Alexis Rondeau

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Everything I publish, in the order I published it: dispatches from Twitter, videos from YouTube and notes from my vault, archived here in full — text, images, video and links — so they outlive the platforms.

857 dispatches since March 2014 · page 3 of 35

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In reply to @original_ngv · Sep 9, 2026

Please fail more in life. In college I lost 41 hackathons, failed 15 interviews and my startup was an epic flop.

During that time I pitched to VPs at Rakuten, scientists from NTRO, engineers from Microsoft and Google and even the government.

And today I work out of New York City with one of the finest CEOs in the world on AI projects that are changing people's lives every day.

I learnt more from my losses than my wins. My failures have given me more than my wins ever have.

So please everyone I beg of you. Fail more often. The view at the top comes from falling a lot of times and getting back up.

Love the specificity of the list. And yes, I learn more from losses than wins too. I've even proactively set myself up to fail just to learn faster.

The part I'd add: at some point it has to be more than just failing. You have to fail well, which really means you had to learn to learn first.

And that usually rests on some kind of post-failure safety net. Not necessarily rich parents. Mine was a curiosity safety net: lower middle class, but I have always loved learning early and kept getting food pellets from the universe for it. That's what made failing survivable for me.

So my ask to you is: looking back at those 41 hackathons and 15 interviews, what were your hidden enablers? Could be socioeconomic, could be intellectual, could be a person. Would love the nuance, because I think that's the part people can't see from the outside.

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Was on the bike thinking about the whole mathematics/OpenAI thing.

Alan Watts: if we approached music the way we approach capitalism, the conductor who reaches the last note first would be the most successful. And the musician writing the shortest songs would win. Obviously silly. But is the journey is as important as the result?

Someone in a thread said a proof is only really valuable if you can explain it. I agree. Otherwise it's slop. Math slop?

But here's the conundrum: what if it works anyway? Throw brute force, money and machines at it, and out comes the actual record-shattering thing. Nobody can explain how.

Someone told me part of the payoff here would be physical prediction models weather forecasting for becoming orders of magnitude better. So you could argue: skip the drama, the back-and-forth, unlock the benefit for everyone, and let only the people whose job it is care about how we got there.

Basically, what if the slop solves world hunger?

And at the same time: the human version of this is years of grinding. You invest your time, your relationships, long stretches without reward. Even the million-dollar prize is nominal once you count opportunity cost.

These three, four, five researchers could have slid up the bell curve into a fund job and made that money anyway.

The most heartwarming part of the post that kicked all this off: the guy mostly said he shouldn't be credited, that it should go to his dude over there. Incredible sportsmanship at very high stakes.

Fast-forward 30 years. Are those researchers financially safe? Taken care of?

Risking your private time to hack on a problem for years IS risk. Spinning up 10.000 agents as part of a marketing budget is not at all risky.

Anyways, all of this is making me think harder about my own work and whether the techniques and methods I apply to my research are actually healthy ones.

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In reply to @pmddomingos · Sep 9, 2026

Before the AI boom is over, we in science have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get tech companies to blow millions on solving scientific problems they couldn’t care less about. Let’s not waste it. Hey OpenAI, rumor has it Anthropic is on the verge of cracking P = NP.

@pmddomingos "Couldn't care less about" is the part that sticks with me. Turns out solving a high-status problem doesn't absolve you of having to care about it. I believe that's new.

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In reply to @paulg · Sep 10, 2026

This is why it's a good thing that American labs are in the lead. If Chinese labs were, their employees wouldn't be able to warn us about threats. But Chinese labs will encounter the same threats within a year, in complete silence. t.co/Bg5Vakbl4W

@paulg Hadn't thought about it from that angle. Maybe the underrated advantage of free speech isn't just the speech part but having a culture for civil conflict. You can point at something and say "this looks broken" and that can now be the start to find a solution or agreement.

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In reply to @MarioNawfal · Sep 9, 2026

Researchers spent 500 hours and $70,000 and found LG TVs logging plain text transcripts in standby, mapping every device in the house, and feeding it to LG's ad arm

Unplug the internet and it saves the files until you plug back in.

LG says its TVs don't record ambient conversations.

The evidence begs to differ.

216 million of these are sitting in living rooms.

Where are the regulators?

Writer: Daniel
t.co/5LLdbXOK1s

Oh! Saw this on HN a few days ago and it didn't land (probably got distracted by Navier-Stokes). The video did land though. Had to watch twice to get that the audio playing back was what the TV itself had recorded.

Would love to see the process (including the r00ting!), the on-device infra/setup and what gets sent where exactly.

Is there a repo or write-up?

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In reply to @ValerioCapraro · Sep 9, 2026

BREAKING: OpenAI might have stolen another major proof.

In a detailed Mastodon post, which I report in full in the comments, Andreas Thom presents several pieces of evidence suggesting that OpenAI may have trained Astra on conversations in which he and Gábor Kun were working on Gromov’s soficity conjecture, one of the ten problems OpenAI later announced Astra had solved.

I know Andreas. We met several times early in our careers. He is an exceptional mathematician, a leading expert on sofic and hyperlinear groups, and one of the most respected scholars in the field. He has spent two decades working on this problem.

If his account is correct, this is not a minor dispute over attribution. It would mean that unpublished human work was absorbed into a model and then presented to the world as a breakthrough by the model itself.

And if the allegations raised by Levent Alpöge, Tristan Buckmaster, and now Andreas Thom are all substantiated, we are no longer looking at isolated incidents.

We may be looking at one of the greatest intellectual scandals in the history of science.

AI is not discovering new mathematics.

AI is stealing human discovery.

Image from the post

Love that math is also moonlighting now as a tracer dye. Meaning: novel math ideas are made of such rare stuff (stuff being human curiosity, endurance, sweat, tears, sleepless nights, jamming with friends, etc.) that when a solution unexpectedly pops up in a more sterile, non-human environment, we're now learning to trace it back to its origins. My take here: Beyond the practical implications of the discovery itself, we're all gaining better tools to work critically with AI.

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In reply to @Quasilocal · Sep 9, 2026

The way OpenAI handled this Navier--Stokes situation was the first time I've actually felt disgust at the whole AI in math situation. Like watching a billionare celebrate his hunting prowess by mounting the head of an endagered rhino on his wall, after 1000 soldiers trapped it.

@Quasilocal The debacle also had me looking at my own AI research critically, wondering if it contains a similar under-current of "gratuitous intellectual violence."

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In reply to @forgebitz · Sep 9, 2026

i don't think tech people understand how little non-tech people care about tech

the average person does not have a basic understanding of how a computer works

the idea of everyone just prompting their own software is only for a small subset of people t.co/6fXWDcsRPU

@forgebitz Personally, I wouldn't use "tech" as a word to separate myself from "non-tech" people. Feels like a term that peaked in the early 2000s.

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In reply to @BetterCallMedhi · Sep 9, 2026

anyone who thinks a tool can tell you if a text is AI written or not with 100% certainty is fucking retarded

these detectors are literally just checking text against basic metrics like perplexity/ sentence burstiness to spot predictable patterns BUT
modern LLMs are trained explicitly to match human language distributions…when your model's entire objective is to minimize the statistical gap between its outputs and actual human writing, the overlap becomes massive

that makes binary classification an absolute nightmare, sincce human and AI text distributions basically sit on top of each other now, pulling a threshold out of thin air guarantees a mountain of false positives &false negatives

Agree. I went down the rabbit hole from the other side: trying to prove a text was provably written by a human. Keyboard hardware events, breathing patterns via mic. Ambient light changes via camera and photosensor, even palm-rest temperature changes to detect hands.

All technically possible. All hackable with even a smidge of curiosity.

So now my litmus test is just: do I get the sense that the author cares? imho you can't fake that. I'm okay if they used AI for it.

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In reply to @lisperati · Sep 9, 2026

I have to admit this was an impulsive shitpost to see if anyone would argue that it wouldn't be possible for me to make champagne, but some of you took it earnestly, sorry 😀

We don't really have grapes- though we do have cherries, loquats, apples, pears, and oranges t.co/RwGQnhaHn2

@lisperati Impulsive or not, I loved reading it. Fruit in a backyard. You, as a physical human, in an actual place (especially instead of all this late AI-headiness)

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In reply to @emanperez28 · Sep 9, 2026

I’ve got to say I did not think a 16 second demo from my iphone would do crazy numbers. Just a reminder to use what you’ve got, no matter where you are.

@emanperez28 Love these demos. I tried something adjacent on macOS recently: detecting presence via the temperature rise where your palms rest on the keyboard. Got it working-ish but learned a lot about hidden sensors :)

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In reply to @samagra_sharma · Sep 9, 2026

Introducing Whip Web: Youtube for interactive experiences

The next wave of internet culture will be something you step inside

Models like Astra are opening up a new creative frontier

Video found YouTube. Interactive experiences deserve a home too.

t.co/iQygo8a1qD

🧵 t.co/yEPVfjaPEO

Video from the post▶ Watch on Twitter

@samagra_sharma I'd love that future world. My favorite physical exhibition of the last decade was "L'Oublier et Accélérer" at the Galifet Foundation in Aix-en-Provence.

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In reply to @signulll · Sep 9, 2026

the wearable category has converged on visible object attached to body which is kind of a failure if the primary job is passive sensing.

the ideal health wearable probably disappears entirely.

maybe we need to reinvent the ankle monitor.

@signulll I'd say the Oura Ring already solves this. Visible, yes, but subtle enough that it disappears. And beautiful should you choose to look at it.

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In reply to @Ananyo · Sep 9, 2026

The animosity you see towards AI firms isn't technophobia. It stems from what looks like their asset-stripping of human knowledge and creativity in a pissing contest in pursuit of big IPO, heedless of undermining the people whose work their using... t.co/5NQfjv3JRA

@Ananyo Agreed, this isn't technophobia. It's the pissing contest toward some looming IPO, and people can feel that.Maybe the real value of this whole Navier-Stokes moment is that it's outlandish enough that we're finally noticing what's being strip-mined.

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In reply to @BetterCallMedhi · Sep 9, 2026

behind the theatrical PR claim lies the crude reality of brute force test time compute scaling burning hundreds of billions of synthetic tokens across a massive inference flux to coordinate 10000ephemeral agents running recursive verification loops is not cognitive illumination it is the industrialization of exhaustive graph search where narrow reward functions force an army of digital checkers through a pre existing mathematical landscape

Very much agree with you here.

To me, already the initial (knee-jerk) reaction to the rumor to throw "tEn-ThOusAnd agents for EigHty-eIgHT hours" at it feels lame.

Maybe uninspired describes it better. And therefore uninspiring.

What I do know is: I definitely want to learn more about the guys who've been grinding on this on their own time for years now.

All of this even puts my OWN recent "Running the scientific method in an AI autoresearch loop" projects in a new, more critical light as well. Maybe they're lame, too!

Like Alan Watt's "The end is not the goal" quote:

[...] In music, though, one doesn’t make the end of the composition the point of the composition. If that were so, the best conductors would be those who played fastest.

Maybe I skipped to the end too fast, too?

Caveat 1: As a non-mathematician I don't understand the domain. So, what do I know?
Caveat 2: As a non-academic, I don't know if this "scooping" based on a rumor is common practice. Leaves a bad taste in my mouth, but again. What do I know?

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