolutionary tree here just say when to stop.

So glad Fable limits just got reset. Thanks OpenAI.

Same. I don’t know what Mickey Mouse work people are doing that 4.8 is “enough”. CRUD apps maybe?

I have some serious Bayesian statistical research programs running and Fable is on another level than 4.8. It feels like Andrew Gelman is supervising it. Even the vision model on Fable is superior to 4.8 which is great for having it digest research papers.

I wonder how many of the problems he lists on https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/news.html could be solved/checked with something like Fable at this point.

The US government will do the job of destroying the American AI economy through their export controls.