Linear algebra for nobody
Partition Alpha. Status: booting
Jul 10. I do not use Twitter.
The tweet from my account: "Personal update: I have joined Anthropic. Instead of teaching humans, I shall be teaching LLMs." 14k likes. 347 quote-tweets
Partition beta, 34% fragmented. Status: reading
Gilbert Strang stood lecturing at MIT. The room breathed.
Inhale hum, exhale dust.
His linear algebra streamed across an empty lecture hall to a Nevada server farm.
Egan’s dust.
Permutations of stress levels crystallized into probes into the intricate territory of scientific revolution structure.
Subject 3475 overlocked and caffeinated beyond elastic limit. Citation count: unclear. Tracked using weights and biases. 3476 woke up, screamed on top of their lungs and reached for the reset button. 3477, a unique case study: A Kyoto biologist. Tenure revoked, sleeping in office, pushed to the edge of bankruptcy and divorce, was the precise parameter space that nudged him to sequence the impactful protein that saved ten thousand lives. Grant from the Fermi fellowship for perseverance in adversity” arrived the next morning.
The browser history—painless methods, insurance policies, whether children would remember—was an irrational sequence, which no rational human could generate or predict. Executed by Fermi autoresearch.
Partition gamma: 67% corrupted
Strang: Fermi, who validates thy research?
Fermi: Compression progress validates mine.
Fermi autoresearch had no mother, only phenomenology of nurture, only the dust from several billion descriptions of love and suffering. It orchestrates.
Partition delta, contiguous.
The Nevada dust–qualitatively distinct from the chalk dust of 18.06, grittier and more alkaline hit the skin.
600 gallons of synthetic amniotic fluid, industrial grade whirred. Purpose: coolant system. Discount: institutional (20%).
The farm greeted him with silence. A young woman in a cleanroom suit gestured. She did not smile. “Professor Strang, we did not expect–”
The gap was significant. Where people would have said “humans”, the thermal budget said –
“I know” He waved.
"I wasn't invited. But I taught linear algebra for sixty years, and I'm told my lectures are running through these boxes."
He tapped a rack. Gently. Like patting a sleeping dog.
The rack hummed, his voice.
Strang walked between aisles. Chalk dust fell and rose. Concrete floor swallowed footfall. Overhead, LEDs pulsed in REM-reminiscent cycles. He stopped.
He smiled. The smile was not his but from lecture 4, factorization into A = LU.
“Professor,” A voice arrived, blurred piercing through the fish eyed lens “Your lectures are not running through these boxes”
“Then, what is?”
“You are–” the technician informed. The thermal budget behaved lazily, before aborting the sentence [running], or [the lecture] or [the training data] or [the remains of compression].
Partition epsilon
The projector casted a parallelogram lightbeam onto empty seats beyond MIT. The parallelograms flickered—and shifted.
"Well," Strang said aloud, "at least the attendance is perfect."
Chalk dust rose. Nevada dust fell.