No, but listen, you know this "put the fries in the bag, Terence Tao"'--*sniff, sniff*--already the usual replies concede too much. "If Tao is serving fries, YOU will be in the lithium mines." My God! This is our defense of human dignity? Don’t worry, the correct people will get the terrible jobs! *Pulls at shirt* You see, everything is up for radical transformation, human intelligence, consciousness, and so on and so on--except that somebody must still have a shitty afternoon so I can enjoy my lunch. But to say "these people are envious", this is too easy. It allows us, "the educated ones," our own little fantasy: we are disliked only because we are so wonderful. You know, the more interesting thing is this *sniff* peculiar identification with the machine. When the mathematician discovers something, apparently this was HIS achievement, his privilege, his little secret. When the machine discovers something, suddenly it's "Look what WE can do!" The achievement has become collective precisely at the moment when no human being can claim credit. See how this "we" functions. For the achievement, I identify with the machine. For the consequences, I identify YOU with the human. "We have surpassed you." Who are we? Well, myself and the thing that has also surpassed me. There is something almost touching here, really. To escape the humiliation of somebody absorbed in something opaque to you, you appeal to something which knows incomparably more than either of you. And this is supposed to settle the matter in YOUR favor. You know the old example of canned laughter. Here we have a similar arrangement. The machine achieves something on my behalf. The mathematician suffers the loss of human significance on my behalf. Somebody to be brilliant for me and somebody to be obsolete for me, without me having to be either, so I can remain as I was. But *pulls on shirt* there is this little difficulty that hides the essential thing: you still need a response from Tao! A correct proof, this Lean slop and so on, is not enough. You need him to certify his own defeat. You need him to say "By god, this is extraordinary! Yes, this is correct, but also this is interesting." Which means--and here comes Hegel--the person you are reducing to an obedient instrument must remain more than an obedient instrument. You need recognition from someone whose authority you are abolishing. "Your so-called expertise is worthless. Now tell me, in your expert opinion, that I, qua machine representative, was right." *Touches nose* But I would go a step further. What does this math person actually do to provoke you? In the fantasy, I mean. He need not insult you. He can be generous, mild-mannered, whatever. Something remains irritating: there is something over there which occupies him, which matters to him, and your opinion does not settle what it is worth. Perhaps he is not even looking down on you. This is the really intolerable possibility. This, you see, is closer to the Lacanian problem of the Other's desire. Not simply "What does he have that I don't?" but "What the hell is going on with him?" Perhaps the answer is: he is thinking about something else. The fries solve this beautifully. Now you know what you are for him. He needs the money. Your presence creates an obligation. And this, at last, also explains why the machine can be less threatening than the mathematician. The machine's intelligence may exceed yours unimaginably, but you imagine it arrives in response to your prompt. You can complain about the tone. You have the privileges of an angry customer and so on and so on. The human has this irritating possibility of being interested in something you did not request and cannot order. And please, this includes the person already serving the fries! *Pulls at shirt* I am almost tempted to say: the dream of unlimited intelligence conceals just this: a the wish that nobody should be doing anything you cannot immediately understand as a service.

It's done. After years of work, Logic Islands: Deduction Game is live on iOS and Android. In an age of vibe coding and endless promises that you can build something in a weekend so you never have to think again, we did the dumbest possible thing. We took years to make something for actual human beings, to help them think more, not less. Every puzzle is made by hand and by obsession. I have been designing them for close to 15 years, slowly refining down to the core few hundreds that truly work, testing them on real people of every background and trashing the thousands that didn't make the cut. Each puzzle has solution walk-through explanations that we wrote by hand, on paper and whiteboards, then sat with players to see what landed and what didn't. Sometimes the most elegant (mathematically) solution wasn't the most illuminating, so we adapted. Some single explanations for one puzzle took days to pitch just right. 10 years ago I had notebooks full with ideas and puzzles for this game. I always had a lot going on, and I wasn't an app developer, so it felt too daunting. But I knew deep in my bones that it had to exist, and that I was built to make it, so it was only a matter of time. After getting hooked on the puzzles herself, my wife @NadiaGasmi convinced me we should build it together and build the version that gets it to the most people possible. 18 months ago, when she quit her job as a neuroscientist at the Cleveland Clinic to go all in with me, I knew it was really happening. I have always believed that one of the clearest marks of a good game (a game being just "voluntary attempts to overcome unnecessary obstacles") is that it resonates with people of wildly different backgrounds and ages. In early testing, in a given day: lawyers and engineers would ask if they could get their friends an invite, since they were hooked and wanted to share it; my (precocious) 10-year old niece would steal her dad's phone every morning and make him late to work because she wouldn't stop playing; and a few of my math PhD colleagues asked me to write papers about some of the stranger puzzles I was testing. This range of reaction, from such different people, gave us huge boosts and extra courage when we needed it. It was brutal at times. I had to keep working my 9-5 as well to keep the lights on while we built this, so I learned to love the evenings and weekends hammering away at it. Since I work largely on AI and math by day, it was interesting and refreshing to work on (what I came to see as) the opposite of AI by night. Especially now, when nearly everyone is claiming they can build something, without thinking, that will quietly strip away our ability and our need to think, and when too many people on social media seem bent on contributing to demoralization campaigns even when it doesn't serve them, we believe that a game that truly challenges you and makes you think more while having fun is extremely valuable. We have also watched the backlash as some big-name apps ram ai down their users' throats. So we are glad that we made the call at the start that we wouldn't hand over to ai anything we knew would be better if we did it ourselves, slowly and without shortcuts, every idea tested on real people, even when it cost us a great deal more time, patience, and expertise than we thought we had. Fundamentally, we made this game because it is 2026 and it is time to make the things that you feel in your core that only you can make: the things that must exist because you love them, that you love so much you know you can serve the people who use them for decades, the things that will help people have more fun, think harder, and feel better about the incredible thing it is to be a human being. Now go play. Link just below.