Connor Atkins

PhD Student - Computer Vision for Cancer Detection @SwanseaUni | @unibirmingham grad | Christian | #AuDHD #Neurospicy

[@jason @Jason]

These people are not democrats, they’re retards

[X Freeze @XFreeze]

Elon Musk is literally turning science fiction into reality

[Tony Feng @tonylfeng]

I am a mathematician but I avoided commenting on this because the problems are (far) outside my domain. Even if I sat down to read the technical details (which I have not), it would be hard to appreciate the context of prior work, etc. But I've gotten enough sense of things through colleagues to be confident about some aspects.

First of all, all the mathematics is fundamentally correct.

How impressive are the results? There is a spectrum of reactions (as with everything), but the consensus seems to be all the results could realistically land (by prior standards) in the very highest tier of publications, e.g., Inventiones for the math papers and "Best Paper Award" at STOC for the TCS papers.

What does this mean practically? Prior to 2026, a Ph.D. student whose only result was one of these 10 would likely land an interview for a tenure line job at a strong university. For some of the results, you could probably replace "tenure line" with "tenured". When Astra comes out, it will clearly be very disruptive to the existing system. I think it's good that the community has the time to react and prepare. Personally I think we should totally overhaul hiring and publishing practices.

Are the results "Fields Medal Level"? I have not heard a mathematician answer Yes to this, and the quoted reason is invariably that the solutions are very clever and beautiful but not "deep". This is consistent with what I can see from a cursory glance.

However, the same criticisms could be levied at certain human generated works which have won major prizes. Ultimately, comparing results is very subjective and also somewhat political, and I absolutely think that if a human had one of these results, and also the right influential senior advocate, then that advocate could make a strong case for the work to win major prizes. The fact is that most mathematicians, including prize committees, don't have the breadth or time to evaluate all the top results, so they rely on proxies for importance like: Is the problem longstanding? Is it famous? Was there a large community of people actively trying to solve it? For e.g. #3 (existence of non-sofic groups), the answer to each of these questions is undoubtedly Yes. I've always felt that people should pay less attention to these proxies and focus more on the actual mathematics; glad to see that is happening with the AI solutions, but the same standards should then also be applied everywhere.

[Konstantin Kisin @KonstantinKisin]

British politics explained in 90 seconds

[Tanishq Mathew Abraham, Ph.D. @iScienceLuvr]

David Bowie's comments about the Internet almost perfectly describes AI as well if you think about it...

[Tiago Forte @fortelabs]

It’s no longer possible to live a decent, even middle class life in the US without being neurodivergent

You’ve either gotta be an autist with preternatural technical ability, or have hyperfunctional ADHD such that you can massively multitask, or have an artistic or mathematical gift

In other words, you have to be an extreme outlier on at least one scale, because first globalization and now AI have completely gutted the middle of every normal distribution of humans that exists

Your ability to generate economic value now depends on being “out of the distribution” in some way. This is why the weird are inheriting the earth

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together. In Jesus Christ, this humanity in its grandeur becomes the Way, the Truth and the Life, opening the path for each of us to grow toward fullness. #MagnificaHumanitas
https://t.co/6i9MWs6LJl

[Tom @tombombadeel]

Imagine asking a human from any time in history prior to the 20th century if they wanted 3 almonds, to travel 20 miles, or to ask an oracle any question no matter how complex

[Connor Atkins @ConnorAtkins11]

Completely agree

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

"L'IA dissout complètement toutes les théories où l'État doit intervenir dans l'économie."

Je me souviens d'une conversation avec un ami il y a quelques années. On parlait des fondateurs de Google.

Il m'avait lâché : "Tu sais, les fondateurs de Google, c'est deux gauchistes universitaires."

Ça m'a marqué.

Aujourd'hui, Sergey Brin fait son coming out républicain. Bezos vire chad. Zuckerberg se masculinise. Musk est devenu le porte-étendard de l'accélération.

Ce n'est pas un hasard.

Ces gens-là, ce sont les cerveaux les plus brillants de la planète. Et ils utilisent l'IA plus intensément que n'importe qui. Ils baignent dedans 24/7. Ils l'ont construite, ils la nourrissent, ils l'interrogent.

Or l'IA a une propriété que les idéologies détestent : elle ne pardonne pas l'incohérence dans la data.

Tu peux mentir à un militant. Tu peux mentir à un journaliste. Tu peux mentir à un prof de Sciences Po. Tu ne peux pas mentir à un modèle qui a digéré toute la littérature économique, toute l'histoire des civilisations, toutes les courbes de croissance, tous les effondrements soviétiques, vénézuéliens, cubains, nord-coréens.

Quand tu lui demandes honnêtement de regarder la data vraiment la data, pas les narratifs il n'y a qu'une conclusion possible pour quiconque n'est pas complètement dogmatique, fou, ou avec un ego qui a quitté l'atmosphère :

Le système économique le plus optimisé, le plus producteur de richesse, le plus producteur de progrès humain, c'est la liberté totale des marchés. L'État n'a rien à y faire.

Pas "un peu". Pas "avec nuances". Rien.

Toutes les fois où l'État a "corrigé" un marché, il a créé une distorsion qui a coûté plus cher que le problème initial. Toutes les fois où il s'est retiré, l'humanité a fait un bond.

Ma thèse, c'est que les cerveaux de cette planète sont tous en train de s'en rendre compte en même temps. Pas parce qu'ils ont lu Hayek ou Mises (la plupart ne les ont jamais ouverts). Mais parce qu'ils passent leurs journées à dialoguer avec une intelligence qui n'a pas d'agenda politique et qui leur renvoie la cohérence brute des faits.

Le virage de Bezos. Le coming out de Brin. La radicalisation de Musk. Le revirement de Zuckerberg.

Ce n'est pas une mode. C'est un signal.

L'IA est en train de diluer les idées à la con. Le gauchisme en tête.

Et ce n'est que le début. Parce que dans 5 ans, ce ne seront plus seulement les fondateurs de la Silicon Valley qui auront fait le chemin. Ce sera n'importe quel gosse de 16 ans qui aura passé 1000 heures à challenger ses idées reçues avec un modèle plus intelligent que ses profs.

La gauche intellectuelle a survécu un siècle grâce au monopole narratif des universités et des médias.

Ce monopole vient de tomber.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

The SpaceX team is incredible!

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

Co-sign.

[Connor Atkins @ConnorAtkins11]

😂

[Noam Brown @polynoamial]

Today, we’re sharing that a general-purpose internal @openai model achieved a breakthrough on one of the best-known combinatorial geometry problems. Less than 1 year ago frontier AI models were at IMO gold-level performance. I expect this pace of progress to continue.

[Sam Rodriques @SGRodriques]

I have spent my entire life working on this and thinking about this for the past 4 years. I don't know what will happen in 20 years, but I can promise you that on the 5-10 year timescale, scientists are not out of their jobs. AI is going to massively accelerate the pace of science, increase productivity, let individual scientists make way more discoveries way faster, and is going to make science overall more fun. But the model is going to be collaboration between humans and AI, not replacement.

The key difference here between science and e.g. software engineering is that science is not verifiable in any rapid/convenient way (unlike software), unlike programming. We still need humans for their scientific taste.

[DogeDesigner @cb_doge]

An 18-year-old kid gets stabbed in the street. He’s running for his life, begging for help, and instead of saving him, the police handcuff him while he bleeds out because the attacker claimed “racism.”

They let him choke on his own blood. No urgency. No humanity. Just cold, ideological policing.

Months later? Still no names. Still no suspensions. Still no accountability.

Meanwhile, the same UK police have arrested over 12,000 people for social media posts.

They move at lightning speed to jail citizens for tweets and online comments, yet they can’t even name or discipline the officers who allegedly let a stabbing victim die in handcuffs on the street.

This is the definition of two-tier policing: aggressive against ordinary people speaking online, but protective when it comes to their own failures and protecting the narrative.

The British people deserve real justice, not another cover-up.

Justice for Henry Nowak.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

This poor boy was running away from someone who stabbed him & stole his phone, but the police in the UK attacked him instead of his murderer!

[Melissa Chen @MsMelChen]

I’ve been lurking in anti-AI, anti-data center activist facebook groups just to understand what their arguments are

Guys it’s really not a good sign that they are borrowing the same tactic of framing non-violent things as violence. During the woke cultural revolution, innocuous things such as free speech and simply asserting the biological reality of two sexes were considered violence.

You know where this leads, right? Labeling things as “violence” or “harm” lowers the bar for outrage and justifies…. anything. There are no limiting principles. It moves the issue from pragmatic cost-benefit analysis into moral theater.

It might be the new mind virus

[Alex Finn @AlexFinn]

Scariest video I've watched this week

America's next generation actively booing the most transformative technology our species has ever seen

In China grandmas line up to get OpenClaw installed

In America, supposedly our most educated people BOO even the mention of AI

The west simply does not stand a chance if this continues

We have a massive AI marketing problem in this country and nobody is doing anything to fix it

Tomorrow Meta will announce 8,000 layoffs. They will blame it completely on AI

They won't blame it on their irresponsible hiring in 2021 or extended elevated rates or horrible market conditions or bad inflation

No, in order to not tank their stock, they'll blame it on AI

College students will read that and learn to HATE the technology

They'll protest outside datacenters holding ridiculous signs that say "SAVE OUR WATER NO MORE DATACENTERS"

Politicians will see this and run on blocking data centers just to get a few votes

All of it will be a cycle that leads to America losing to China

This should be a warning sign to all frontier labs and CEOs: messaging matters. And if your messaging doesn't change the West is cooked

[Naval @naval]

We’re searching for permanent satisfaction with an impermanent mind in an impermanent world.