Algostonk (@algoxstonk) header
Algostonk (@algoxstonk) profile picture

@HeyAlvaAI (https://teapawt.net/t.co/g5jgdEHMGA), CTO (Chief Troubleshooting Officer). DM me if Alva sucks. Ex full-time trader. Paying Theta 24/7 🐂because life is just long gamma.

Joined January 2026
Random thought: we've spent decades optimizing software for human perception. 100ms vs 900ms to open an app is a big deal. But agents don't really care. A few hundred ms on a tool call probably means very little, especially when inference itself takes seconds. Even for frequent calls, maybe throughput and parallelism matter more. Wonder if this will eventually change how we build databases, storage, etc. Haven't seen much evidence of that yet though. Right now agents are still adapting to a world built for humans, not the other way around.
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Why is nobody talking about the big comeback of Opus 5.5? Or am I the only one who ever switched to GPT over the past couple of months? While it still struggles to sound human, it's ridiculously good at building web pages that explain things clearly. So now I ask him to produce web pages to explain everything, from design doc, code diff, to live monitoring results. It might be a good idea to force all changelogs to be web pages too..
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Personal agents are a terrible business, at least for the next few years. (1) Brutal competition, zero moat. I spent months building and improving my own Hermes agent, only to switch to Muse overnight. I invited Muse to our family tailnet, gave it a few permissions, and it instantly had almost all the same context. Why switch? I can launch Muse by holding my phone's power button. That's it. Imagine abandoning your own baby over one UX feature. (2) Terrible economics. I heard ByteDance's Doubao loses over $10M a day. Subscriptions are harder to sell in China, but I doubt Muse or Dot could be better. Don't know anyone is paying for Muse. (3) no one can get shopping done right....
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Which model is actually good at shopping? GPT has been consistently terrible in my exp. It often recommends obscure products or questionable sellers. It did: (1) recommended slippers from Brazil (good slippers, but why?), (2) Linked me to a likely scam store selling at 1/2 Costco's price. Only caught it after I asked it to verify. Muse is not better either (probably worse bc I think its search & browse tool is not as good as gpt) but at least faster..
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“Scientific vulgarity,” “industrial cynicism,” “feudal lord of silicon,” “prostitute scientific integrity for capitalist spectacle” — wow, these critics can really write and same hard to read as the math part...
go fuck yourself @sama claiming that you solved navier stokes because 10000 agents ran in circles for 88hours on a multimillion dollar gpu cluster to formalize in lean a blowup case under controlled external forcing is pure scientific vulgarity the clay mathematics institute millennium prize does not ask m whether you can artificially force a singularity in a fluid by injecting an ad hoc smooth external forcing term f(x,t) to twist the vortex until it breaks the real problem questions the fundamental stability and global smooth existence for 3dimensional incompressible euler & navier stokes equations under natural conservation laws and viscous dissipation alone using a mathematical loophole on forced equations to parade a century old victory is a major conceptual scam Altman technically & epistemologically what you present as an agi breakthrough is nothing more than bruteforce combinatorial autoformalization the ai did not understand fluid mechanics it simply navigated a continuous search space previously mapped out and constrained by the monumental work of human mathematicians like tristan buckmaster/ levent alpöge / diego córdoba or tarek elgindi coordinating 10000 agents to check the logical consistency of a 100 page proof via lean is a software engineering feat and computational parallelization triumph not an intrinsic scientific discovery it is the victory of the compute bulldozer over abstract human intuition repackaged for the public as a higher mathematical consciousness to this theoretical imposture you add a disgusting ethical and industrial cynicism taking advantage of private codex sessions and informal preprints from academic researchers to siphon their research leads and then trying to redact or erase the contribution of levent alpöge under the pretext that he works at rival anthropic is intellectual serfdom openai behaves like a feudal lord of silicon appropriating the cognitive subsistence of independent scholars threatening their careers behind closed doors if they protest and turning community academic labor into a privatized pressrelease this entire staged event serves a desperate financial agenda in a pre ipo panic facing the slowdown of scaling laws and growing investor skepticism over the profitability of foundational models openai needs to manufacture an artificial sputnik moment claiming to solve a millennium prize without immediately submitting the proof to traditional peer review means using the prestige of fundamental mathematics as cheap marketing fuel to inflate a delusional valuation!!! real science is not a clout chase on social media or a compute spike spent to rob the clay mathematics institute it is a quest for elegance physical truth and universal rigor to decode reality true artificial intelligence will not emerge from hostile corporate takeover of academic work hidden behind computational bruteforce but from architectures capable of generating new conceptual paradigms by masquerading constrained formalization as the collapse of physics greatest mysteries you did not solve navier stokes you only proved how far silicon valley will go to prostitute scientific integrity for capitalist spectacle
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Bizzy busy Friday, Aug 28 1. 5:30 AM PT: U.S. PCE/core PCE inflation 2. ~9:00 AM PT: Fed Chair Kevin Warsh’s Jackson Hole keynote I would short vol until them.
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alva.ai/u/snarketh/playbooks… Bitcoin traders, we just saw the price breakout after the longest negative funding rate in the BTC history: 2026-02-27 → 2026-05-22, 85 days. Now up ~0% (because it was ended at $75,540) Last time was 2024-09-02 → 2024-09-20, 18 days, ended at $63,201, up +67.93% in 90 days.
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Retail HDD prices have almost doubled since January 2026, with higher-capacity drives seeing much steeper increases than lower-capacity ones (e.g. 16TB vs. 2TB). Interestingly, I just checked Taobao (Chinese Amazon), and prices there are still significantly lower. A Seagate Exos X18 16TB enterprise SATA drive is ~$685 on Amazon and ~$600 elsewhere, like Newegg, but only ¥2,920 (~$440) on Taobao. Source: pcpartpicker.com/trends/pric…
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api.github.com/users/Stumble 3461891 (replace the /Stumble with your username to see your id).
Grok 4.6 has a great sense of humor 😂
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My Alva agent is doing great. Sometimes it comes back with ideas I don’t fully understand and definitely don’t have time to deep dive with him. So my most common replies are: LGTM/Yes/Go...no micro-management, full trust lol
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futureoflife.org/open-letter… does anyone remember this?
I'm actually fairly bearish on frontier lab valuations. I've never seen the reasons articulated to my satisfaction, so before I go to sleep, I wanted to quickly jot down my thinking here. The basic issue is that the labs are highly unprofitable. This may seem like a simple point, but private market valuations can be relatively irrational; however, like with $SPCX, post-IPO pricing will likely be much more punishing, especially as the standard 6-month lockup period expires and selling pressure intensifies. Many people claim that the labs have high margins. Yet even with high margins, a valuation of $1T would be justified only if the labs were doing nothing aside from serving inference (thus reducing costs only to those relevant to inference) and posting annual revenue numbers in the $100-200 billion range assuming ~80% gross margin and a 20x earnings multiple. This assumption is obviously not true, because the frontier labs have to continually spend money training the next generation of models. This is because of market competition from runner-up firms. For example, if OpenAI had paused model development last year, there would no longer be any point in paying GPT-5 API prices when you can just use Qwen or Kimi instead for much cheaper. Thus, the labs are forced to invest ever-increasing amounts of money in model training, in a way such that at any given point of time, the amount you're forced to invest in the next model is dramatically higher than the amount of money you're actually making, because even if your revenue goes up with higher model capabilities, so do your future training costs. This is a profoundly punishing dynamic which severely penalizes frontrunners. (There is also a related subpoint where frontier labs claim they can distill their leading models to win out at lower intelligence levels as well. This makes no sense because the revenue numbers involved are far too low when taking into consideration the rather low margin of such inference.) Frontier lab valuations appear largely to be based on the assumption that as you scale up, the capabilities which emerge will be sufficiently general and profound that we'll see explosive growth (epoch.ai/publications/explos…) from things akin to AI agents starting and autonomously managing entire companies of subagents. But it's not clear to me that this is the case; indeed, as I mentioned in my previous post (teapawt.net/andrewho03/status/2082…), I believe that capabilities growth will be slower, spikier, and more data-limited than people currently assume. It may be the case that eventually we will see explosive growth of this nature with full automation of the economy, but at the very least my viewpoint implies much longer (multi-decade) timelines until we reach this point. It is not clear to me that the frontier labs will be able to operate unprofitably for so long, although I suppose maybe this foreshadows some sort of inevitable nationalization. I also want to make a broader point about technological diffusion. The reason why technological diffusion is slow isn't just because, e.g., old people take a long time to learn how to use technology (although this is of course a contributing factor to some degree). In my view, it's because when a new, revolutionary technology comes along, the ways to incorporate that technology into subsequent developments are not always obvious, and in fact they cannot necessarily be arrived at through the application of pure reason. If they could be, then perhaps frontier models, at a certain point, would have a perfect understanding of how the LLM application layer should be developed, and they would then autonomously code, deploy, and sell such a layer. But it seems more plausible to me that this diffusion is limited moreso by the hard problem of economic calculation--that is to say, the Hayekian notion through which the price system gradually promotes efficient allocation of resources and which cannot be simulated through central planning--and that even if we froze current capability levels at today's levels, it would take well over two decades to fully integrate in LLMs into our lives. Such a view is consequently rather bearish for the continued profitability of labs as it reduces their prospects for finding, say, something else comparable in profitability to coding agents, which seems to have been a somewhat lucky discovery by Anthropic to begin with. That is to say, even if you spam FDEs you aren't necessarily going to be able to just figure out the "correct" product shapes fast enough. Overall, I don't think that people have clearly reasoned through their mental models for why lab equity should be worth as much as it currently is, and that if you actually bother to write down such a model, you may not arrive at the conclusion that you want to arrive at. This isn't to say that I don't expect AI to experience a huge (industry-wide) boom in the coming decades, but just that I'm not entirely sure I would buy OpenAI or Anthropic stock at latest valuations if I were given the opportunity to do so. Of course, as an ex-lab employee, arguably this is talking against my own book; I should really be giving people more reasons to be bullish. But in the end, my influence is so small that it doesn't make a difference, so why not have some fun?
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Love this idea. We’ve been running our internal “fleet” for months, and I’m a bit surprised that the showcase examples are still well-documented, well-specified systems like databases and filesystems. (remember claude code on compiler? Those are hard for humans because they require a lot of prerequisite knowledge. For agents, easy. The hard part is the product: the countless implicit assumptions, edge cases, taste, and subtle details that can’t be cleanly written down as a spec. Btw, I still think there will be one open source system that can do this very well, in the future. Don't see why it should be a free software.
We are starting Intent Lab, building an autonomous team we call "fleet" that turns intent into production software. Today we are sharing some early results: the fastest GLM5.2 inference engine, one shot database creation, and a fully verified agent filesystem. intentlab.ai/blog/turn-your-…
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Apparently someone listened and fell in love with $ADBE.
Adobe spent decades building software that’s still incredibly hard to replicate. -34% ytd “agent infra” startups building thin layers like proxies, sandbox, llm telemetry, that your team could probably vibe-code internally or just ask your agent to deploy open source ones: raising at crazy valuation. I'm confused.
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Used 4 usage resets in just five days after GPT-5.6 launched, only 12% left until the end of this month lol. 1. The agency is even more extreme. I gave Ultra a long task without enabling Goal Mode, and it ran for basically an entire day and burned through a full reset. 2. The taste is still bad, sometimes. I gave it a 30k-line code porting project, and it very agentically produced a technically correct result in a completely wrong direction. Eventually, I had to step in and guide it through the project one decision at a time. The final implementation ended up being fewer than 3,000 lines. 3. Honestly, the last time I was genuinely impressed by the taste of a model + harness combination was Opus 4.5 + Cursor. I miss it. 4. It has also gotten much worse at speaking like a normal human. I’m not sure whether this started with Opus 4.6 or somewhere else, but the writing quality of these newer models feels noticeably worse than before. You have to aggressively bully them into producing a genuinely good document. For a team like ours with a document-driven development process, this is actually a major problem. The quality of the human-model interaction has gone down. 5. I don’t know whether this comes from the Codex harness or the model’s RL, but it is obsessed with writing tests and checks. Normally this is good behavior. But sometimes it goes so far that even I, as someone who loves tests, think: okay, this is too much. 6. Still, it’s obviously a very strong model. Hopefully my absurdly long-horizon traces are useful for training the next one :)
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We may still be underestimating how much of mathematics is ultimately just brute force. This also reminded me of the classic paper 「Social Processes and Proofs of Theorems and Programs」, which argues that math proofs become trusted not because it's checked, but because they survive a social process of reading, criticism, and reuse by the math community. Many great examples in the paper. I thought LLMs combined with formal systems like Coq and Lean may fundamentally change that process, well turns out we don't even need formal systems in some cases lol
hello there the jacobian conjecture is false thanx to my close friend akhil for asking about it and my other close friend fable for working during the world cup final ((1+xy)^3 z + y^2 (1+xy) (4+3xy), y + 3 x (1+xy)^2 z + 3 x y^2 (4+3xy), 2 x - 3 x^2 y - x^3 z): \C^3\to \C^3, has jacobian determinant -2, and sends (0, 0, -1/4), (1, -3/2, 13/2), and (-1, 3/2, 13/2) to (-1/4, 0, 0)
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Adobe spent decades building software that’s still incredibly hard to replicate. -34% ytd “agent infra” startups building thin layers like proxies, sandbox, llm telemetry, that your team could probably vibe-code internally or just ask your agent to deploy open source ones: raising at crazy valuation. I'm confused.
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Highly recommend! It touches on one of the key ideas behind Alva: AI makes cooking up features possible for anyone. What really matters after that is your taste in how you collect, combine, and use your own sufficiently orthogonal feature set.
Complex Feature Engineering at Two Sigma with Ben Wellington (S7E32) My guest this episode is Ben Wellington, Head of Complex Feature Engines at Two Sigma. In a modern quant process, one might argue that edge can live in three places: the data you can get your hands on, what you do with that data, and how you forecast from it. Ben lives squarely in the middle layer — feature generation — which also happens to be the place AI is reshaping fastest. So that's where we spend our time. We start with what a "feature" even is, and why, as raw data gets commoditized, the edge increasingly comes from what you build out of it. Then we follow the thread running through the whole conversation: large language models. Ben has a line I keep coming back to — that anything can be language now — and we trace what that unlocks, and whether making feature creation this cheap just democratizes the edge away. We close on what a quant starting out today should be building toward, and which skills compound most in a career where AI is the dominant tool. Please enjoy my conversation with Ben Wellington.
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Finally someone organized my music collection, which probably started when I got my first MP3 player in elementary school. about 1,140 audio files after cleanup. These files survived countless PCs, my PSP era, Windows Mobile 6.1/6.5 HTC phones (few knows what it is today), random external drives, and 20+ years of append-only management. It has to fix: 1. GBK/GB18030 Chinese ID3 tags being read as Latin-1 mojibake. The major headache for morden players. 2. CUE split. 3. misc small issues like duplicate tracks, missing artist/album metadata, split album artists, and cursed folder names. @ChatGPTapp Thank you.
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