My gut tells me that exploring mathematics in this way has very high potential for bringing on future advancements. (1) Simple elements that (2) reveal coherent structures, and were (3) hidden to historic geniuses due to requiring exhaustive computation.
They’re basically just taking equations of the form f(x,y)=k where k=0, and asking “ah but what about when k!=0”?
Indeed, looking at the constant as a variable by looking at the equation f(x,y)=z IS quite useful. (I’m reminded of Feynman favorite trick for solving integrals). That generalization trick is actually useful in MANY contexts. But there’s nothing novel here.
Real question: is there anybody that is both maintaining alpha-dev capability by keeping abreast of all these daily changes, while also reserving enough time to actually work?
Seems like we've reached the event horizon of whether AI advances are worth paying attention to.
I feel like it's most useful to get in a bit of a groove with one setup and then poke your head up every now and again and try updating. Staying at the bleeding edge of anything can be a bit of a treadmill.
I think the play now is to just try out whatever the best new model is every time you see a headline that fundamentally reorganizes your conception of what's possible.
I enjoy using opencode go to play around with a lot of different models. I wind up using deepseek v4 flash for most everything, stepping up to minimax m3 if that doesn't cut it, finally preferring GLM for complex tasks or important planning I want to go right the first time
I recommend opencode or something akin to it to play with models. Any big model updates or hot new ones will naturally run across your desk that way
I don't think you need to be keeping abreast of them really, you just need to be using the best model you can get enough tokens from, which for many people is Fable 5 @ $200ish, ideally fanning out implementation to cheaper models
I would love to be shilling for Anthropic, but I am not. I am part of a group of about 30 developers, and 80% of them are using Fable 5 and very sold on it, with the remainder being committed to Sol. Both are competent, but among our set (who will try anything), Fable 5 is definitely winning. The fucking refusals for security work are insane though, and I hate them.
I use Sol and Grok 4.5 as my inline debuggers/reviewers, and both do well, and are decent at token save. DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 found some interesting bugs when I tried it a few days ago, and I'm curious to see if that also joins the code-review line up
Surprised no one here just does the outside border and spirals in (pinching off and immediately finishing irregular bulges). Looks neat, though more organic than rows, and is naturally motivating, as the second "half" always seems to go much quicker. Spiral the other way next time for evenness.
It will continue to be a mystery only solvable by the dwindling number of people clever enough to combat the problem with strategies like the many offered here.
Until the real problem is identified...which IMO is that programming itself is just harder to concentrate on in 2026 than it was in 1989. There are way too many possibilities of how to do things, and way too much difference between a good choice (say getting Claude to do it) and a bad one (say, writing a linked-list traverser yourself). Humans work well with the few variables involved in creating things like that linked-list traverser. But they require tons more energy if everything is on the table. Right library? Right platform? Right coding agent? Right way to keep myself from getting distracted?
In contrast, doing almost anything else seems like a relief for your brain.
My suggestion is always to look at what colors people think "go together". A Westerner looking at a Chinese temple will say "ugh, saturated red, light blue, and gold, all together?" My own self looking at a shirt my Eastern European wife loves: "dark blue, gray, and orange, bleah". It suggests that depending on your culture, you may have adopted a different visual response, where blood color is harmonious with sky color, or something like that.
The real trouble is knowing what being heard, means. For me, as long as no one's intending to make this situation better, I'd like to go do other things. How long do I have to stay there pretending to lament that her life is so hard--especially when part of that is because she hates having her problems solved?
It's unbelievable that we try so hard to solve this problem even after CRTs are extinct. Every LCD-type screen is easily made to refresh at any rate below its max. If we can't show a 24fps movie at 24fps on our TVs (or smoothly smoothed at 48fps)...what are we doing as a society? It's not like people think TV is an unimportant corner of their lives.
Considering that practically the only metric of economic success in the US oligarchy is the price of the flat-screen TV you'd imagine they'd at least work by now. At at least one price range.
I've got a "smart" TV that I didn't want, but that's the only thing they offer in my price range anymore. Maybe 5 years old. Stopped connecting to Wi-Fi, an actual hardware problem. Bricked. Opened the TV, cleaned the contacts and uncreased some wire strip. Has been working ever since. Most people would have thrown it out and bought another. But I'm the bad guy for using incandescent light bulbs.
Something about people successful with computers makes them quick to claim something is easy based on the number of steps needed, without regard to the ease of remembering all the arbitrary or sometimes contra-pattern steps required.
In my defense, I remember it because I expect Option key to modify the original character and Shift key to make it bigger, so remembering that Option plus Shift makes hyphen into a bigger alternate version of it, i.e. the em dash, is not difficult. I acknowledge that not everyone would see it this way.
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