I've had the nice experience of teaching my younger brother chess and as he made those bad blunders I started to remember when I played the same and made me happy. We like to review his games together and have a laugh at the shit moves and crack jokes like "killing a fly with a bazooka".

So I would like to know what you guys enjoyed re-living and teaching.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/shit/p/1149726/not-my-theoretical-degree-in-physics

AI Disproves 80-Year-Old Erdős Conjecture

OpenAI announced on May 20 that one of its AI models disproved a conjecture posed by Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős in 1946, solving what's known as the planar unit distance problem.

Image: nature.com - AI cracks 80-year-old mathematics challenge

The problem asks: given a set of points on a plane, how many pairs can be exactly the same distance apart? Erdős showed that larger grids could contain same-distance pairs growing slightly faster than the number of points, and he conjectured no arrangement could do better. For nearly 80 years, mathematicians believed him.

OpenAI's model proved otherwise. It used techniques from algebraic number theory to discover a new family of point arrangements that breaks the limit Erdős proposed, according to Nature. The system chose points with coordinates that were solutions to particular equations, finding constructions that outperform square grids.

Image: OpenAI - An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry

"If Erdős were alive, I am sure that he would just be raving about this advance," said Tom Trotter, a mathematician at Georgia Tech who co-authored papers with Erdős, per Nature.

Sebastien Bubeck, a mathematician at OpenAI, said he believes this is the first time AI has autonomously produced a significant result in any research field. The proof came from a single prompt, a machine-rewritten statement of Erdős's question. "It's kind of remarkable to see the model really reasoning through the problem like a human," said OpenAI mathematician Mehtaab Swahney.

Daniel Litt, a mathematician at the University of Toronto who independently verified the proof, called it "the first result produced autonomously by an AI that I find interesting in itself."

What the AI Did and Didn't Do

The broader problem remains unsolved. As the Guardian reported, the AI showed Erdős's proposed limit was too low but did not establish a new answer for how fast the pairs actually grow.

OpenAI has not released the full 125-page chain-of-thought reasoning, nor named the specific model. Bubeck described it as an experimental, general-purpose reasoning model rather than one trained specifically for mathematics.

Image: the Guardian - OpenAI makes breakthrough on 80-year-old maths problem

Independent Verification

The result has been validated by outside mathematicians. Thomas Bloom, who maintains the Erdős Problems website and had previously criticized OpenAI's earlier Erdős claims, co-authored a companion paper. He wrote that the AI achieved its results by "persevering down paths that a human may have dismissed as not worth their time to explore," the Guardian reported.

Bloom added a caveat: "While the original proof produced by AI was completely valid, it was significantly improved by the human researchers at OpenAI and the many other mathematicians involved in the present paper. The human still plays a vital role."

Mathematician Tim Gowers, also writing in the companion paper, described the result as "a milestone in AI mathematics."

OpenAI had been embarrassed last year when it claimed an earlier Erdős breakthrough that turned out to be based on existing literature the model had absorbed. This time, independent verification appears solid.

For the most complete account of the mathematics involved, Nature's coverage by Davide Castelvecchi is the best single read.

Sources: Nature, The Guardian See also https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/74c24085-19b0-4534-9c90-465b8e29ad73/unit-distance-remarks.pdf

But it’s worth the drive to go stay at SeaWorld for a few days.

have you heard of this guy? what a schmuck. thanks for reading my political analysis, make sure to lime & subscrime

cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/9156148

Archived version

Here is the full study: China's mercantilist squeeze on developing countries (pdf)

• The "China Squeeze" affects low- and middle-income countries through three major channels: intense competition in global export markets, rising Chinese import competition in their own domestic markets, and limited access to China’s own consumer market for low-skill-intensive exports from developing countries.
• The scale of the squeeze is historically unprecedented and may represent hundreds of billions of dollars in lost exports and forgone jobs in labor-intensive manufacturing in developing countries.
• Macro indicators on wages, productivity, and exchange rate policy suggest that distortions, especially an undervalued renminbi, may have played a role. Regardless of the cause, China’s dominance may be closing off the traditional manufacturing-led development path for low- and middle-income countries.

...

China’s resurgent trade surplus has revived concern in the United States and Europe, but consequences for low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) remain underappreciated.

This paper documents a “China Squeeze”: China’s compression of the industrialization space poorer economies need in labor-intensive manufacturing.

Using historical benchmarks and labor-endowment comparisons, we show that China, despite becoming richer and moving up the technology ladder, still commands a historically unusual share of global low-skilled manufacturing export markets. We estimate that this squeeze costs LMICs hundreds of billions of dollars in forgone exports.

It also operates through rising Chinese import competition in LMIC markets and China’s limited absorption of low-skilled imports from poorer countries. Macro evidence suggests that policy distortions, including exchange rate undervaluation, may have amplified the squeeze.

The central concern is developmental: China’s export strength may close off pathways to industrialization for poorer economies.

...

This wasn't my article, but Gardiner's! Anyway, here's a nice guide if you've never done so but would like to emulate PSP on SteamOS :)

May 25, 2026

Trump suggested that Iran could also normalize relations with Israel by signing the Abraham Accords and said that “it would be an Honor to have them also be part of this unparalleled World Coalition.”

However, Baghaei threw cold water on Trump’s optimism, stressing Monday that “the focus of the negotiations is on ending the war on all fronts, including Lebanon,” and that this critical point is “one of the core elements of understanding in any agreement.”

What negotiators aren’t discussing at this time, according to both sides, is ending Iran’s nuclear development.

I hope not very many of you are wondering WTF awkward interactions have to do with privacy, but hopefully the following examples make it clear to any of you who are wondering that.

Story 1

So, I go to sign up for a bank account at <insert big-ass household-name (in the U.S.) bank name here>. As soon as I walk in the door and tell the person I want to sign up for a checking account, they say "ok, let's get you set up with the app."

Now, I was running Lineage at the time with no Google apps. Just F-Droid and stuff I could install from there. I had yet to install any proprietary apps on my phone. (Not necessarily saying there was nothing proprietary running on my phone. I'd be surprised if Lineage doesn't depend on some binary blob drivers and such for my particular phone. But still, my rule was "no proprietary apps." And even if I decided to break that rule at the time, I kindof doubt the bank's app wouldn't just refuse to work without Google Play Services.)

My mistake was to say "it won't work on my phone" rather than "I'm not interested in the app; can I still get a bank account here?" They pushed it hard. "It's Android, right?" "...Technically, but not the way you're-" "Ok, go to the Play Store." "I don't have the Play Store." "Let me see your home screen." (My second mistake was not ending that line of conversation there with a "no, just give me a bank account.")

Before it was all said and done, I'd scanned their QR code and hit the "install" button so I could show them the error message that resulted. It wasn't until then that they dropped it.

I honestly wonder if they didn't get a commission when folks installed the app.

Lesson learned. Don't say "my phone's weird and it won't work." Say "I'm not installing the app. The only question that remains is whether that means I'm taking my business elsewhere or not."

Story 2

Much more recent. Same phone, but by that point I'd switched to Ubuntu Touch. My phone just stops working as a phone abruptly. No calls or texts.

(The astute among you may already be thinking "oh, probably the carrier dropped 2G/3G support and now requires VoLTE." And if you're thinking that, congratulations you get 100 internet points, but don't spoil it for the rest of the class.)

Now, I've always been really nervous about cell phones. About the time they started being ubiquitous (back in the days of Nokia candy-bar phones with black-and-white LCD displays), I had just quit Windows for OpenSuSE, and then not long after that, Gentoo. And when cell phones started becoming smart phones, stuck with the dumbest phones I could find in the used-phone bin at the phone repair place in the mall. In other words, I was (and largely still am) Amish for QWERTY.

So, I honestly don't know shit about cellular communication technologies because I've never really used them. I've literally never had a data plan. I'm still grandfathered in on a no-data prepaid plan with my carrier that isn't available any more.

Anyway, back to my current story where my phone wasn't working. I had gotten a message a while previous that my SIM card (a physical SIM) would stop working at some point and I had to get a new SIM card. And my SIM card was super old. It was one I'd had to cut down to size and everything. I hadn't followed through on the SIM card replacement, so I figured that was the issue.

I don't have an online/web account with my carrier. And I still have never installed any proprietary apps on any phone, so I didn't have my carrier's official app. The chat and phone support wouldn't help me because they couldn't get proof that I was me. (They required text-message-code authentication, but my phone didn't work, so I couldn't receive the text.) They referred me to the T-Mobile store to get a new SIM card that would ostensibly work.

So, I suppressed my gag reflex and walked into the T-Mobile store. At the door, they asked me some basic questions and entered me into the queue. They told me it'd be 15 to 20 minutes of wait time.

I went and had a seat to wait. Well over an hour later, I finally asked someone for an updated wait time estimate. I'd apparently slipped through the cracks because as a prepaid customer, I appear on a different wait queue in their software than other customers. But at least prompting them got me attended to.

I told them the whole situation. I was glad they didn't try to push me to get a new phone and plan. And they did give me a new SIM card. But when they found out I was running Ubuntu Touch, they referred to it as a "bootleg rom", intimated that I might be doing something shady (because custom roms can supposedly "break the rules" and... I dunno get calls for free or some shit, I don't know), and warned me strongly to be very careful with what data I store on the phone. (As if a stock-firmware phone is completely trustworthy. Heh.)

Not only that, but the new SIM card didn't resolve the issue. Reverting to the stock firmware did. VoLTE is the only thing Ubuntu Touch doesn't support on that phone. So now I either stick on the stock firmware until that red x turns into a green checkmark or try to figure out if Lineage supports VoLTE on the Pixel 3a as a stop gap until I can go back to Ubuntu Touch.

Anyway, those are my stories. I'd love to hear more such painful interactions with "normies" who don't understand why you wouldn't use Facebook or smart kitchen knives that won't work without WIFI or what have you.

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