Drew Lewis

Sauron has claimed a refutation of the Exponential Time Hypothesis (ETH). Frodo, Sam and Pippin have been invited to Mordor and asked to organise a community-led effort to evaluate this claim. Should they accept?

Switched the thermostat from AC to heat this morning so you know what that means

A hot dog is not a sandwich for tax purposes. #HoagieHomies

Actually from several moves ago, but: you can* pay people to help you pack, as well as to help you move *I recognize this is a privilege, but one I didn't know was even an option for a while Also, label everything in absurd levels of detail. This makes unpacking over time so much easier.

I am becoming increasingly convinced that this journal's technical editor I am forced to deal with is an LLM rather than an actual person.

As grumpy as I get about tap lists that are 80% IPAs, I am taking a moment tonight to celebrate that my local beer garden had both a Dortmunder export and an altbier on tap today. (As well as 11 IPAs)

There’s this thing that people do right now like “don’t judge me i used AI lol” like if you object you’re the prude and it’s like babes this isn’t a scam you’re running on a corporation, this is you participating in our society’s demise. Please let’s just be literate.

If one of my students (correctly) called me out for feeding them AI slop I would die of shame, not write (or have AI write) a blog post about it.

Lovely having my morning coffee in the midst of the redwoods

Rented a place with its very own redwoods so I can enjoy my evening cocktail amongst the trees

Now THIS is how you write a story. Devastating.

It's telling that men would rather try to invent tech to replace humans' role in caregiving than step up as equal partners in parenting. Telling, that is, in that it shows how financial capitalism and patriarchy work together to dissuade men from doing "unprofitable" labor, like the work of care.

This reminded me of a post I saw today from a mathematician-turned-AI-bro noting (without an ounce of self awareness) the exponential increase in submissions to arXiv and math journals

The Association for Human Mathematics (AHM) statement on OpenAI’s October 6 release of mathematical documents just dropped! www.ahmath.org/statements

Me when OpenAI drops 547366156 LLM-written “papers”:

This is fine, but AI bots do not respect copyright or license terms, why should we expect they will respect this toggle?

Absolutely wild to me that mathematicians can't be bothered to use their own brains to write a statement about AI use in math education. maa.org/wp-content/u...

The chart explains AI hype more than any chart that's ever been charted.

I'm not sure if y'all saw a CNN report on how the US had almost started WW3 with China based on fabricated information generated by a chatbot, claiming that a Chinese vessel was carrying components of nuclear weapons. That was an "existential threat" to humanity www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Images are once again borked on Bluesky, and once again you see why alt text has more than one use.

I think administrators cowing to media pressure hurts the reputation of a university much more than piloting a long overdue and quite modest change to grading practices.

Imagine replacing people with tokens for plagiarism slot machines. This is why I take the extreme position that LLM-fuelled papers are not research, should not be read or cited, and should definitely count in one’s CV, but negatively.

Reaching new levels of ridiculous here

For physics instructors, the takeaway is important: if our grading practices heavily penalize blank responses, exams may disadvantage some student groups and may not measure physics understanding equally well across students.

@djphysicswebb.bsky.social, Mary Chessey and I have a newly accepted paper on uncollected test item responses on open-ended physics exam questions! Blank responses on exams are missing data, not measurements of physics knowledge or skills. Read on for details... Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2606.05473

Chaim is bringing the fire 🔥

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

Went north, but not nearly as far, to see some trees this weekend

Starting to get kinda annoyed at senior mathematicians saying "I use AI to speed up my work because I have to. But we must protect junior researchers from being scooped. I just have no idea how!" You are the ones doing the scooping!