Ah. I'm a Windows user from the days when it did not have a version. Played my first computer game, Balance Of Power, back then. Used every version, even ME, supported and maintained my clients machines on everything from Windows 3.1 when I became a tech. Reinstalling 95 and 98 I don't recall as being a big thing, but I was supporting a fairly homogeneous population then. I installed 95 Upgrade Edition and ran it continuously for over 30 days without rebooting. Then the first update broke that, and I learned as many did to reboot occasionally, or more often. I found 98 and 98SE to be improvements. ME we will consign to the manure pile of MS. NT was a greater leap forward then most realize, that kernel is still the basis for Windows, and it is superb despite the naysayers. Vista was a great leap forward also, though it was an interim step towards 7, perhaps the most durable and resilient Windows yet released.

8, 10 this was an era of genuine improvement. 11 also but it suffers undeserved complaints. To this day very few understand that Windows has to, and always had to, tolerate drivers from manufacturers of varying quality and performance, which Apple hardly has to at all. Also Linux has an army of obsessive (often) coders noodling over drivers as well as the benefit of a Unix-like kernel that can tolerate more abuse than commercial software does, and only because it gets so much more attention from a huge volume of coding expertise. But as you know, Linux desktops can be changed, sometimes grammatically, on a whim of the 'owners', the GUI world under X was complex and inscrutable, Wayland is a seismic disruption, and while I think for the better, it took some time to become fully featured and adopted. This event is similar to the 10>11 migration, though perhaps oversimplified this?

But in all this, I encounter disgruntled Windows users with unusual problem histories. Unusual because these are single-digit percentages of users. Not that you experience should be ignored, no. But on the desktop Windows 10 and 11 is working and performing to high levels. In the server room nobody much bothers with anything but Linux, the advantage is huge. The vocal Windows complainers I see are too often making what seems to be a religious argument. I've encountered this since the 90s, and the 'Helpful Internet Community' responding to my Windows questions with "oh, Winblows", get a real OS" in the days of Slackware 1.x. yeah, I did run that, but not as my daily, and 'Windoze' was working. Fortunately they are much less offensive than before. But Windows 10 has run its course. The objections have been answered. Old apps are overdue, mostly, and that's expensive, but your complaint may be with the vendor. And that's software, and that's a problem even with FOSS. Just the cost being in effort.

But, after all that, if it works, use it. If not, go and find the solution.

Ya forgot the /s flag...

There's so much excess bullshit in American that many World Cup fans visiting from away wish they could stay. Forever.

The distinction here is that they are in that situation getting information about what the market is doing slightly faster, or sending an order slightly faster. But here the information is information that is not publicly available. So yes, the distinction here is clear. This is insider trading. (That the other stuff should also be illegal but isn't is a secondary issue here.)

Yes, you and I have disagreed on these matters before here. That you might want to listen even a little bit to subject matter experts should maybe occur to you. But if you don't want to listen to me, then there are other options. Alvaro Lozano-Robledo did a great interview with Francesco Fournier-Facio about it the sofic group problem and why we care https://www.youtube.com/watch?... . Fournier-Facio has done a lot of recent good work in infinite group theory. If you want to learn more about the sphere packing problem and why we care, you can look at Conway and Sloane's book "Sphere Packings, Lattices and Groups." For the Ramsey problem, you can check out Ron Graham's book on Ramsey theory, although it is a bit old at this point. A more up to date book is Soifer's "Ramsey Theory: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow" but I haven't personally read it. But the upshot is that other than which of these problems I've personally worked unsuccessfully on, there's nothing here that you cannot verify yourself, so you don't really need to rely on me and your own opinion that I have no clue is only a little relevant.

Mathematician here. None of the ten problems under discussion here are remotely problems that "nobody really looked for a long time because the problem was not interesting enough." All ten of these were major problems in their subfields; I was familiar with 8/10 before this, and I've talked with people in the other subfields who have confirmed that the other 2 were also major enough. The sphere packing problem has been a problem which people have been thinking about variants of for literally over a hundred years, and is one that I thought about (and made no progress on) when I was doing my PhD. The Ramsey problem is one of the most famous open problems in Ramsey theory, and one I've also thought about, as my own research areas have moved somewhat into graph theory the last few years. Of the remaining other 6, I've never seriously thought about, but are still well known problems.

Your point about there being many open problems, and they've only solved a small fraction has more validity. But that's also just as true for how human mathematicians function. I've probably thought about hundreds of problems, and solved only maybe 5% of those, and nothing I've solved has been remotely of the level of any of these ten problems in fame or amount of prior attention. That these systems are only solving a fraction of the problems is true but is only the smallest hit on how impressive these results are. And these systems continue to improve. We'll likely see even more impressive results in a month or two.

Sure. And, true to form, you didn't offer a reason why you changed from Windows. Your wife's reason seems to be she 'didn't like it'. Choice based on individual and subjective enjoyment, I understand. Rejecting Windows based on security and privacy concerns out to be based on objective analysis, but if to often based on rumor and 'reports' (but I repeat myself).

I've stopped relying on Cory's rants vigilantes. Long time ago.

The person you are referring to is not an AI hater, they are as they say astonished. I'm not sure which example they are referring to, but there have been multiple examples at this point with GPT 5.4 or higher or Fable where the primary thing the human has done is just told it to keep trying and continue every so often.

While we do not know precisely what system OpenAI was using, the proofs they generated in this case did not come with automatic Lean or other verification. And many of the successful uses of AI in math now, such as Erdos 1196, the Unit Distance Conjecture have been done using just the regular LLM without Lean, or any other system.

Well, that's true also for human mathematicians. I'm a mathematician, and I'd guess I end up solving about 5% or fewer of the problems I end up trying to work on.

Anthropic made a profit second quarter this year https://aitoolsrecap.com/Blog/anthropic-first-profit-2026-revenue-breakdown. We'll see if they make a profit in Q3, but at least right now, that statement doesn't look accurate. Now, there's reasonable concern about how real this profit is, given the weird amount of self-dealing and entanglement between the different companies. I also wouldn't be surprised if none of the major data center companies are taking chip depreciation into account to the extent they should. But at least on paper, right now, the statement isn't true.

People spend far more than $2000 on things like the Large Hadron Collider or the James Web Telescope. We care about these questions in part because they are questions about the nature of the universe. In that sense, they are far beyond just mere counting grains of sand. Note also that while none of these have direct applications, a lot of them are related to ideas which do have direct applications. Sphere packing is connected to making error correcting codes. the quantum parallel problem is part of a broader program to understand analogs between classical and quantum contexts, which is relevant for both physics and possibly for quantum computers, and the closest vector problem is important in understanding the robustness of certain cryptographic systems. That said, it is true that some of them like the sofic group problem and the Ramsey problem are just really good math problems, with no obvious connection to anything applied.

The answer here is that these systems are not "half-random-BS-generators" but have gotten very good at careful reasoning. Even the frontier models still make mistakes in mathematical reasoning, but the mistakes are often at the subtle level that a professional mathematician would make. LLM AI intelligence right now is very "spiky" very good at some tasks, and still failing badly at others. But you should reevaluate what your understanding is of what they are capable of.

That occurred very early on with some highly obscure Erdos problems. That stopped being the situation a while ago when Erdos 1196 was solved by an AI. This was a well known enough problem that that was highly unlikely to have some obscure paper out there solving it. Similarly, then the Unit Distance Conjecture and the Jacobian Conjecture got solved. And all ten of these are pretty major in their subfields. That means that obscure papers that do the same thing and no one realize the question had already been asked or solved are extremely unlikely.

A simplistic view. '"really" don't like' comes down to, in my experience:

- Rejection of change, Doesn't matter what the change is. Just move the Start Menu from left-justified to centered. That's juvenile.

- No more than rumors of enhanced telemetry becoming a serious privacy concern. Rumors are enough. Add in captures of new data and the screamers will blow it up into disproportionate danger. Ignoring their browser, every web site that clandestinely keeps logs that describe your activities, etc. That's a little juvenile also.

- Any launch bugs or flaws. Claimed as proof of rushed release, danger, and well just keep going on.

- Any security concerns, any. As if not merely Widows, but Linux, BSD, even Apple software suffers a security flaw at leas occasionally, some undiscovered for a decade or more.

- And other juvenile complaints and reactions.

Occasionally, Microsoft has hit a release out of the park. W4W 3.11, NT4.0, Windows 8. Mostly because these were preceded by less than excellent releases, though some were leaps ahead that could not be compared to predecessors. Windows 11 is working. Get over it. Or hide behind some excuse and cling to Windows 10 like an infant to their mommy's leg. Linux isn't winning Windows 10 clingers, nor Windows 11 runaways. And if you're paying attention, it's not even winning security and privacy wonks, since they know it takes some effort to secure Linux and hold on to even the illusion of privacy on the modern Internet.