Vikram Saraph

April Cools' Club

It's March, which means it's one month to April Cools, which means time to start writing *something* www.aprilcools.club

However, it aligns with my experience with struggling/failing to come up with a proof like this (no simp) by prompting ChatGPT through the browser interface a few months ago.

I used Claude Code to write a Lean proof of the irrationality of the square root of 2, but without using tactics like simp that make it trivial. It consumed much more of my quota than I expected, considering the simplicity of the proof.

At me if you recall what it is

First thing that came to mind too, didn’t think it’s used to make interactive documents though. I’ve described it to others as a nice sweet spot between Markdown and LaTeX.

Vehicle Tire Pressure Sensors Enable Silent Tracking Like many other features and systems in modern cars, tire pressure sensors leak sensitive data that can be abused by threat actors.

Security researchers have revealed that signals from tire pressure monitoring systems (TPMSs), required in U.S. cars since 2007, can be used to track vehicles from 40-50 meters away using devices costing $100.

TPMSs send a unique sensor identifier that never changes during the lifetime of the tire.

Someone asked me about the ordinal numbers today and I had to stop myself from nerding out too much about infinities

leandojo.org/torchlean.html

Uh this looks cool, excited to see the code and potential applications

Okay, there seems to be some interest in this. I can't make the class video public, but here are my notes that transcribe what I said.
gist.github.com/shriram/0647...

Wow, bonus in that I’ve also gone fairly deep down the rabbit hole when it comes to MinHash and SimHash. I’ve got to read this

Yes! Not the first time I’ve seen you post content about simplicial complexes @moultano.bsky.social

I don't think I've heard of this way of formally reasoning about the flow of information before:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informa...

Made me think of what if we could add an MCP server purpose built to assess or recommend color schemes. Perhaps that tools baked into vanilla CC are insufficient?

These aren't major problems imo, something a human can just go in and fix, and I'll caveat this with me still learning to use CC effectively, but seeing this same pattern on two entirely different apps, one of which was built from scratch, and another an existing one, seems noteworthy?

I wouldn't have thought twice about it, except I saw this same kind of pattern on a different app/codebase where I wanted to add a dark mode. Again, it seems like it got all the logic to do so correctly, but with poor color contrast. Telling it to fix it didn't fix it.

From what it was logging, CC looked like it was trying to generate contrived grep and awk commands (like of .css files) to assess quality of color contrast, and I guess it didn't do a good job otherwise I would've seen it reflected in the UI it built.

I posted earlier about its ability to build front and backends for Euchre. I did pretty well at that with just a few prompts. But it chose a color palette with a poor contrast. I tried to fix it just with prompting but that also went poorly.

Now I that I've dabbled a bit with Claude Code (instead of just reading about it), I can see why it is that one would want to hook in custom MCP servers (depending on what you're building)?

Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War A statement from our CEO on national security uses of AI

This to me is unexpected. Wow.

www.anthropic.com/news/stateme...

TIL of the Seattle Freeze: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle...

Sum 41 - Fatlip YouTube video by Sum41VEVO

m.youtube.com/watch?v=CMX2...

Can LLMs figure out who you are from your anonymous posts?

From a handful of comments, LLMs can infer where you live, what you do, and your interests; then search for you on the web.

New 📄 w/ @SimonLermenAI, @joshua_swans, @AerniMichael, Nicholas Carlini, @florian_tramer 🧵

Modular: The Claude C Compiler: What It Reveals About the Future of Software Compilers occupy a special place in computer science. They're a canonical course in computer science education. Building one is a rite of passage. It forces you to confront how software actually works...

This is quite something: www.modular.com/blog/the-cla...

EnigmaEval Explore the SEAL leaderboard with expert-driven LLM benchmarks and updated AI model leaderboards, ranking top models across coding, reasoning and more.

For my AI followers who don’t know anything about puzzles, I’m going to repost this puzzle solving benchmark: scale.com/leaderboard/...

The 4th annual Brown puzzle hunt is coming soon! www.brownpuzzlehunt.com

It didn't get some colors right (poor contrast in dark mode), but it's close enough.

Claude Code for the most part was able to one-shot adding dark mode to a website I'm contributing to. Nice.

A color-coded binary tree displaying how to expand (x+y)^3. There are 8=2^3 terms on the bottom, and by putting them in "alphabetical order" and grouping like terms, you see that (x+y)^3 = x^3 + 3x^2y + 3xy^2 + y^3.

My coauthor Dave Perkinson made this diagram to explain the binomial theorem and I think it's the perfect distillation. Here's our draft book, Discrete Structures, if you want more: kyleormsby.github.io/files/113spr... 🧮

Opinion | The A.I. Disruption We’ve Been Waiting for Has Arrived

Worth the read regardless of your opinions on AI

DBSCAN is a confusingly named algorithm in that it has nothing to do with databases, scanning, or scanning databases