Fodder #51
What's Trending? What's Transcendent?
Next week will be a year of Fodder, which is kind of fun. If you like what we’re doing here, forward this to a friend!
The International Math Olympiad wrapped up this week and there were 5 perfect scores. Which is insane, because these problems are absurdly hard. Here’s question 6:
Consider a 2025 x 2025 grid of unit squares. Matilda wishes to place on the grid some rectangular tiles, possibly of different sizes, such that each side of every tile lies on a grid line and every unit square is covered by at most one tile.
Determine the minimum number of tiles Matilda needs to place so that each row and each column of the grid has exactly one unit square that is not covered by any tile.
Question 6 is special for another reason. Google DeepMind and OpenAI both had general purpose models (no special IMO training) participate in the IMO. And while they both scored gold medals, both missed Question 6. Still amazing, but Terry Tao had questions. Also the Google researchers are Meta now, Zuck strikes again!
Other than the IMO, which was clearly the biggest news this week, some other things happened. The UK now has 8 babies with 3 parents. That’s not a throuple, that’s literally 3 people’s DNA to make one baby.
Also Tesla opened a techno Diner, and also missed earnings, which nobody cares about. Google earnings beat, and search is still growing in revenue. OpenAI is building 4.5 GW of capacity at Stargate. The Coldplay guy gets put on leave.
The All In bros do an AI conference in DC. Jensen was there. Scott was there. And yes, Donald was there. And remember that weird trade letter he sent to Japan a couple weeks ago? This week there’s a Japan trade deal, after the Indonesia one last week.
Strategy now has STRC. Uranus is warm. Taiwan’s science fairs hit hard. Bitcoin turns $54,000 into $9.6 billion. M2 hits a record. Scottie Scheffler’s baby outshines his golf game. Hunter Biden talks chemistry.
On to the reading!
Timely
What Was It Like to Live in 1776? - A brief hint.. cold and dark and not that great. The things we take for granted now is basically everything.
Nobody Knows How To Build With AI Yet - We’re all really just making this up. Everyone I talk to is doing different things too, and still getting amazing results. We’re all now amateurs forevermore.
Stargate Advances - From the always-know-what-OpenAI-is-saying department, a look into the construction behind Stargate and just how big it’s going to be.
God is hungry for context - Since o3 pro we’ve had Grok 4 and Opus 4 and Kimi K2, but all of the language and ideas apply. And how can you not love the language. Feed me more tokens!
Timeless
Alpha School - Alpha School is radically changing the ideas of secondary education. It’s using AI for everything and it’s only two hours per day. This is a (very) deep dive into the whole methodology. Lots to learn.
The Philosopher-Builder - Why do we build? What is the purpose? What do we seek? A brief look at what Ben Franklin can teach us about this.
On Agency - Everyone’s talking about agents but they mostly aren’t human. Kids make us more so.
Death by AI - What happened to the comedian Dave Barry? He died, didn’t you hear?
Books
Socialism Sucks by Robert Lawson and Benjamin Powell - Because apparently we need to relearn why it sucks, I give you this super fun book. They go to some crazy places, including the borders of Venezuela and North Korea and Cuba, drinking beers the whole way, and explain where things go wrong. It’s an easy, fun 1-day read about a serious subject: why socialism sounds so good and always ends up so bad.
Tweets
Some good ones, so you don’t need to scroll!
The world is amazing. Cheers!