Head of AI @NormalComputing - building formal thermodynamic chips. Ex @Meta @BARCdk SupWiz @OxfordQuantum. Follow for Math, AI, Probability, Lean, Tensors.
Copenhagen
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Thomas Ahle retweeted
I discussed the paper with an LLM for a while. At the end, I had it write up a new version of the result. It's 12 pages and seems to do a clearer job of explaining the main ideas. Uses a little quantum language, sorry :)
cs.cmu.edu/~odonnell/some_et…
DISCLAIMER: no idea if it's correct
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Thomas Ahle retweeted
The exponential time hypothesis is FALSE!
We are announcing three new discoveries in mathematics, computer science, and physics about harmonic analysis, complexity theory, and quantum field theory.
openai.com/index/building-sc…
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Here's a direct link to OpenAI's PDF claiming a refutation of ETH. In particular, it's claimed that 3SAT on n variables is in about exp(n/(log n)^{1/2+o(1)}) time
github.com/openai/math/blob/…
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Thomas Ahle retweeted
How do you tell if authors fabricated their research results? Sometimes: they just tell you. Read, e.g., this caption carefully.
Another banger of a post by my friend Nihar B. Shah on his blog, where he found at least 20+ such #ICLR2027 submissions:
researchonresearch.blog/2026…
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Thomas Ahle retweeted
Math 1 was crazy
Andrew Wiles worked on Fermat's Last Theorem alone in his attic for 7 years and told nobody except his wife.
The problem was 358 years old. Fermat scribbled in a margin in 1637 that he had a proof and no room to write it, and every mathematician since had failed.
Wiles saw the statement in a library book at 10 years old. He never let it go.
He was a Princeton professor when he started in 1986. He stopped publishing new work and released old results in pieces to hide the silence.
He announced it in Cambridge in June 1993, over 3 lectures, revealing the target only at the end. Newspapers ran it worldwide.
Then a referee found a gap. One step in the proof did not hold, and the error was fundamental.
He spent 14 months trying to close it in public view, with the whole field watching. He was ready to quit.
The fix arrived in September 1994. He has said he stared at it in disbelief for 20 minutes.
The BBC filmed him describing that moment. He gets a few words out, then turns away from the camera in tears.
He kept the greatest result of the century secret so nobody could take it.
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Thomas Ahle retweeted
Security called me at 6:12 AM today.
"Patch every PHP server immediately."
I asked what happened.
"Two critical vulnerabilities. Remote code execution. No authentication required."
Cool.
How many PHP servers do we have?
According to inventory: 12
According to reality:
Nobody knows.
We found one running WordPress.
Three running old internal tools.
One under someone's desk.
Two inside vendor appliances.
A forgotten employee directory from 2016.
And a server named:
PHP-OLD-DO-NOT-TOUCH
Naturally, that one runs payroll exports.
Then we found a PHP 5.6 box.
I asked who owned it.
The documentation said:
BRIAN.
Brian left in 2019.
We called Brian.
He said:
"Oh wow, that's still running?"
Excellent.
By 8 AM, leadership joined the incident call.
CEO:
"Can hackers actually get in?"
Security:
"Potentially yes."
CEO:
"Without a password?"
Security:
"Yes."
CEO:
"Then why do WE need passwords?"
Not the lesson.
Finance asked if we could wait until the weekend to patch because downtime affects revenue.
Security explained that the alternative was letting strangers execute code on our servers.
Finance asked for a cost comparison.
At 9:17, someone suggested temporarily taking the vulnerable websites offline.
Marketing refused.
"Our campaign is live."
So for the next hour, the company officially decided maintaining a landing page for 20% off webinar registration was more important than preventing remote server takeover.
We finally patched everything we could find.
Then our scanner discovered another PHP server.
Hostname:
TEMP-PHP-2014
Uptime:
4,512 days.
Nobody knows what it does.
Nobody owns it.
Nobody can shut it down.
But every time we block network access, the warehouse stops printing shipping labels.
Security has classified it as critical infrastructure.
It is running PHP 5.4.
The vulnerability has existed longer than half our employees.
The emergency patch took four hours.
Finding out what PHP actually runs took eleven.
The internet isn't held together with code.
It's held together with servers everyone is afraid to turn off.
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Thermo chips
Илон Маск предлагает не охлаждать чипы для космоса, а наоборот — пусть работают горячими.
Вот в чём настоящий парадокс космических дата-центров.
Все думают: «В космосе же −270 °C, чипы будут охлаждаться сами». На деле всё наоборот. В вакууме нет ни воздуха, ни воды, которые могли бы уносить тепло. Вакуум работает как огромный термос: тепло, которое выработал чип, остаётся внутри. Единственный способ от него избавиться — излучать его в виде инфракрасного света с больших радиаторных панелей.
И тут начинается жёсткая физика. Чем холоднее радиатор, тем слабее он излучает. По закону Стефана–Больцмана мощность излучения растёт пропорционально **четвёртой степени** абсолютной температуры. Если поднять рабочую температуру чипа всего на 20 % в кельвинах, радиаторы начинают излучать в два раза больше тепла. Значит, их можно сделать в два раза меньше и легче.
Именно об этом говорит Маск в видео:
«Если увеличить рабочую температуру на 20 % в кельвинах, массу радиаторов можно сократить вдвое. Поэтому в космосе выгодно работать на более высокой температуре».
На Земле мы тратим миллиарды, чтобы держать чипы холодными. В космосе выгоднее спроектировать чипы так, чтобы они спокойно работали при 100–120 °C. Тогда радиаторы становятся существенно легче, а стоимость запуска резко падает. Плюс нейросети довольно устойчивы к случайным битовым ошибкам от радиации — для огромной модели несколько перевёрнутых битов почти ничего не значат.
Получается, что главная проблема космического ИИ — не энергия (солнце в космосе бесплатное и постоянное), а именно теплоотвод. И Маск предлагает решать его не охлаждением, а температурой.
Выглядит почти контринтуитивно, но физика на его стороне.
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Project status: sped up Inkscape 100x on Mac.
Turns out I was running an old version of Inkscape, and massive performance improvements had already happened upstream...
Still got a 2x speedup vs Nightly, including better startup time and UI responsiveness.
I would contribute the changes, but Inkscape currently doesn't accept "AI-assisted" code changes.
The performance fork is here: gitlab.com/lobais/inkscape
since seeing this, I've had zero tolerance for slow software.
currently having Astra rewrite the OpenGL backend of Inkscape on Mac.
what other software is inexcusably slow?
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Ah, it's this thing
GPT-6 Astra Pro in ChatGPT got an upgrade with faster responses and improved use of plugins and tools.
And now, multiple agents can tackle different parts of a task in parallel. You can follow each agent’s progress and open completed tasks to review their work.
Now available to Pro users in the Chat tab.
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Thomas Ahle retweeted
Over the last couple of weeks I interviewed ~2 dozen (very serious and productive) people -- from all kinds of companies ranging from frontier labs and "FAANG" (whatever abbreviation is for this right now?!) to start-ups with O(1) people in them -- about their use of coding agents at work: which models/harnesses they are using, how are they ensuring the resulting code is correct, how did the culture and teamwork get affected, what are some good and dangerous practices in the modern era of software engineering.
Since then I got caught up in some other stuff, and currently I'm procrastinating on finishing the post. Let me use this tweet for accountability, I will try to drop this post early next week.
It will be a boring set of observations and takes, none of the sensationalist crap of the sort of "everyone is already using swarms of agents to build products in a day that make millions of ARR" or "LLMs are stochastic parrots hence useless". It's simply a several thousand word expansion of "It depends!". But I hope that in the era of anxiety, FUD and doomerism, it will help you to understand where we are and where we might be going, how it definitely did help me.
See you soon (and if by some chance you want to see something specific in the post, pls let me know!)!
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Thomas Ahle retweeted
Claude figured out the origin of the NIST curve parameters. Turns out to have been timestamps!
anthropic.com/research/ecdsa…
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since seeing this, I've had zero tolerance for slow software.
currently having Astra rewrite the OpenGL backend of Inkscape on Mac.
what other software is inexcusably slow?
GPT-6 Astra just got Age of Empires IV running at 70-150 fps on Apple Silicon.
CrossOver was doing ~8 fps and freezing constantly.
now: max settings, big fights, online, stable.
I genuinely did not think this game was going to run like this on a Mac
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