Orbital Salvage

“It’s a gut punch. It’s a kind of dying.”

A worker has reached the top of a set of stairs, with nowhere left to go but down.

Some sort of crypto bro has posted to Twitter, which is to be expected, but what he says is resonant.

I don’t know who Dave White is – he seems great, honestly, and I’m probably judging him unfairly only because I see he has written most recently about “stablecoins“, and because his employer, Paradigm, is a Crypto Investment Firm. (Albeit one with a handsome home page.)

Mr. White (may I call him Dave?) … Dave is reacting on Twitter to Chat GPT’s success at a math competition. If so inclined, you can learn about that on Ars Technica: “International Math Olympiad gold medal announcement; Non-math AI model reportedly solves proofs at human speeds, but early reveal roils community”. But I’ve brought you here for Dave’s thoughts on the matter, which add up to a lot of existential dread.

Back to Dave:

i consider myself a professional mathematician … now a bunch of robots can do it. as someone who has a lot of their identity and their actual life built around “is good at math,” it’s a gut punch. it’s a kind of dying.

Dave goes on to say:

like, one day you discover you can talk to dogs. it’s fun and interesting so you do it more, learning the intricacies of their language and their deepest customs. you learn other people are surprised by what you can do. you have never quite fit in, but you learn people appreciate your ability and want you around to help them. the dogs appreciate you too, the only biped who really gets it. you assemble for yourself a kind of belonging. then one day you wake up and the universal dog translator is for sale at walmart for $4.99

Which frames how I think a lot of us are feeling right now: watching our unique skills and abilities, the things that gave us a place and a purpose in the world, become mass-produced and trivially accessible.

multiply that grief out by *every* mathematician, by every coder, maybe every knowledge worker, every artist… over the next few years… it’s a slightly bigger story

It popped up the same day that I noticed Jason Kottke shared a 2019 article by NY Times article, “Y” and it sort of feels like it’s all related. See the discussion at Kottke.org and you’ll find a link to “Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think” as well.

Here’s a screen capture of the Twitter post in full:

Dave White @_Dave__White_ on X (Twitter) the openai IMO news hit me pretty heavy this weekend i'm still in the acute phase of the impact, i think i consider myself a professional mathematician (a characterization some actual professional mathematicians might take issue with, but my party my rules) and i don't think i can answer a single imo question ok, yes, imo is its own little athletic subsection of math for which i have not trained, etc. etc., but. if i meet someone in the wild who has an IMO gold, i immediately update to "this person is much better at math than i am" now a bunch of robots can do it. as someone who has a lot of their identity and their actual life built around "is good at math," it's a gut punch. it's a kind of dying. like, one day you discover you can talk to dogs. it's fun and interesting so you do it more, learning the intricacies of their language and their deepest customs. you learn other people are surprised by what you can do. you have never quite fit in, but you learn people appreciate your ability and want you around to help them. the dogs appreciate you too, the only biped who really gets it. you assemble for yourself a kind of belonging. then one day you wake up and the universal dog translator is for sale at walmart for $4.99 the IMO result isn't news, exactly. in fact, if you look at the METR agent task length over time plot, i think agents being able to solve ~ 1.5 hour problems is coming right on time. so in some way we should not be surprised. and indeed, it appears multiple companies have achieved the same result. it's just... the rising tide rising as fast as it has been rising of course, grief for my personal identity as a mathematician (and/or productive member of society) is the smallest part of this story multiply that grief out by *every* mathematician, by every coder, maybe every knowledge worker, every artist... over the next few years... it's a slightly bigger story and of course, beyond that, there is the fear of actual death, which perhaps i'll go into more later. this package -- grief for relevance, grief for life, grief for what i have known -- isn't unique to the ai age or anything like that. i think it is a standard thing as one appreaches end of career or end of life. it just might be that that is coming a bit sooner for many of us, all at once. i wonder if we are ready 8:59 PM · Jul 21, 2025 · 464.1K Views
Note on the cover image: I generated this image using Midjourney, which constantly amazes me. I added an effect using tooooools.app which is super fun, and free. I then pieced it all together in Photoshop, where the workflow becomes more AI and less me every time I use it. Which is all to illustrate that I'm gleefully destroying my own career.

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