David Darmon

Recovering former-academic. Always-aspiring mathematician. Data scientist. Views are my own.

[David Darmon @DavidDarmon]

Loving Claude Fable 5's strong safety measures protecting me from exploring extensions of ideas related to epsilon-machines+computational mechanics and deep learning.

[David Darmon @DavidDarmon]

It's fun to see this actually working and providing useful leads already. Also a big fan of the "the CLI will rule them all!" trend in tooling.

[David Darmon @DavidDarmon]

I liked ChatGPT Pulse but cancelled my Pro subscription a few months ago.

So I vibe-engineered a pi + Ollama Cloud pipeline for creating Pulse-like reports from chatbot conversations, coding sessions, and Anki cards.

Works surprisingly well for a 2-weekend project.

Link below.

[David Darmon @DavidDarmon]

https://t.co/eIfFqOfmfS

[David Darmon @DavidDarmon]

It is kind of crazy I can just say "Hey Claude Opus 4.7: I want an open-source version of ChatGPT Pulse that processes my chatbot conversations, agentic coding sessions, and Anki notes through Pi using Ollama Cloud" and it gives me workable first-draft in less than an hour.

[David Darmon @DavidDarmon]

https://t.co/jftxyY5bQL

With a `--help`-able description of `sesh` for when you want your LLM-agent to do the reading and searching for you.

[David Darmon @DavidDarmon]

I made a thing. I've been using Claude Code, Codex CLI, and Cursor and wanted one place to browse and search all my coding sessions across coding clients.

Meet `sesh`: a terminal app that finds all your LLM coding sessions and lets you read, search, and resume them.

Link below.

[David Darmon @DavidDarmon]

@kareem_carr Is this parody?

[David Darmon @DavidDarmon]

Always a bummer to find out Applied Math isn’t “Real” Math.

[Edward Frenkel @edfrenkel]

This is an unwise statement that can only make people confused about what LLMs can or cannot do. Let me tell you something: Math is NOT about solving this kind of ad hoc optimization problems. Yeah, by scraping available data and then clustering it, LLMs can sometimes solve some very minor math problems. It's an achievement, and I applaud you for that. But let's be honest: this is NOT the REAL Math. Not by 10,000 miles.

REAL Math is about concepts and ideas - things like "schemes" introduced by the great Alexander Grothendieck, who revolutionized algebraic geometry; the Atiyah-Singer Index Theorem; or the Langlands Program, tying together Number Theory, Analysis, Geometry, and Quantum Physics. That's the REAL Math. Can LLMs do that? Of course not.

So, please, STOP confusing people - especially, given the atrocious state of our math education.

LLMs give us great tools, which I appreciate very much. Useful stuff! Go ahead and use them AS TOOLS (just as we use calculators to crunch numbers or cameras to render portraits and landscapes), an enhancement of human abilities, and STOP pretending that LLMs are somehow capable of replicating everything that human beings can do.

In this one area, mathematics, LLMs are no match to human mathematicians. Period. Not to mention many other areas.

Calling on my friend @ericweinstein and @GaryMarcus, who has been one of the few sane expert voices on these matters lately. 🙏

h/t @hellheff

[David Darmon @DavidDarmon]

@colin_fraser My impression is he either doesn’t know what statisticians actually do, or has a very different definition of “statistician” from me.

[David Darmon @DavidDarmon]

@colin_fraser I saw Nate speak during his book tour for The Signal and the Noise. During the Q & A, I asked him about his claim in that book that “most statisticians are Bayesian,” citing a tally I did of major stat journals. He replied, “Oh, I don’t follow the academic literature.”

[David Darmon @DavidDarmon]

"AGI is here!"

But also: top-of-the-line reasoning models can't extract calendar events from a screenshot of my daily calendar.

What?

[David Darmon @DavidDarmon]

@jsylvest us-east-1 for the win.

[David Darmon @DavidDarmon]

It's amazing how much of my job is either (1) "clean up your room!" or (2) "can you just show the thing you're talking about?".

[David Darmon @DavidDarmon]

@jsylvest Good times.

[David Darmon @DavidDarmon]

Love to see it.

ellmer is legit, though! #tidyverse

[David Darmon @DavidDarmon]

http://72.94.165.90:50001/lebesgue-integral-quadrature-approximation/

[David Darmon @DavidDarmon]

One thing LLMs are really good for is quickly prototyping interactive Shiny apps around well-defined concepts.

I present a Shiny app for exploring Lebesgue integration.

Link to the app below.

[David Darmon @DavidDarmon]

@colin_fraser iPad with pencil. Ideally with the Rock Paper Pencil cover. But without that is nearly as nice.

[David Darmon @DavidDarmon]

R Twitter: is it a known-issue that R's `read.csv()` doesn't support round-tripping from binary64 -> decimal string -> binary64 with 17 decimal digits?

Or is that a bug?

Left is R and right is Python.