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Psychologist and writer. Author of the memoir Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class, and of a newsletter on human nature, psychology, social class and what he calls luxury beliefs.

• Dark Forest, Young Men, Blood Boy

  Links and recommendations + the best sleep upgrade I've ever had

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Writes Don't Worry About the Vase, a near-daily account of what is happening in AI and what they think it means. Former Magic: the Gathering pro and trader; unusually willing to put a number on a belief and to grade their own past calls.

• Brand New AI Solves a Millennium Prize

  The first Millennium Prize, Navier-Stokes, has fallen to AI.

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Physicist and science communicator. Writes Backreaction and makes videos explaining new physics and astronomy results, frequently to argue that the headline about them overstates the case.

• Midwit here! If the OpenAI Navier Stokes proof had been dropped online by an introverted mathematician who no one previously heard of, you'd all be celebrating the enormous breakthrough and analyzing it rather than writing tales about the demise of maths.

  OpenAIRelated

German developer; founder and lead developer of Mastodon, the decentralized open-source social network.

• Does anyone have a high resolution copy of Shishkin’s Brook in a Forest (Stream by a Forest Slope)? Wikipedia has the highest resolution I can find, but not nearly high enough to print at a reasonable size. I’ve already looked through the top hits on Google and Yandex in both English and Russian. Is this just a dead end?

  GoogleRussiaRelated

Product designer and entrepreneur; author of Mobile First and Web Form Design; formerly a product director at Google; now building AI products.

• Large Scale Agent Coordination

  As AI can agents tackle more work, we naturally assign more work to them. The most notable example this week was OpenAI's use of 10,000 concurrent agents to propose a solution to the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Probl…

  OpenAIRelated

Physicist and science communicator. Writes Backreaction and makes videos explaining new physics and astronomy results, frequently to argue that the headline about them overstates the case.

• The Navier Stokes equation isn't just a continuous limit of what's actually made of atoms, it also isn't relativistically invariant, meaning it's not compatible with Einstein's theories. It's a limiting case that works in many cases, but not fundamental.
  Quoting@PlinzBtw the Navier Stokes problem comes down to: if we lived in a truly continuous universe, fluids might sometimes explode. It’s an issue for the universe of classical mathematics, but does not apply to the computational universe we are in.

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Mathematician and Senior Lecturer in the Mathematics department at Columbia University. Author of the book Not Even Wrong and of the long-running physics blog of the same name.

• A Modest Proposal

  The announcement yesterday by OpenAI of a solution to the Millennium Prize Navier-Stokes problem has been causing a great deal of discussion among mathematicians. There’s a lot to be said about this story and its implic…

  OpenAIRelated

Physicist and science communicator. Writes Backreaction and makes videos explaining new physics and astronomy results, frequently to argue that the headline about them overstates the case.

• Some comments about OpenAI's claim that they have solved the Navier Stokes Millenium problem

  youtube.com

  OpenAIRelated

Author of The 4-Hour Workweek and Tools of Titans, and host of The Tim Ferriss Show podcast.

• I get a lot of questions about "marketing," and people usually ask a granular technical question, but I think they usually miss the forest for the trees. Perhaps "What exactly is 'marketing'?" is the question I don't get asked. My answer: "Marketing" is knowing exactly who your reader or customer is, and making a product exactly for them. Kevin Kelly's "1,000 True Fans" is a great read that helps this type of thinking. People should spend 80% of their time on product, and the so-called "marketing" largely takes care of itself later.

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Software engineer; co-founder and former CTO of Tailscale, previously on the Go team at Google.

• The old quote that "computers are useless, they can only give you answers" seems to extend to an LLM solution to a millennium problem. Now we have a blowup in Navier–Stokes equations, but no new insights into mathematical technique or turbulence.

  LLMsRelated

Co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette; writes daily at simonwillison.net.

• Wrote up my thoughts on the whole OpenAI Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem story, and how it highlights the still confusing question of what using my data "to improve model performance" actually means

  OpenAIRelated

Creator of the Keras deep-learning library and the ARC-AGI benchmark.

• Terence Tao just posted this really insightful thread which seems to have been written in reaction to the Navier Stokes announcement. Please give it a read.

  mathstodon.xyz

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Principal engineer at Cloudflare as of 2026, on agents and developer tooling. Streams TypeScript, OCaml and Neovim on Twitch, and wrote the better-result library after writing the same Result type about a hundred times.

• can solve navier-stokes but can’t write a maintainable typescript abstraction smh

  TypeScriptRelated

Co-founder and CEO of Every. Writes the Chain of Thought column about working with AI tools and hosts the podcast AI & I.

• ok I’ll bite what’s a Navier stoke

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Mathematical physicist at UC Riverside. Wrote This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics and now the Azimuth blog on mathematics, physics and environmental science.

• News flash: OpenAI claims formal proof that Navier-Stokes solutions can blow up. They used 10,000 agents simultaneously, who sent 2.7 million messages and used ~130 billion output tokens. They will not claim the $1,000,000 Millennium Prize for this result. This prize is not going as expected. The first winner refused to take it, saying the math establishment is corrupt. The second possible winner is a team of 10,000 AIs whose human masters turned down the prize. 😆 https://openai.com/index/navier-stokes-solution/ (1/2)

  OpenAIRelated

Co-founder and CEO of OpenAI; previously president of Y Combinator.

• I spent much of the weekend talking with the team who did this work. Seb--and everyone else--acted with integrity and generosity throughout. Initially we believed the other team had also solved the problem. We wanted to collaborate and do a joint release. When we learned that they had Euler but not Navier-Stokes, we offered to let them go first, to suggest that they should be the ones to get the prize, and optionally for Tristan to be the lead author on a rewrite of the OpenAI proof. We felt it was challenging to offer the same to Levent (an Anthropic employee), who was not willing to talk or…
  Quoting@SebastienBubeckI would like to clarify a few things: 1) The screenshot is my reaching out to Levent to coordinate our releases. I hope it’s clear from the message that we came in with the best possible intentions. 2) I never ever asked for Levent to be removed from authorship of his own work (as indicated by my t…

  AnthropicOpenAIRelated

Mathematician at UCLA, working mainly in harmonic analysis and partial differential equations. Writes What's new, a long-running blog on their research, open problems and expository notes.

• A concrete example of how AI advances in solving key open problems could inihibit the future development of a mathematical field can be found in the global regularity problem for the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations (as well as its counterpart for the Euler equations). Until recently, this problem was on track to be one of the most promising examples of an AI-assisted success story, in which AI tools could be used both to solve the problem and to set the stage for the next round of progress in the field. While the problems remain open for now, there is now an increasingly realistic scen…

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Programmer on the Dart language at Google and author of Game Programming Patterns and Crafting Interpreters; previously a game developer at EA.

• Uploaded my first observation to iNaturalist (a Western toad I spotted while hiking in the Gifford-Pinchot National Forest) and I am more proud of myself than I expected to be. Did I just unlock a new hobby?

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Computer scientist and director of the MIT Digital Currency Initiative; her research covers distributed systems, databases and digital currency.

• https://t.co/JQTg7cNIIe happening right now! I'll be on at 2:45 PM ET with @starkness and @AlexLi98 to talk about The Forest and the Trees: Bitcoin's Future in the Era of Quantum and AI

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Experimental psychologist and author of the blog Experimental History, on psychology, science reform and creativity.

• The one science reform we can all agree on, but we're too cowardly to do

  OR: the long overdue forest fire

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Environmental writer and campaigner; author of Six Degrees, The God Species, Seeds of Science and Our Final Warning.

• "It can't happen here" - or can it? I talk to Professor Susan Stokes about the playbook that elected leaders use to quietly erode democracy from within — the same tactics that have turned Hungary, Turkey, and now the United States into hybrid autocracies.

  weplanet.org

  AmericaRelated

Historian of the Renaissance at the University of Chicago and a science-fiction novelist; wrote Terra Ignota and Inventing the Renaissance.

• The Lost Towers of the Guelph-Ghibelline Wars

  Looks fake, doesn’t it? This implausible Medieval forest of towers, as dense as Manhattan skyscrapers, is our best reconstruction of the town of Bologna at its height, toward the end of the Medieval Guelph-Ghibelline wa…

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