By some coincidence I've been looking at bevy and other engines lately. Bevy sounds like it had thought put into it's library to make it more modular. However so far it very hard to even get started in it. (Haven't even gotten it to build)

> However so far it very hard to even get started in it. (Haven't even gotten it to build)

Haven't been my experience on either Linux, macOS or Windows, what errors are you seeing here?

Bevy is somewhat modular but it's also kind of coupled. You could use bevy_ecs by itself, and lots of things by themselves, but lots of them also kind of assume you use the rest too. Although it seems there are games that use everything-sans-renderer, so modular it is, in some ways.

Yeah I was wondering if some things are more coupled together. The issue I'm having is building it on a system without Wayland installed is very hard (or possibly impossible).

Without Wayland and X11? I'm targeting both (one shared build though), using Wayland when available otherwise defaulting to X11, and seems to work out in most cases.

Or you're without both Wayland and X11?

No just without Wayland. My system didn't have Wayland installed because it's old enough not to include it by default and my card doesn't support it. However, a short while ago I got it to build by installing libwayland. (I was afraid my system might break by installing it but that doesn't seem to be the case so far.)

Then I don't see why you'd need libwayland at all? Build only for X11 and it won't try to use Wayland? X11 is enabled by default (wayland is even behind a feature flag), and you can force it with WINIT_UNIX_BACKEND=x11 as well.

yes it's very well designed, and because if it's modularity it's well positioned both to support an editor (eg. jackdaw) and llm assisted coding.

I think that's ultimately a good thing. As proofs weren't supposed to be the point as stated by William Thurston long ago. Maybe now the focus can be more on better explanations and creating tools for growing understanding and intuition.

Good explanations should take the form of human-understandable proofs.

Define "human understandable".

It's worthy of note that most humans, do not find most mathematicians understandable. As is frequently demonstrated in Calculus classes. Therefore it is arguable that even human produced results are not generally human understandable.

Then they are not good explanations.

"What I cannot create, I do not understand"

- Feynman

Awesome, I love it. I never even heard of the Vectrex before. I'm guessing it was too expensive for most people since it's basically a whole arcade machine.

As a kid, it was incredibly exciting to see in person! It was pretty small (had a 9" CRT) and $200 (~$650 today). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vectrex

A Vectrex wasn't prohibitively expensive, but, even for its time, vector graphics seemed a bit primitive*.

1980s TV gaming consoles may not have had high resolution, but they were less visually monotonous than glowing lines on black.

* Consider that Asteroids is the only vector-based game listed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1982_in_video_games

** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroids_(video_game) was already three years old by the time Vectrex hit the market

The Vectrex was the first games console I ever tried. My parents could not afford one so I never got one...until a couple of years ago when I won an online action. It's amazing and the new developed products for it makes it even more amazing.

$199 when it was introduced in 1982. It was discounted a couple times after that after Milton Bradley bought them and got down to $100. That's a pretty decent price considering the Atari 2600 debuted in 1977 at $199.

It was basically a whole arcade machine, just a lot smaller :-)

Is not just games. I've already seen the beginnings of proprietary software such as Wolfram Engine and Microsoft Word vibed up into alternatives. How long till all of MS Office, Creative Cloud, Houdini get the same treatment? Truly exciting times.

Yep. And these companies know it. I’ve been in the room with execs candidly saying their billion-dollar cash cows will be easily replicated by a teenager on a weekend.

The sane ones recognize that sales, service, and support have value. Is that teenager going to ensure 24/7 operation for a multinational?

The less sane ones think “if one teenager can build MS office, our thousands of SWEs can make thousands of, uh, help me out here…”

While it is certainly now quicker and cheaper to do this, it is not clear that maintaining a copycat app as an ongoing concern has much more business value than it ever has. Take Photoshop. Pixelmator existed (acquired by Apple eventually). Photopea is still independent. What else... Sketch? Figma and Canva for the "unicorn startup" category. Procreate serving a different chunk of users. Is there room for many more new entrants in this category to gain significant marketshare? Is the ability to dupe Photoshop the actual blocker?

Word 1:0 for windows makes an excellent high speed wasm layout engine …

Yes then expand to popular saas like jira etc, then photoshop. The potential of this sort of disruption was priced into stocks as “saaspocalypss” about may 2026.

Shhh, I have slack, jira and trello in my crosshair

I like the concept and these explainers. It sounds like this is using a HTML based format to be similar to like a Flash / Shockwave animation to keep data size down.

I wonder what the challenge would be of making these videos more interactive would be? Also I do wonder if there is any research happening in making AI explainers more trustable.

As sometime who's memorized but also forgotten their timetables while still managing to go through Algebra I. I don't understand the importance for memorizing times tables (or any other tables for that matter).

Most people on a budget (i.e. the vast majority of people) are constantly using exact or approximate multiplication while shopping. And they are rarely whipping out their calculator for this purpose.

Why not just use the calculator app on your smart phone? That's what I do. (School made me all too aware of how easy it is for me to get the wrong answer when trying to do calculations mentally)

Depends on the calculation and context, it is definitely advisable to use tools for complex or high-risk situations, dividing the dinner bill by 2 or 3, that should not require a calculator or one of the thousands of bill splitting apps, perhaps it is a bit harder when you want divide bill by items, but not a high risk situation.

practice makes perfect, exercise your brain like your body

I use addition when shopping. Multiplication is not necessary.

There are basic skills that everyone should learn, being able to do simple math in your head is a building block for more complex reasoning.

I once had a roommate who I encouraged to divide our grocery bill by 2 in his head for splitting the bill, by the end of the year he was quick and accurate.

That doesn't follow. I'm not especially gifted at mental math yet I've been able to learn various programming languages and libraries and dev tools. I've also been able understand and implement some algorithms.

memorizing programming language syntax is a more apt analogy that enabled you to think in higher level concepts when developing software

Quick math. Basic financial literacy. Times tables are for arithmetic, the working man's math. Algebra is an entirely different math which solves different problems and deals more in the abstract.

You can definitely get past algebra without knowing your times tables, but algebra isn't going to help you in the checkout line to make sure you received the correct amount of change and bought the correct number of goods.

I for one cannot be convinced that these companies saying they want to slow down AI progress is for the safety of mankind (or any other altruistic reason). However, I respect someone willing to give up a very comfortable career for his convictions.

That most people are sincere in their beliefs (in AI doom), as the author says and I think too, doesn't mean there aren't cult leader-types exploiting these beliefs. And their private beliefs may be quite different from their stated ones.

I’d wait and see what happens next in their professional life. It’d be ironic if they founded a new AI startup or something like that.

I don't get these comments. If he got paid way above his needs for a while he can easily retire already if he continues to keep his expenses in check, and take on a position in his church. Pays with happiness, not money, though if he has enough of the latter he can focus on maximize the former.

You have a fair point. I am financially secure so it's not a great sacrifice.

It was psychologically difficult to give up the opportunity to make more money at a fun job, though.

> I don't get these comments.

Why? It’s not that difficult to imagine. People don’t necessarily do these things out of need. That’s a naive way to think about it IMO.

But that was exactly my point. If it is not out of need, why focus on making even more money instead of focusing on other things in life?

You are welcome to call me naive for such a viewpoint.

You didn’t get my point, which is, people are not ambitious only because of lack of money. At least not in real life. Someone who’s well off may still want to get richer. Look around you.

That would be ironic! But there's no chance I'll work on anything that accelerates AI. If I was OK with that, I would not have left Google.

I do expect to use AI in my work, as I indicated in my blog post. I haven't (yet?) reached the point where I consider that anathema...

> But there's no chance I'll work on anything that accelerates AI.

Fair, but I don’t mean you in particular.

> I do expect to use AI in my work

So as I but for your position, don’t you think that’d contribute to what you want to distance yourself from? It’s like leaving a political party but still donating to them, while finding their mission unacceptable. From outside these seem contradictory.

I think unintuitively all of us are capable of holding contradictions in our head (or word) without any conflict.

But this time, focused on AI safety (just like all the previous ones).

That's a little dismissive on the series of posts, as many aren't hand-wringing. The heart of the posts including this one is about recognizing that the math community/academia needs to be better than it has been. (Rewarding teaching more over research, rewarding motivated explanations over proofs etc.)

I agree that human society is too focused on productivity but disagree that it's tied to ignorance of the Bible. The fall of man illustrated in Genesis is tied to feeding on the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Having the right set of religious concepts wont put you in harmony with God and thus won't make you more loving to your fellow man.

If you cannot tell a story why humans are more valuable than machines or animals, then you will begin to treat humans like machines and animals, or treat machines and animals like humans.

There are many modern examples leading to disastrous results.

Let's see how long (if it ever happens) it takes for models to generate motivated explanations (possibly done via the Manim library or something like it) along with their Lean proofs. Grant Sanderson is right that this is kind of subjective but so is Art and I'm very enthusiastic about AI generated Art.

> possibly done via the Manim library or something like it

It can be done already: the point is that the motivation and explanation parts are terrible, especially for novel topics where the AI can't just rip off existing content. A Lean proof is at least a verifiable task; you end up with an actual proof that you can work through. A Manim slop video doesn't have that.

The more I see these posts about mathematics institutions reforms and challenges from AI advancements the more it looks like they may need to go through a death. Or to put it another way they may need to start again from first principles.

If math is truly about spreading intuition and understanding then our institutions have dropped the ball decades ago and have not been able to grab hold of it since (if they ever had it to begin with)

Not sure why you're down the bottom when the current top post says pretty much the same thing. I agree that the reevaluation and refocusing that is being forced by AI is one the maths establishment could fruitfully have had a long time ago.