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Comment by gbjcantab | Hacker News Reader

For some reason, this approach makes me think of the difference between “wizardry” and “sorcery” in some fantasy magic systems. The magic of “wizards” is fundamentally based on a deep study and understanding of arcane things, perhaps assisted by some (necessary or helpful) tools of great power. “Sorcerers” summon supernatural beings and are able to control them, cajole them, and protect themselves and others against them (with more or less success)... but the actual desired magical effect is performed by those beings.

Computing has historically been a field of wizardry. It's... interesting (?) to see so many people pushing so hard in the direction of sorcery, and in fact applying that sorcery to other fields, in which they themselves aren't quite able to validate whether the spell worked or not.

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It's a truly wonderful read, made better by the fact the author doesn't quite understand what's going on.

The usual format that fun mathematics is presented (being talked at by someone who is very well versed in the subject) comes with a heavy cognitive burden - and often I just can't really make it through.

When the author is not an expert the writing is just so much more accessible - it's easier to understand and making it through feels more of an adventure and less of a lecture.

I've never thought previously how much I would enjoy this format though. I'm here to see more amateurs stumbling through mathematics.

Also, wasn't expecting this sort of side-quest from the guy who got me into React.

Agreed! I've always been interested in the field of mathematics, only to be let down by my lack of ability to comprehend it. I can usually follow an article up until the point that it starts using formulae.

I love this approachable prose.

If anyone is aware of any other "mathematics for people who don't know mathematics" resources I'd greatly appreciate any links.

OK this is probably not quite what you meant but I'll shoot: I highly recommend Terence Tao's Analysis textbook (which now also has a Lean counterpart on GitHub). You can skip Chapter 1 (it sets up the motivation but I couldn't answer most questions, which is part of the point). From Chapter 2, it builds up in a somewhat "dry" but actually very accessible and methodical way. It is "mathematical" but it is "for people who don't know mathematics" in the sense that it forces you to build the entire mathematics from scratch, including proving things like `a + b = b + a` as exercises. This is actually how I got into proofs in the first place, with later picking up Lean by doing Natural Number Game.

Since you respect Terence Tao, but not the general population of mathematicians, maybe you’ll read his blog posts which describe the ways your actions are detrimental to human striving.

I’ve replied to this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49762433

You did not.

Edit I apologize to Dan Abramov for venting my frustrations about things outside of either of our control and unfairly using him as a punching bag. He seems to be an intelligent person and I hope he continues learning mathematics using whatever tools he sees fit, including AI. It was wrong of me to do this and I will take a break from this website for one week.

Thanks, I'll have a read

Are you talking about the posted article? I agree that it was a fun read, but it did not present any mathematics at all. Like, none. Its not that the author not being an expert made it easy to understand, it's that there was nothing mathematical to understand presented.

Heh, I like this. but it should be pointed out that from the other point of view, software developers were the supernatural beings (dare I say demons), which the sorcery of a good project manager could tame (with more or less success) to perform the desired magical effect

All this time, I've been considering myself the warlock. When, in fact, I've simply been the Imp. Dastardly news.

It's goblins all the way down.

The same corollary occurred to me, as well!

And now everyone is a sorcerer: they can trap small demons inside metal boxes and force them to do their bidding. As before, any supernatural effects are performed by those beings (which were willed into existence by siphoning the wisdom from the wizard's own grimoires...)

I’ve felt like a warlock for about half a year now - talking to demons which summon code from the abyss. Exhilarating and terrifying, especially when you can tell the demons get better faster.

> in which they themselves aren't quite able to validate whether the spell worked or not

Knowledge is of 2 kinds: know-that and know-how. Know-that is what LLMs are enabling such as the proof here, while know-how is more useful as that constitutes understanding and puts that knowledge to use.

The sorcerers have always outnumbered the wizards. Before AI, we called them code monkeys.

That’s fair! I think what struck me, though, is that what we’re seeing is large numbers of “wizards” jump ship to and actively promote “sorcery” instead, in this sense. That is, it’s interesting to me to see Dan Abramov, whose blog primarily consists of painstaking explanations of React internals based on the deep knowledge he developed over years as the most visible member of the core team, switch over to “do a breakthrough.”

I try to address this in the post explicitly in a few places.

Primarily I thought of this as a sort of "epistemic performance art project", maybe similar to playing Elden Ring blindfolded having never played it before, or speedrunning a game by opening a box a thousand times and overflowing some counter. It's funny and absurd to do knowledge work without the knowledge.

I think it's also a stress test of meta skills. Like, how much can we do without knowing? What kind of processes can we set up around these demons that would constrain them into our requirements? How can we know when things are going wrong? In some sense, this isn't too different from engineering management.

Naturally, I'm also interested in how much of my role in this could've been automated away. Can there be a skill for that? Then "do a breakthrough" is an irrelevant implementation detail of that skill.

Note that "do a breakthrough" actually produced the worst results over the runs. The best results were from more directed runs like searching for first obstacle towards the next milestone.

This reminds me of Terry Pratchett’s Sourcery.

The wizards don’t become sourcerers themselves - they become enthusiastic users of someone else’s sourcery. Their years of learning don’t protect them from mistaking access to power for mastery of it.

And before those code monkeys were making money, we called them skiddies.

Script kiddies are hacking sorcerers. Different discipline.

Or like the difference between chemistry and alchemy? Understanding and reasoning with the building blocks as opposed to throwing random stuff together, trying different things and hoping it somehow produces gold.

Differently than wizards that lock their knowledge in towers and in sects, software development has a tradition of being open for the most part, so the sorcery and wizardry analogy works more like a spectrum. It just depends on how close to the metal the apprentice would like their consciousness.

> Computing has historically been a field of wizardry.

Counter argument, "historically" is not last year but closer to 2 decades ago.

modern computing has sat atop a mountain of sorcery for ages. You may be able to squint and call a good compiler a "tool of power" more than sorcery but there are plenty of other tech stacks that simply sit upon one opaque box after another.

And it's not unusual for sorcery to produce crap, even if it's production worth crap. Dreamweaver had a WYSIWYG editor ages ago and as someone who was hand crafting HTML in that era it's code was typically a mess.

Now that's the norm, almost nobody makes HTML by hand, some js framework does. And it's often shit, I've seen entire sources of nothing but <div> nested ad-nauseam, conjured up from the depths of "I-don't-care-as-long-as-it-works"

I thought you were going to talk about the difference between D&D wizards and sorcerers: the former are the same as you describe, whereas the latter are born with some sort of innate talent for casting spells without needing to learn it or necessarily practice any discipline. It honestly also kind of fits; there's a difference between "I worked hard to learn the skills I have so I can explicitly craft the solution to the problem I have" and "idk man I just kinda point and think 'go magic spell' and the magic happens".

Sorcerers are the vibe coders of D&D magic, which perfectly describes how wizards in-universe feel about them.

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