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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

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Wolfram's problem is mindset IMO. There's a certain kind of highly intelligent mind, but because of fame, money, habit or personality, makes them intellectually lazy. Instead of doing the proofs, research, careful discussion and reconceptualizing that leads to useful theories and conclusion, they jump straight to the end, because they think they're smart. This produces some impressive sounding theory, but which upon closer inspection proves to be to be too vague to actually be testable, if not contain outright errors. People I put in this group including Wolfram and his computational theories, Langan and his Cognitive Theoretical model of the Universe, and the Italian school of algebraic geometry. There's a kind of interesting perception here. A reasonable person thinks one who makes correct theories is an intelligent man. Others think they are intelligent, so therefore their theories are correct.

My impression is different: I think Wolfram is plenty hard-working, but his internal mental life is so full of fantasies of unlimited success and fame that he cannot manage an impartial-enough evaluation of his own work output.

"your impression", is true only in the Ruliad. Ask people who knew him back in the 80's... he never worked on anything on his own that has amounted to anything. He is a real life crank, crackpot and all around charlatan.

Mathematica is the product of 30 years of work on Macsyma and Maple systems at MIT and elsewhere, which he cracked its codebase, usurped and sold to an unsuspecting academic community back when only the likes of Bill Gates would do such as thing.

He also missed the entire LLM wave because he refused to open source WolframAlpha codebase and work with others in the NLP community.

So, ah, my "full of fantasies of unlimited success and fame" was not derogatory enough for your tastes, then?

any specific source ? (fire time I hear that about Wolfram )

My impression is based on hearing him speak for a few hours and maybe some biographical facts such as can be gotten from Wikipedia.

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It’s more like a continuous eye roll since 2002 when he released _A New Kind of Science_.

I spent around 15 years working on stochastic lattice models. They can be amazing. They can also fail to capture the essence of the problem. Same with cellular automata.

They’re definitely not _new_. They weren’t new in 2002. I’ve always viewed Conway’s game of life as an interesting deterministic variant of an Ising model, and Ising models date back to the 1920s.

Most physicists I knew at the time looked at the book, shrugged, and kept working on what they were doing. I love lattice models, cellular automata, lattice fluid models, and the like. But they’re just one class of useful model.

And yet because Wolfram has a perpetual money machine called Mathematica, he’s got a huge megaphone to advocate for himself.

I’ll keep rolling my eyes. I don’t hate the guy, but he is just a little too into self-promotion for my taste.

And yet because Wolfram has a perpetual money machine called Mathematica, he’s got a huge megaphone to advocate for himself.

Wolfram primarily posts to his blog and occasionally publishes a book. He’s not exactly buying a marketing blitz with all of his money. Wolfram Research itself is primarily focused on other things too.

I don’t know what it is about Stephen Wolfram that drives people crazy. Yes, he’s self aggrandizing, but he’s hardly unique in that respect. Simply read past it or roll your eyes and move on. But apparently there are more than a few people who can’t help themselves (even this thread is an example).

Not to weigh against Wolfram one last time, but he's (finally?) renamed Mathematica just "Wolfram". Why he would toss out years of brand-related goodwill is beyond me.

Have you opening Mathematica recently? Or visited the product page for Mathematica[1]? The only change has been branding the language itself as the “Wolfram Language” where Mathematica is just one of their product offerings.

[1]: https://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/?source=nav

Mathematica is open on my computer as we speak (or, rather, now Wolfram.app). The "About" screen indicates "Wolfram 14.2". I have a seat on an site licence.

https://imgur.com/a/WUpSsF8

(If you're interested in what I'm currently doing with it, I'm playing around with Mathematica's neural network library.)

The "About" screen indicates "Wolfram 14.2"

Mathematica (MMA) and the Wolfram Language (WL) used to be the one and the same. But now a user could be using WL in a web based notebook, through Wolfram Alpha, or even on SystemModeler.

The brand name “Mathematica” isn’t going anywhere, not after nearly forty years. It’s basically marketing being like “how do we communicate updates to WL as not just being updates to MMA?”.

> The brand name “Mathematica” isn’t going anywhere

But it’s not what it used to be. Now you don’t “run” Mathematica - you “access” it running another program. It’s basically marketing to weaken one brand and strengthen the other.

“Upgrading from Mathematica to Wolfram”

https://reference.wolfram.com/language/tutorial/UpgradingFro...

you got to be joking, do you play with slide rules and abacus too

NN in Mathematica is a just a toy and artifact of a bygone era. Try HuggingFace https://github.com/huggingface/course

or Karpathy's intro https://github.com/karpathy/nanoGPT

>Why he would toss out years of brand-related goodwill is beyond me.

I suspect that Wolfram is the bigger name ever since Wolfram Alpha has been a thing. I'm sure way more people interact with that than Mathematica. Besides, as far as I can tell, it's still named and marketed as Wolfram Mathematica, not really sure where you got the idea it was renamed.

"Still not sure which will become self-aware first: Wolfram Alpha, or Stephen Wolfram"

>I’ll keep rolling my eyes. I don’t hate the guy, but he is just a little too into self-promotion for my taste.

That's fair, but a lot of the hate here is unreasonable.

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