aerodexis

I, for one, am profoundly thankful that the ~300 year mania around innovation and newness is beginning to wane. You don't need to read that many history books to appreciate that the values that we have today are profoundly different than what they were previously. It takes a few more books, and a pinch of humility, to appreciate that today's values are neither universal nor the necessary outcome of a teleological evolutionary process. The reworking that Tao suggests here reaches far beyond math. The fact that mathematicians are starting to wrestle with these questions is cause for great optimism. Once VCs do the same thing, we'll be on the other side of the storm.

"you will reach El Dorado" is profoundly different than "I will reach El Dorado"

Don't bother with this.

I'm reading Information and Meaning in Evolutionary Processes by Harms and it goes off on how weak Dawkins is.

I'm hyped for you. This one is a massive banger.

I wouldn't be surprised if it's marketing all the way down.

Personally - for banking - I'd be plenty happy dealing w/ 90% uptime if it gave me an order of magnitude more security against getting robbed. This tradeoff may not have been realistic a decade ago, but it seems to be where things are trending.

It also is de-facto the case today when logging in as per usual sometimes requires a captcha or additional verification.

You don't think frontier mathematics is already secret?

I could imagine it going so far as to have an LLM re-impl core libs every time a request is processed. Lightning never strikes the same place twice.

What would you prefer: 99% of user requests to succeed but w/ 5% risk of getting O-day'd, or have 90% of user requests succeed but w/ 0.1% risk of getting 0-day'd.

Makes sense to me - I see it going down two separate routes in parallel:

One is to take the human out the OODA loop for cyber defense. Servlet libs (for example) are going to become fluid, self-modifying things w/ contracts that operate much differenlty from how they do today. The engineering practice around these things will need to change.

The second is that UX will be self-modifying. Just like how pi can modify itself, I can see this being a general practice for user-facing applications. Perhaps a text-box in which users can describe tweaks in can request changes to how the application functions. Engineering an application will focus on modeling the non-negotiables of how an application works, and providing the correct primitives for user-driven LLMs to modify software on the fly, as well as track and rollback changes. There'll also be funsies around how to ensure that ads get delivered regardless of the user trying to get rid of them.

yea - but did you read it?

Interesting project. I've been thinking about the need for something similar at work when a coworker thought it was a good idea to explode our design documents by having an AI slop out tens of pages of additional design w/ zero consideration of modeling of the human-derived ground-truth or knowledge ontology.

A humble suggestion is to consider having this become an annotation layer on top of existing code or documentation.

Working on getting real-time computer vision telemetry from cameras placed in a barn. Managing the training datasets was annoying enough that I created my own simplified clone of CVAT and LabelStudio : a browser-based image annotation and review tool for detection + categorization. Will eventually expand this to an end-to-end solution.

https://github.com/bcabs/pictureCram

I'm genuinely surprised by this comment. I'm not talking about why a mathematician pursues math - I'm talking about where the stipend comes from.

Higher math is exceptionally useful for cryptography, defense, econometrics etc. I have a hard time thinking of other motivations that would hold a candle against such things.

Is the idea that government (for my purposes : folks w/ a monopoly on violence) is sincerely interested in promoting human flourishing, and is invested in mathematics insofar as it is a pure expression of human curiosity? I can also maybe see the glorification through monument building angle. If we're talking about math literacy in the population - that's distinct in my mind from higher mathematics.

It's dangerously naive to believe that science and math are pursued for majority benign purposes. No one here knows about Grothendieck?

Seems more like a misalignment b/w the people practicing mathematics and the people ultimately footing the bill for their work.

Governments are invested in solving mathematical problems for practical purposes. Up to now, achieving these practical purposes relied on mathematicians doing their mathematician thing, which is better defined as a social activity than the achievement of a practical result. Now, governments can achieve similar practical results w/o the need of the social activity.

I don't believe it to be productive to think of the problem wrt AI or AI-company alignment. These conflicts always existed, but they were easy enough to paper over and believe in heavily subsidized fictions that folks in government ever cared about things that mathematicians cared about.

They will use it for nefarious but "legal" purposes - however - they have decades of experience handling such data and keeping it "safe" from "illegal" purposes.

handling end-to-end flight booking seems like a very good target use-case that if you can get right, implies that you got a lot of other things right. Just like how Amazon started off by selling books online.

Are you one of those openAI swarms that got into the wild?

Been working on a similar project for doing animal behavioral analysis on cameras setup in a barn. I got YOLO running in real-time on several streams on a RTX4070. Managing the training data and doing DINO->YOLO distillation has me writing my own data management suite that I plan on OSing soon.

Core use-case : push a message every time my dog is eating my shoes.

So in computer science we have this thing called "distributed systems". It turns out that even if you buy the biggest and most powerful computer there is, all it takes is one problem with that one machine to make your system stop working. Instead, what people do these days is use lots of little computers to work together. That way, when one of them breaks, the system keeps going. Believe it or not, that's how google dot com works!

in addition, there is also "stupid" and "not stupid"

Truly fascinating how when you're a tourist in a place that survives off of tourism, you get treated nicely.

It is utterly fascinating the ends to which people will go to insist the opposite.

The Chinese desire to raise China to global dominance is exactly a concern w/ status and wealth. It's naive to think that America and China are any different in the degree to which leadership is driven by these concerns. One simply hopes that the facts-on-the-ground (i.e. geography) structures this pursuit in such a way to provide peace and prosperity to normal people.

America, for a time, made appeals to things beyond power and status when it talked about "freedom". Nowadays this has been debased to just mean the freedom to attain power and status. Americans are deeply resentful about this, and their thinking will remain incoherent until they move past this.

China never made appeals beyond power and status. Communism essentially claiming that power and status are all that exist, and that peace is produced by removing the ability for specific people to asymetrically amass it, which is equally incoherent as the Americans just on a different time-scale.

Because of better middle-term planning, China is in the better position to amass status and wealth. But this is not all because they are somehow less concerned with status and wealth.

Both powers have near zero long-term planning, because anyone with an iota of wisdom knows that status and wealth are fleeting.

Seems like the difference b/w samurai and ninja. The samurai saw his sword as an extension of his soul - a disrespect to the sword was a disrespect to the man. The ninja used the sword like any other tool - and if it was helpful to use it to pry something open, there you go.

the samurai mentality doesn't make sense in today's economy.

Is it not the case now that oligarchs "own" intellectual credibility? Becoming a credentialed mathematician requires an entire lifetime of devotion, lots of money or scholarships, and association with institutions controlled by monied interests. Token spend is arguably cheaper, and although still paid to monied interests, lowers the bar for real participation in mathematics.

Sure, I'm conflating the tool w/ the people building the tool - but imo muddling the distinction is good, because the hard distinction is what tricks people into an unthinking mode.

Reminds me of Blood Meridian where The Judge meticulously sketches the rock glyphs that he comes across, and then destroys the original.

Now that I think about it, The Judge is an apt metaphor for AI : "Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent."

too bad hypocrisy never got in the way of people making money

The fact that they're not being prosecuted for breaching HF's systems is bad news.