Ragnar {Groot Koerkamp}

Holy crap! I find this way, WAY more surprising than the 3-SUM and APSP results, which I already found extremely surprising. "Just" SETH would have already been gigantic if somewhat less surprising. A few comments:

Skimming this new PDF, I feel some similarities to the sub-n*lg(n) FFT writeup by David Harvey. It's all like breaking the n^3 matmul bound: instead of doing many independent mat-vec-mul units of work, do them all at once, exploiting structure to save a few operations. bsky.app/profile/curi...

It's on days like this that I am happy that the TCS paper I'm writing this month will have a target audience of maybe 10 people.

real ones always said that SAT is easy

Subquadratic O(n^(2-eps)) edit distance is back on the table then!

An internal model at OpenAI has produced a claimed refutation of ETH! Russell Impagliazzo, Mohan Paturi, and I have been asked to help organize an open and independent examination of this claim. 1/4

Here's a direct link to the PDF claiming a faster 3SAT algorithm: github.com/openai/math/...

OpenAI has claimed a refutation of the Exponential Time Hypothetis (ETH). Russell Impagliazzo, Mohan Paturi and Ryan Williams (@rrwilliams.bsky.social) have been asked to organize a community-led effort to evaluate this claim. More here: docs.google.com/document/d/1... h/t @gautamkamath.com

A similar thing happened when someone hacked the newer model roomba. Yes your roomba is spying on you. www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/19/1...

> Several car brands also note that it is a driver’s responsibility to tell passengers about the vehicle's privacy policies.

Aletsch Glacier 2021 | 2026 Over these 5 years, it has lost 25 m in thickness at Konkordiaplatz (2900 m asl) 🧊🔥 And likely more than 50 m over the section shown here (1800-2200 m asl) 😱 All this melting is entirely caused by human activity! 🏭

Pfff, not sure what to think of this. Derivative is a crate to derive Add and such on simple types and it works but has now been given a Rust advisory which triggers rustsec warnings for all 600 dependents... Do we really need this churn for something that isn't broken? rustsec.org/advisories/R...

How did the grid react as Storm Austen and Storm Boelo passed through over the weekend? I pulled this together over the weekend. It's part of a new video format that I'm exploring to better explain what's going on within the energy system and the wider context surrounding it (such as the weather).

that's the part where they tell you that that bit about rust restricting mutation is actually completely wrong and rust does almost nothing to restrict normal mutability (which they call✨interior mutability✨) and rust just has a second mutation mechanism on top of that if you have a unique reference

"How do we kill vibe coding and AI slop?" Vibe coding and AI slop are bad. Applying these terms dishonestly or lazily is also bad (though not in the same way). combine-lab.github.io/blog/2026/10...

Holy shit! lnkd.in/p/g3r98kNM

Today, in DD/MM/YY form, is 24/10/26, a Pythagorean triple, the last one this century apparently

Mathematics is a subject for the young. ~ Tristan Buckmaster. terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/10/21/m... #AI4Math

"Both bugs resided in the respective languages' C code. So any advice like 'move away from PHP' is misdirected. What is needed is a push away from C." @joaxcar.bsky.social

P99 watchparty! Join live now! p99conf.io

Indeed, this article is a really really nice read! Without knowing much about this topic, the first 10-15 pages give a really nice hand-holding whiteboard-style exposition of some of the ideas. Unfortunately, the conclusion:

> Perhaps we need to ask the LLMs to “explain it to me like I’m human” (ELIH).

We are ready to bring you another day of highly technical sessions at #P99CONF. Day 2 features @dorlaor.bsky.social, @curiouscoding.nl, Georg Kreuzmayr, and @reconditerose.bsky.social. Join them and 15 other breakout speakers as we kick off at 8:00 am PST! www.p99conf.io?latest_sfdc_... #ScyllaDB

the story goes like this

So just to summarize we’ve got: - eMudhra keys leaked (“4”) - RCE in PHP since 2012 - RCE in gitlab since 2016 - Java CVE (probably eMudhra) - HTTP3 compression bomb - PingCAP just utterly beyond 0wned Anything else?

A good friend, a very serious algebraic geometer, is having his work from the past decade swooped upon by a person with AI; said person is pushing out AI-generated proofs of the parts my friend exposed to the world. Fortunately not everything was revealed, but this is utterly gross. #MathSky #LLM

are you watching me on P99 conf? p99conf.io well you should be

uncompressed version

I agree that proper disclosure was disrupted because of embargo-breaking. The PHP Foundation's writeup has the details on that and it's not a good look that a security company broke embargo 👇 Genuinely curious: what could/should OpenAI have done differently? thephp.foundation/blog/2026/10...

oh okay well thanks

🚨🚨🚨 PHP PATCHES JUST DROPPED 🚨🚨🚨 Go update right now!!! www.php.net/archive/2026...

yes, 4 is a bad choice, but 6 would have been perfect

finally got to reading maevyn's post. add this one to your queue. two paragraphs that hit me particularly hard

details leaked. this vulnerability is a full unauthenticated unconditional remote code execution exploit against any service running on a PHP version from 5.4 until latest yeah if anything deserves CVSS 11, this is it. this is CATACLYSMICALLY bad.

BTW knowledge of the existence of this vulnerability enables a well financed malware group to use AI to find it, if you run PHP anything you should be taking the service down NOW until a patch is available. And then patch before bringing the service back up.

To reflect on how this plays out in mathematics: Editing, especially by a senior coauthor, should include re-thinking the content at a technical level and not just polishing tone. E.g. adjusting lemmas to the minimal hypotheses to show *why* they are true.

truly a wild time to be alive when the cryptography world is split between those worried about quantum computers and those whose private key is “4”

The details are now public, as of two hours ago. bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi... The secret P-384 keys for these intermediate CAs are all zeros except the last 8 bits. All not-updated software can be MITM'ed now. IOT boxes that can't or don't update are now trivially MITM'able forever.

Please, everyone: stop mathing. There's too much math.

Very good essay. You can read it in 5 minutes. I wrote some of my own thoughts on this over the weekend. What Counts as Impact? doi.org/10.59350/006...

"AI can't create anything new because it just blends existing discoveries" well 1. practically this is not true, the entire math community is dealing with a crisis of AI competently making discoveries 2. I don't think our set of discovered work is convex, "just blending" can still go to new places

I'm up Thursday 6:10pm CEST

Our P99 CONF keynotes feature top engineers and system architects like @dorlaor.bsky.social, @curiouscoding.nl, Georg Kreuzmayr, and @reconditerose.bsky.social. Plus, you get to interact with each at our free and virtual event on October 21-22. www.p99conf.io?latest_sfdc_... #ScyllaDB #P99CONF

Uploading one-shotted AI "expositions" of one-shotted AI-generated papers is totally bonkers to me. What value do you think this has? And what do you think your contribution is, "access to buttons?"

2019 video of Heidi the Octopus, captured by Dr. David Scheel, a professor of marine biology at Alaska Pacific University in Anchorage & aired on PBS Nature program "Octopus: Making Contact". We think the color changes are the results of Heidi dreaming as she sleeps. Let's talk about it.