@pkleinpklein@MichaelRapaport It's from Daily Wisdom (also known as Daily Wisdom: A Daily Dose of Inspiration from the Rebbe), a Chabad publication featuring the Lubavitcher Rebbe's teachings.
I agree. Kemi Badenoch is the leader Britain needs right now.
In other news I am to the end of your book on Stalin: it's magnificent. The story of Stalin and the red terror is better than the Godfather, Goodfellas the Sopranos - you name it... and you tell it so well.. thank you.
Cenk Ugyur hoist by his own petard.
@cenkuygur hears his own words repeated back to his by Jacob Rees Mogg.
He was skewered.
Real good.
Thank you @Jacob_Rees_Mogg
Wow @Jacob_Rees_Mogg just absolutely tore @cenkuygur apart using Cenk’s own words.
And of course Cenk realises this, panics and does what he always does by just blabbing as loudly as he can over the top of Rees Mogg.
🚨BREAKING: Henry Nowak's father speaks out on the murder of his son:
"He told officers he could not breathe NINE TIMES, he said he had been stabbed FOUR TIMES, but the officer replied saying' 'I don't think you have, mate.'"
What a brave man.
Exklusiv: Wir wissen ALLES über den türkischen Attentäter von #Winterthur, der leider den Schweizerpass besitzt. Wir werden den Namen des radikalen Islamisten in Kürze unzensiert bekanntgeben. Liebe Schweizer, jetzt müssen wir zusammenstehen! 🇨🇭
Charlie Munger, the Stoic: "Life will have terrible blows in it. Horrible blows. Unfair blows. It doesn't matter. And some people recover and others don't."
"There, I think the attitude of Epictetus is the best. He thought that every mischance in life was an opportunity to behave well. Every mischance in life was an opportunity to learn something. Your duty was not to be submerged in self-pity, but to utilize the terrible blow in a constructive fashion."
The Fading Trophies of Mathematical Discovery
LLMs are now getting so absurdly good at math that frontier systems from OpenAI and Google DeepMind have already hit gold-medal IMO performance — solving five of the six problems at the level of the best human high school competitors on Earth. And these aren’t calculator tricks or benchmark gimmicks. IMO problems require long chains of creative reasoning and full proofs written in natural language.
At this point it seems pretty obvious where this is heading. Competition problems are just the warm-up. Real mathematical discovery is next — and probably at scales and speeds humans simply can’t compete with. Give these systems huge test-time compute, persistent reasoning loops, and formal verification systems like Lean, and they can grind through gigantic hypothesis spaces endlessly, across thousands of parallel copies of themselves, day and night.
And now we’ve crossed another threshold.
In May 2026, an internal OpenAI reasoning model apparently disproved a major Erdős conjecture in discrete geometry — the unit distance problem from 1946. Erdős conjectured that among n points in the plane, the maximum number of point-pairs exactly one unit apart grows only barely faster than linearly. The AI instead found a new construction giving a genuine polynomial improvement. Human mathematicians reportedly verified the proof and described the methods as elegant and genuinely clever.
That’s a strange moment historically. Because it may be the first time a significant open mathematical problem was solved largely autonomously by AI.
And what’s interesting is watching the reaction.
You immediately start hearing:
“It wasn’t really that important.”
“If an LLM solved it, maybe it wasn’t actually that hard.”
“It was derivative.”
“Not really deep.”
Some skepticism is healthy, obviously. But a lot of this feels psychologically familiar. The trophy is starting to evaporate.
Because many hard math problems functioned socially a little like rare flowers growing on dangerous cliff faces. People valued the flower partly because retrieving it required extraordinary human effort, risk, and talent. But once drones can effortlessly pluck the flowers all day long, the social meaning changes overnight. Suddenly the guy still dangling from ropes to retrieve one manually starts looking less like a hero and more like someone who missed the memo.
That doesn’t mean mathematics itself loses value. Some discoveries genuinely reshape science, cryptography, optimization, physics, engineering, and our understanding of structure itself. AI may massively accelerate all of that.
But a huge amount of the prestige economy surrounding pure math was tied to scarcity. Solving a famous hard problem signaled exceptional human brilliance. It got you reputation, jobs, grants, status.
And now the scarcity may collapse.
What makes this especially eerie is that pure mathematics was always somewhat unusual epistemologically. Unlike experimental science, math does not discover contingent facts about the physical world. It explores the consequences of axioms and definitions. In some sense it is an enormous web of tautological structure — incredibly rich and profound structure, but still ultimately formal.
So there’s something almost fitting about statistical engines eventually becoming extraordinary at it.
And I suspect that, over time, people will quietly stop treating many mathematical discoveries the way they once did. Not because the discoveries cease to matter, but because the social meaning attached to discovering them changes.
The mountain is still there.
But once helicopters exist, fewer people care who climbed it barefoot.
'This exhibit completely dismantled everything that I thought I knew.'
Former pro-Palestine activist Taryn Thomas joins @JoshxHowie to discuss whether the Nova music festival exhibition has the power to change minds on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
This remains one of the most powerful videos I’ve ever seen.
Israeli pilots were literally above Tehran, recording themselves wishing Shabbat Shalom in the calmest voice you can hear.
Balls of steel.