Kevin Lacker
@lacker
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Working on math + AI at https://t.co/u95v5xJnFC. Formerly: alien hunter, Parse cofounder, Facebook eng manager, Google search quality engineer, college mathlete
Piedmont, California
Joined March 2008
I'm happy to announce the launch of Acorn, a new theorem prover that includes an integrated AI. Theorem provers let you write mathematical proofs that are rigorously verified. But they are notoriously difficult to use. Acorn makes it easier, by using AI to fill in the details.
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TIL the knife I take backpacking is illegal to carry in public in England.
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Generate videos in just a few seconds. Try Grok Imagine, free for a limited time.
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Most residential buildings in San Francisco were built before 1940. Since then, construction has gotten slower each decade.
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The formal Turing Test still has not been passed, for a reason that I would never have suspected 15 years ago: that demonstrating your AI is good at misleading people would be bad PR.
I would be happy to wager any challenger $1000 that I (as the judge) can tell a human from any frontier AI model in a Turing Test.
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The AIs finally beat my IMO score. I'm a bit sad. but it would have been more disappointing if AI had stopped making progress. Now it's exciting. What will we be able to build or discover with the tool of superhuman math AI?.
the openai IMO news hit me pretty heavy this weekend. i'm still in the acute phase of the impact, i think. i consider myself a professional mathematician (a characterization some actual professional mathematicians might take issue with, but my party my rules) and i don't think i.
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It’s funny how many different things the GLP-1 drugs improve. It’s like drinking a potion of +1 Constitution.
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As a baby I had pyloric stenosis. A valve in your intestine is too tight and food can’t get through. Before Conrad Ramstedt figured how to fix this via surgery in 1911, it was a death sentence. Nowadays, it’s a simple surgery with a survival rate of nearly 100%.
What's a modern minor medical treatment that is just bonkers effective, like you'd painfully die for weeks if this happened 400 years ago.
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Dating app idea: no swiping or anything like that, you just chat with an AI who has the personality of a friendly little old matchmaker lady, and she sets you up with someone who would be a good match for you.
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People should unit test their documentation by giving an LLM a set of prompts and testing that it works. "Read this documentation and implement X.".
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This. actually makes sense. If stablecoins work, why not stockcoins? Crypto could let random people on the internet bet on startups that are private, even if the startups themselves don't have anything to do with crypto.
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We need a YIMBY-NIMBY compromise, where we upzone the areas that are furthest below their potential, like the Mission and West Oakland. But we keep the nice places unchanged, like Marin and Orinda. Enforce it at the state level. YISEBY: Yes, in someone else’s back yard.
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The weird thing about publicly-owned national forest is that a lot of it is *currently* being logged by private timber companies. There isn't much difference between selling the land to a logging company, and maintaining ownership but selling timber contracts.
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Such a scam, Windows trying to sell you things on startup with the default button being “buy”. Now I need to warn my children never to trust anything this Microsoft company says.
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Interesting theme in common with recent events in Ukraine, surprise drone attacks taking out more-expensive conventional equipment before it can be activated.
Mossad has released footage of its operations this morning on the ground in Iran, which involved the targeting of surface-to-air missile launchers and ballistic missiles aimed at Israel. Drones were launched and struck a ballistic missile site near Tehran, preventing Iran from
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Waymo used to represent "wild sci-fi fantasy" to me. I guess to some people it still does. Maybe it's even scarier, that now there's an overlap between wild sci-fi fantasy and reality.
People are burning Waymos because they are vile representations of governance that has valued profit over the public good: they represent labor replacement, the decimation of public transport, & wild sci-fi fantasies being privileged over common sense.
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Apple doesn't like it, but native iOS app development is growing less and less popular over time. The iPhone isn't getting many new features any more, and the cool stuff is happening with AI in the cloud. Among developers learning to code, Swift is even less popular than Haskell.
Apple today took a shot at React Native and other cross-platform frameworks. I have thoughts. First, the quote in question, from their keynote (around the 40 minute mark):. "Some other frameworks promise the ability to write code once for Android and iOS. And that may sound.
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"Good morning, ChatGPT agent. Please create a fictional resume for me, that perfectly matches the position, for every job posting on this site.".
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Claude Code is helpful for cleaning up documentation too. "Sometimes the docs tell you to do X, but that isn't recommended any more. Instead they should tell you to do Y. Please fix!".
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