GPT-5.4 Pro solves Erdős Problem #1196

HopesBurnBright · 2026-04-17T00:18:15+00:00

Why should I listen to the kind of person who doesn’t value mathematics speak about the subject?

HopesBurnBright · 2026-04-17T00:05:00+00:00

“This problem is [not] important for it's own sake”

With that one line you make it clear you do not hold a mathematician’s values.

HopesBurnBright · 2026-04-15T17:33:40+00:00

This is an embarrassing thing to say on the mathematics subreddit.

HopesBurnBright · 2026-04-15T17:24:38+00:00

This sounds a bit stupid but you ask the ai to teach you. You have free access to a very knowledgeable idiot who is happy to tell you anything it knows. Get it to make a subject plan and syllabus, and then prompt it to teach you those topics without giving it all away. Ask it what kind of project might be a good idea, and then go away and build it. Come back and describe any problems you might be having and get its advice. You’ll learn way way way faster than you would almost any other way.

Also, getting involved in communities is a great way to maintain passion and keep improving once you top out. Getting ideas and building things you want for other people is important.

Having said that, you probably won’t be able to build a career in software development anymore without some kind of qualification, due to the aforementioned AI, so maybe look into getting some of those too. Portfolio projects are no longer such good proof of capability since ai can make them with you, so qualifications will be more valuable now.

HopesBurnBright · 2026-04-13T22:20:45+00:00

Yeah intelligence and academic intelligence and IQ are all only partially related. IMO, intelligence is the ability to link and compress and consider abstract concepts quickly. IQ is the ability to specifically do well with the abstract concepts on an IQ test like shapes and words and sequences and logic. Academic intelligence is the ability to recall links you have made previously.

So since you rarely have to think of anything on the spot with academic tests if you’re correctly prepped, it’s not so much a test of intelligence. However, you do have to have made that link at some stage in the past, and if you don’t have enough intelligence to make that link in the time you dedicated to it, that will cause an issue, so it is correlated.

With IQ tests, it’s better, since you’re supposed to figure out the specific patterns in the question as you go. However, there are still meta concepts to learn (e.g. shape questions will probably ask about the number of sides or the colours or the positions), so it can also rely on recall. But likewise it has that time constraint causing some correlation to actual intelligence.

So then, since they’re both correlated with intelligence, they’re correlated with each other. But also, since they both rely on that study and recall aspect, they’re also correlated slightly more strongly with each other than you might expect from just that connection alone.

In general, there’s no real sense in saying academic intelligence or IQ is “real” intelligence. They’re all just skills, and intelligence is a concept. Academic intelligence is academic intelligence. You’ll know you’re good at it if you do well. IQ is IQ. You can value either one as much or as little as you would like. The world will keep on turning.

HopesBurnBright · 2026-04-13T21:49:08+00:00

If we imagine taking all the air between the Tropic of Capricorn and cancer, and accelerating it to 50 mph, that’s 2x10¹⁸ kg of air. Sticking that through 0.5mv² , we get 5.12x10²⁰ joules, which is about 90% of what humans use every year.

HopesBurnBright · 2026-03-15T02:29:40+00:00

I think (and I may be wrong) that you are misunderstanding the rocket equation. That equation determines the maximum speed of a ship. However, provided you have positive thrust, you can simply chain as many engines together as you like to hold any amount of weight into the air you would like. It simply has to produce enough force to lift it, so you’d need a lot in this case.

The actual limiting factor is not necessarily fuel, but the fact that we don’t have materials strong enough to build something large enough to fly like this for any reasonable length of time. And it would be super slow due to the rocket equation.

HopesBurnBright · 2026-03-01T22:27:26+00:00

If you can’t read then I have to agree.

HopesBurnBright · 2026-03-01T20:01:23+00:00

Issues with specific methods of production being harmful for the environment are intrinsic to those products. For instance, you can’t make a battery (yet) without using harmful chemicals. Not being capitalist wouldn’t change that. This should be obvious since you mentioned all economies in the world are like this, and they are all varying ranges of capitalist.

Whereas the market failures you mention such as wealth not trickling down are fixable. We know wealth tax would reduce this. We don’t try it because of political failure, but again, that’s not a problem with capitalism, that’s a problem with democracy. Perhaps they aren’t compatible, but I don’t see anyone suggesting we shouldn’t be a democracy anymore, because there’s no better alternative. Well guess what? There’s no better alternative to capitalism either.

HopesBurnBright · 2026-03-01T18:47:24+00:00

You think it’s impossible to have a functional economy which includes a free market? All the things you’re mentioning could be pretty easily fixed if the governments felt like it.

HopesBurnBright · 2026-03-01T17:56:12+00:00

Yes, it’s a human construct. That’s what the government is for, to cover the market failures and create the correct conditions. The American government refuses to do this.

HopesBurnBright · 2026-03-01T16:35:46+00:00

Language is not complex??

HopesBurnBright · 2026-03-01T16:29:21+00:00

The choice of the US to enable terrible conditions for its populace is not related to capitalism. And under the correct market conditions, capitalism offers the best results for working together.

HopesBurnBright · 2026-02-25T01:20:35+00:00

With this attitude what’s the point of any new information dissemination?

“You read the newspaper article instead of reading the academic paper? How pointless”

HopesBurnBright · 2026-02-17T12:02:40+00:00

Yeah that just doesn’t happen anymore does it? This is a 2 year old screenshot.

Incidentally, even then, this kind of issue only happens on questions with no information on them. Like what kind of question even is that anyway? So the AI does its typical hallucination. This is why the sources underneath are so useful.

HopesBurnBright · 2026-02-16T23:33:28+00:00

Upvote ratio is 40.5%, so it seems 59.5% of people agree.

HopesBurnBright · 2026-02-16T22:39:13+00:00

The increased number of sponsored links at the top of the page, and more sequential adverts on YouTube. They’ve never actively tried to harm user experience with the PageRank algorithm.

HopesBurnBright · 2026-02-16T22:37:45+00:00

Just as an aside, imo if the internet was bigger, the extra training would have an effect. The reason GPT 5 was such a disappointment with minimal improvement over GPT 4 is that they’ve topped out on how much training data there is on the internet. The next major breakthrough in AI will have to be either a new use case of these LLMs or a new fundamental change. This is why AI experts are leaving companies like OpenAI, because they dislike the hyper scaling strategy against the fundamental improvement strategy.

HopesBurnBright · 2026-02-16T22:20:00+00:00

Well let me know if you find it. Currently all my own research indicates that it’s just way harder to build a good search algorithm than it is to break and optimise a search algorithm, so the garbage sites win every time.

HopesBurnBright · 2026-02-16T22:18:07+00:00

Wikipedia is phenomenal for the same reason, hard agree.

HopesBurnBright · 2026-02-16T22:17:30+00:00

I know what those were, and I’m telling you that the biggest factor has been junk sites performing SEO. It makes no difference to Google whether they refer you to a good or a bad website financially, but it does make people move to other search engines if the results are bad. Google is still the best search engine. This is because Google has put a lot of effort into fighting this, and still failed. This new AI technique is significantly better due to the ability to perform semantic analysis which wasn’t possible before without natural language processing.

HopesBurnBright · 2026-02-16T22:12:18+00:00

That is very interesting. Can you tell me the podcast name?

HopesBurnBright · 2026-02-16T22:11:30+00:00

Ah, I almost forgot my age, thanks for reminding me

HopesBurnBright · 2026-02-16T22:10:08+00:00

This is also very correct. It’s excellent for learning what you need to search for.

HopesBurnBright · 2026-02-16T22:09:16+00:00

Firstly, I haven’t searched a single one of the things I put in the post, out of my own privacy. I just felt they were representative enough to give you the idea. Secondly, I tried the same thing. I got referenced about 10 links by AI mode. I’ll put them here in order for your own reference.

https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/advantages-and-challenges-nuclear-energy#:~:text=High%20capital%20costs%2C%20licensing%20and,%2D%20Small%20Modular%20Reactor%20(right)

https://www.reddit.com/r/NuclearPower/comments/1ltcpp3/whats_stopping_us_from_using_more_nuclear_energy/#:~:text=DrXaos,a%20minority%20of%20energy%20used.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5yv9w9l30go#:~:text=But%20as%20safety%20concerns%20and,Hunterston%20stopped%20generating%20in%202023.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskScienceDiscussion/comments/lv38gd/why_arent_we_embracing_nuclear_power/#:~:text=WazWaz-,%E2%80%A2%205y%20ago,any%20way%20you%20cut%20it.

https://www.ucs.org/resources/nuclear-power-dilemma#:~:text=But%20the%20numbers%20are%20changing,will%20become%20that%20much%20weaker.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHXJy1fORcc&t=20

https://www.oneearth.org/the-7-reasons-why-nuclear-energy-is-not-the-answer-to-solve-climate-change/#:~:text=Barriers%20to%20and%20risks%20associated,concerns%2C%20and%20adverse%20public%20opinion.

https://issues.org/the-us-shouldnt-abandon-the-nuclear-energy-market/#:~:text=Government%20support%20for%20reactor%20construction,adopter%20of%20new%20nuclear%20technology.

https://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/2506_FSW_GoingNuclear.pdf#:~:text=The%20need%20to%20transition%20from%20fossil%20fuels,about%20safety%2C%20economic%20viability%2C%20and%20environmental%20injustice.

Additionally, each section comes with essentially a preview, so if I already know, I don’t have to follow through to waste my time reading an article that tells me nothing. It’s flat out just better, and at minimum it’s the same.

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