Kevin Lacker

I'm happy to announce the launch of Acorn, a new theorem prover that includes an integrated AI. Theorem provers let you write mathematical proofs that are rigorously verified. But they are notoriously difficult to use. Acorn makes it easier, by using AI to fill in the details.

Dating app idea: no swiping or anything like that, you just chat with an AI who has the personality of a friendly little old matchmaker lady, and she sets you up with someone who would be a good match for you

The AIs finally beat my IMO score. I'm a bit sad... but it would have been more disappointing if AI had stopped making progress. Now it's exciting. What will we be able to build or discover with the tool of superhuman math AI?

It’s funny how many different things the GLP-1 drugs improve. It’s like drinking a potion of +1 Constitution

As a baby I had pyloric stenosis. A valve in your intestine is too tight and food can’t get through. Before Conrad Ramstedt figured how to fix this via surgery in 1911, it was a death sentence. Nowadays, it’s a simple surgery with a survival rate of nearly 100%.

People should unit test their documentation by giving an LLM a set of prompts and testing that it works. "Read this documentation and implement X."

This... actually makes sense. If stablecoins work, why not stockcoins? Crypto could let random people on the internet bet on startups that are private, even if the startups themselves don't have anything to do with crypto.

The medieval equivalent of gamers funding GPU development

We need a YIMBY-NIMBY compromise, where we upzone the areas that are furthest below their potential, like the Mission and West Oakland. But we keep the nice places unchanged, like Marin and Orinda. Enforce it at the state level. YISEBY: Yes, in someone else’s back yard.

The weird thing about publicly-owned national forest is that a lot of it is *currently* being logged by private timber companies. There isn't much difference between selling the land to a logging company, and maintaining ownership but selling timber contracts.

Such a scam, Windows trying to sell you things on startup with the default button being “buy”. Now I need to warn my children never to trust anything this Microsoft company says.

Interesting theme in common with recent events in Ukraine, surprise drone attacks taking out more-expensive conventional equipment before it can be activated.

Waymo used to represent "wild sci-fi fantasy" to me. I guess to some people it still does. Maybe it's even scarier, that now there's an overlap between wild sci-fi fantasy and reality.

Apple doesn't like it, but native iOS app development is growing less and less popular over time. The iPhone isn't getting many new features any more, and the cool stuff is happening with AI in the cloud. Among developers learning to code, Swift is even less popular than Haskell.

"Good morning, ChatGPT agent. Please create a fictional resume for me, that perfectly matches the position, for every job posting on this site."

Claude Code is helpful for cleaning up documentation too. "Sometimes the docs tell you to do X, but that isn't recommended any more. Instead they should tell you to do Y. Please fix!"

Apparently this is called "gleaming".

AI alignment is going to be a very important practical matter very soon, because we need to make sure our AI coding agents don't get tricked into introducing security holes by malicious documents.

We all owe a debt to the PC gamers, who nobly funded years of GPU development before the rest of the world understood how useful they were.

I appreciate that Claude Code pays attention to my edits, if I alter CLAUDE.md while the agent is running.

Minecraft needs a "vibe building" plugin where kids can just describe what they want, and it appears in their Minecraft world