iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Ragnar {Groot Koerkamp}

What I like about not using LLM-based tools is writing code is so tedious you are looking for solutions to write less code or no code at all and you usually find them. Which improves your project dramatically in a longer run.

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Reposted by Ragnar {Groot Koerkamp}

Robin Hawkes @robhawkes.bsky.social · 13h

What if offshore wind farms were star constellations? 🌌 I've had this idea in my head for years, ever since I first saw satellite radar imagery of wind farms. They often look surprisingly like a telescope image of a star field. Over the weekend I finally made it a reality…

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Ragnar {Groot Koerkamp} @curiouscoding.nl · 29/09/2026

(in stree.rs in crates.io/crates/znipp...)

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Ragnar {Groot Koerkamp} @curiouscoding.nl · 29/09/2026

Randomly browsing crates.io, when suddenly... Can LLM-generated testimonials be part of academic CVs already?

This module is a derivative work; the algorithm — the cache-line-sized
implicit S(+)-tree, the branchless SIMD node compare, and the software-pipelined/prefetched batch traversal that hides memory latency — is entirely Ragnar's. **Thank you, Ragnar Groot Koerkamp**, for the design and the beautifully written explanation; every fast path here traces back to your work, including the B-factor and batching trade-offs we re-measured for i64.

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Reposted by Ragnar {Groot Koerkamp}

Rasmus Pagh @rasmuspagh.net · 29/09/2026

Very interesting report about AI and theoretical computer science, based on a recent meeting at @simonsinstitute.bsky.social simons.berkeley.edu/ai-tcs-worki... These are times of change, but I am optimistic that there will always be a valuable place for humans who seek to understand.

simons.berkeley.edu

AI + TCS Working Group

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Reposted by Ragnar {Groot Koerkamp}

Grace @gracekind.net · 30/11/2025

I don’t think this is a narcissistic injury, but it is an egoistic injury. And it hurts a lot! If a computer can do everything I can do, what makes me valuable? This is a difficult question to answer

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Ragnar {Groot Koerkamp} @curiouscoding.nl · 28/09/2026

What really gets to me is every header using "the" as if stuff was already obvious at that point. But the entire point is to explain it _after_ the header. And also lots of headers like "<topic>: <the main takeaway>". I do this myself in blogposts, but in papers, I find it super cringe somehow.

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Ragnar {Groot Koerkamp} @curiouscoding.nl · 28/09/2026

Google scholar sent me a notification of a new preprint with a highly relevant but obivously LLM-generated title. On 10s of scanning, many headers in the text are also LLM-generated. It's just so repulsive I cannot put myself to looking at the thing more than 20 seconds total...

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Reposted by Ragnar {Groot Koerkamp}

Resist 🕎🍉 @antizionistjew.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Google Maps Updated Their Maps - The Atrocities Of Gaza Are Now EXPOSED To The World. Heartbreaking 💔

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Ragnar {Groot Koerkamp} @curiouscoding.nl · 27/09/2026

We have AI, but gmail still doesn't have a feature where it suggests to snooze a mail to the one date that's mentioned in it.

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Reposted by Ragnar {Groot Koerkamp}

Rob Patro @robp.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Tangentially, @jermp.bsky.social also points out @recombconf.bsky.social is listed as B tier in CORE portal.core.edu.au/conf-ranks/?.... This is something that we should figure out how to address. RECOMB is a premiere conference in comp bio, & it is highly selective. It is `A` tier without question.

portal.core.edu.au

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Reposted by Ragnar {Groot Koerkamp}

Rob Patro @robp.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Ok comp. bio / bioinformatics / genomics friends. Let's talk about @recombconf.bsky.social and, specifically, the way in which the "proceedings" have evolved. This seems like something that we, as a community, should address. RECOMB now has no "published" proceedings in the classic sense.

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Reposted by Ragnar {Groot Koerkamp}

Greg Egan @gregegansf.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

I was aware of Google announcing an implementation of Shor’s algorithm that needed substantially fewer qubits than previous methods, but I missed the bit where they released a Zero Knowledge Proof of their claim ... www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-...

scientificamerican.com

Why mathematicians are suddenly hiding research results

Google made a major breakthrough in quantum computing. To prevent the results from being misused, the company kept them secret. That backfired

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Reposted by Ragnar {Groot Koerkamp}

jazz mickle @queenjazz.gay · 27/09/2026

conventional wisdom for the entire time i've been programming has always been "less code is better". the idea that we must write more code faster is ridiculous. the problem has never been rate of output

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amos @fasterthanli.me · 26/09/2026

Q: what is it called when you start letting AI write some of your docs, then some more, then... A: "slippery slop"

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Ragnar {Groot Koerkamp} @curiouscoding.nl · 26/09/2026

Woke up at 2500m this morning 🤩

Picture of a rugged mountain ridge with a perfectly clear blue lake in front. The ridge is reflected in the lake. The foreground shows rocks at the bottom of the (shallow) lake, while the shoreline on the back shows a red upside down tent drying in the sun.

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Gro-Tsen @gro-tsen.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

The two answers to the MO question mathoverflow.net/q/515514/17064 exemplify these two mindsets. The main damage done by AI here is that the second motivation means you need to keep your questions absolutely secret and refuse to answer “what are you currently working on?”.

mathoverflow.net

Soft question: an era in my research terminated by AI (which is, in a way, not so bad)

I feel like writing a post about it, though I am not sure what kind of answers I will get. Here is my story. Ever since I have heard Michael Atiyah talk about his problem on configurations of points (

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Bede Constantinides @bede.im · 24/09/2026

"Claude Opus 5.5 refused to answer on biosecurity grounds, its refusal costing half that of DeepSeek’s complete answer"

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Antoine Leblanc @nicuveo.gay · 24/09/2026

AI is the triumph of "code is nothing but a means to an end", which is why we in the "software engineering is a craft" camp tend to hate it so much.

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Reposted by Ragnar {Groot Koerkamp}

Matt Henderson @matthen.com · 24/09/2026

every (convex) quadrilateral is a square- if you view it from the right perspective

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Ryan Moulton @moultano.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Over and over I find that the key to being a good experimentalist is to trust absolutely nothing.

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Ragnar {Groot Koerkamp} @curiouscoding.nl · 24/09/2026

Also, like math, there are objective measurements to guide/verify it. It should be very much expected that they are good at this? (Yes, I'm saying that all this optimization work in e.g. my papers is pretty straightforward once you know what you're doing.)

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Ragnar {Groot Koerkamp} @curiouscoding.nl · 24/09/2026

I'm honestly surprised that at this point people are still surprised Claude can autonomously optimize code. It's just measure, identify hotspots, optimize, measure again, and repeat. Honestly all quite mechanical steps. The optimizations themselves are also mostly pattern matching I suspect.

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Ragnar {Groot Koerkamp} @curiouscoding.nl · 24/09/2026

I/we don't really play with the data enough probably?

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Jarno N. Alanko @jnalanko.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

www.anthropic.com/news/claude-... 950 Claude agents spent 21 hours looking at sequences encoding reverse transcriptases and noticed nearby spaced repeats like in CRISPR. It's cool but.... how come the string matching community had not found this before? Embarrassing.

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Reposted by Ragnar {Groot Koerkamp}

Eugene Vinitsky 🍒 @eugenevinitsky.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

If you view AI as filling in the convex hull of knowledge, this is great in the short term but bad in the long term if there's no one left to expand the hull after

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Reposted by Ragnar {Groot Koerkamp}

Dirk Lorenz @dirque.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Signs that academia may be for you: * eduroam works on the first try * you get your travel reimbursement without having to email anyone twice * you understand your institution’s course management system

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Reposted by Ragnar {Groot Koerkamp}

Jarno N. Alanko @jnalanko.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

I'm starting to believe in the labor theory of value for TCS/math papers. That is, given equally skilled workers, with equal tools, and equally important problems, the value of a paper is roughly proportional to the amount of (human) labor that has gone into it.

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Reposted by Ragnar {Groot Koerkamp}

Camille Fournier @skamille.themanagerswrath.com · 22/09/2026

New critical skill: refusing to let people give you work by throwing AI crap at you. If it isn't immediately obvious what the value is from the doc it's going right back to sender

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Reposted by Ragnar {Groot Koerkamp}

Phil Eaton @eatonphil.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Man there's no way to crash your reputation so quickly as an engineering org as publishing obviously AI-written articles.

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Reposted by Ragnar {Groot Koerkamp}

Yuri Sulyma @yurisulyma.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

A lot of AI/math discourse has a kind of sitcom-y view of mathematics, as if every open problem is a profound breakthrough Many open problems are there bc the author was exhausted and wanted to get the dang paper on arxiv already; or to leave low-hanging fruit for young people

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Reposted by Ragnar {Groot Koerkamp}

Zach Weinersmith @zachweinersmith.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Artists: but I don't want to lose my job. I love it. Mathematicians: but I don't want to lose my job. I love it. Economists: LONG HAVE I AWAITED THIS HOUR! DESTROY ME, EFFICIENCY, AND LET UTILIZATION-ADJUSTED TOTAL FACTOR PRODUCTIVITY RISE ON THE WIND OF MY ASHES!

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Ragnar {Groot Koerkamp} @curiouscoding.nl · 22/09/2026

I'll also present the SimdQuickHeap at P99, in case you missed it at the ESA best paper session ;) Basically, it's a pretty simple data structure inspired by quickselect with some SIMD sprinkled on top that's up to 2x faster than all other priority queues and up to 8x faster than binary heaps!

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Jarno N. Alanko @jnalanko.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

It is really starting to feel like at least a decade worth of pure math/TCS results is going to be happening in Q4 2026. Human understanding, digestation and dissemination is going to take a while. But wow.

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Reposted by Ragnar {Groot Koerkamp}

Zalea 💜 @zalea.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

this comparison to alchemy is super interesting. LLMs feel similar to mercury in that they could be a red herring and exposing yourself to them too much messes up your brain

The alchemists also had clues that led them astray. For one thing, the were obsessed with mercury. Mercury is not very interesting chemically, but it is the only metal that is a liquid at room temperature.

This seemed very significant to the alchemists, and caused them to place mercury at the heart of their alchemical system, and their search for the Philosopher's Stone, a way to turn base metals into gold.

It didn't help that mercury was neurotoxic, so if you spent too much time playing with it, you started to think weird thoughts. In that way, it resembles our current thought experiments with superintelligence.

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Cooper Lund @cooperlund.online · 22/09/2026

Damn, he had Sam Altman dead to rights in 2016

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Alexander Kasprzyk @amkasprzyk.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Public perception about the future of mathematics is an enormous challenge facing our community. We are currently not even remotely in control of the narrative. For example, the photo shows what’s on display in every newsagents and supermarket in the UK. Will future students be scared away? #MathSky

The latest issue of New Scientist magazine, with the front cover “How AI blew up maths”.

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Ragnar {Groot Koerkamp} @curiouscoding.nl · 22/09/2026

Also: farmers get to protest for the past 30 years against reducing their emissions and the size/number of farms to avoid shrinking their industry. Us mathematicians et al. are basically gonna have to just suck it up overnight.

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Ragnar {Groot Koerkamp} @curiouscoding.nl · 22/09/2026

At least so far they're only proving open problems, i.e. known-unknowns. Here's to hoping there'll still be work for us in defining what we don't know... (not sure I'm optimistic.) Also, given that they `grep conjecture` I wonder if they deemed my minimizer conjectures worthy. 😆

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Huck Bennett @huckbennett.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Wow does the post title bury the lede! I particularly like the pictured comment.

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Ragnar {Groot Koerkamp} @curiouscoding.nl · 21/09/2026

If you work for your institute, you presumably get paid a salary for that? Although if it's all overtime... yeah not great then. I was lucky to get unemployment benefits while writing my MSCA proposal last year.

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Ragnar {Groot Koerkamp} @curiouscoding.nl · 21/09/2026

To clarify just in case: in the sense that you spend 2 months of time on it that should be valued at 10k. Not in the sense that you actually pay this amount.

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Ragnar {Groot Koerkamp} @curiouscoding.nl · 21/09/2026

There's also a bunch of prisoner dilemma in here... It's best if everybody decides to only do minimal polishing. Ideally there would be a rule against overly polishing 😅

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Ragnar {Groot Koerkamp} @curiouscoding.nl · 21/09/2026

Another caveat: Encouraging students to think about future research plans is not really wasted money. But I must say that MSCA has a lot of "process" and "meta" around it that takes a lot of time to get right that at least to me feels quite redundant and not reusable.

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Ragnar {Groot Koerkamp} @curiouscoding.nl · 21/09/2026

Maybe we can learn from corporate rewards: - base salary based on past perf (experience/CV/seniority) - bonus based on current (past year) perf - stocks to encourage future perf So proposals could be: - 1/3rd on project finished in last 2 years - 1/3rd ongoing projects - 1/3rd upcoming projects

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Ragnar {Groot Koerkamp} @curiouscoding.nl · 21/09/2026

Yeah I've been thinking the same: say you get 3-5 years PhD "for free" and then repeatedly get the next 3 years of funding based on the past 3 years. This of course has the major drawback (as does the current system) that success of your PhD is amplified massively to success of your career...

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