andrepd

Please don't project on me. Doomsrolling irrelevant junk and polluting one's mind might possibly be what the majority of smartphone use is for. Hence my distinguishing that from "calling and texting".

I can text my wife when I leave home telling her to meet in the park. I can call for help in an emergency. I can talk to my family, back in my home country, whenever I want and wherever I am. My grandparents emigrated when "seeing your family" meant a month's journey by sea, so I'm quite sensitive to this. It's a miracle we take for granted.

Did you read why I wrote? It appears you completely ignored it and are just talking past me... Yes I goddamn know "technology can create ills where previously there were none", that's why I called algorithmic social media a catastrophe.... Swear to god

That's ridiculous. We have managed without electricity or antibiotics for 100,000 years too. Are you keen on reading by candlelight or dying of preventable infections?

Instant messaging and calling is extremely valuable. Algorithmic social media is extremely noxious. Unfortunately, they both live on the same device.

Destructors run predictably at list, and are pervasive everywhere. You know that when you exit a scope, be that a function or whatever it may, the destructors of variables in that scope are called. That is clear and consistent. The transformation mentioned above is not.

An empty loop, under some non-obvious conditions, on some compiler flags but not others, silently transforms into a system call. In a systems programming language.

Actually it was. But thanks for elaborating.

> The navier-stokes shows us what mathematical problem can be solved when $10m worth of compute is thrown at something.

That's the thing, it very much does NOT show us that. What happened was mathematicians at openAI learned of an imminent development on this problem, and the insight that it entailed, then they were able to prompt a system in the correct direction and spend 20 million dollars to write down the final steps.

Which is rather precisely the point that the article is making!

> If you knew AI could be affordable enough in 3-5 years so that even the most underfunded researchers could use it to solve cancer

As the saying goes, if my grandmother had wheels she would have been a truck.

Reads like satire. "I get 100$ for every 1$ I put in" is exactly the kind of phrase that triggers ponzi alarm bells on anybody reading this x)

How in god's name—irrespective of how valid this is, and its very valid—is this even remotely germane to the issue of AI in mathematics? Rattling off incidents and making the case that there is discrimination and sexists in mathematics (yeah no shit), how is this related to the issue of AI that was raised in the letter? Are the complaints raised in that letter any less valid because the mathematicians who signed them make part of a community which has reproachable behaviour, both past and present? I really don't get it.

> mathematicians (as a community, even though there were outliers) didn't care - not even the slightest - about the impact of LLMs and generative AI, other type of AI and machine learning until it started impacting them. So I have no sympathy for their community at all. They brought all this AI dystopia on us

Wait wait wait. The research mathematicians brought this AI dystopia on us. Not the techbros, not Silicon Valley, not the global financial system and its tentacles, not surveillance capitalism... No, it was the postdocs working on ultrafilters for C(2,3) epimorphisms on symplectic manifolds. That's certainly a take.

> People prefer larger tap targets on touch screens.

Only in a completely stupid, nonsensically A/B tested notion of "prefer". I'll refer you to this ~~excellent piece of satirical writing~~ actual post from Google design team: https://design.google/library/expressive-material-design-goo...

I think it's obvious that the target audience has a huge overlap...

Seeing "Material 3/Material You" is a negative point for me, not a positive. It's almost comical just how atrocious the UI is. Yes let's make all phones 20% huge-er and all whitespace 40% wider, said no sane person ever.

Yes if you don't think about the matter for more than 6 seconds you would indeed conclude that, and retreat to the comfortable cliché of "it's just a tool". Meanwhile, I'm glad that there are still people who _think_ about issues and ponder the consequences and reflect on things before they become a reality.

I'm an AI skeptic, but I don't see how this squares with what the organisers of the event actually say. "It previously suggested that math researchers already have no place in mathematics"? I don't see this.

> As a parallel example, can we prove the phase of the moon had no impact on the NS solution? No, not without a bunch experiments run at different phases of the moon.

The _gall_ to say something like this. Do you perhaps think we are all stupid?? This very blogpost claims not to know if their work was used as input for this model. I don't even understand how that is possible, surely you can know if something is part of the training data, even if you are in the dark about what impact it actually made, qualitatively. The moon....

> Knowing most of the recipes we use, there's really no reason to think such contamination happened.

Yeah sorry but I don't trust you. I don't trust people or companies that have shown themselves to be dishonest before. Especially when the previous paragraph is comparing plagiarism and training data contamination with, _the phases of the moon_.

Might even be you're actually telling the truth, but the boy that cried wolf and all that.

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As an aside, I would bet very good money at how most (all?) these companies are flouting their ZDR.

Lmao my friend, the whole "drama" is that there are allegations of plagiarism.

> "I deeply apologize for this extremely poor choice of words, it is the opposite of what I was trying to convey."

The AI-isms are seeping into their speech :)

Holy late capitalism. Everything revolves around line-go-up, and sociopaths rule the show. These people cannot even collaborate like civilised scientists on one of the most famous open problems in mathematics?

“It would be simpler if Levent was not an Anthropic employee” I cannot believe this shit.

1. Interaction with Meta is virtually mandatory in many places in the world. Try opting out of Meta when your kid's daycare or your building's group chat is on whatsapp.

2. It doesn't really matter if you opt out, because _other people around you don't_: they take pictures in which you show, they tag you, they talk about you, they send you links, etc. Which means they (Meta) build a shadow profile of you anyway.

The "personal responsibility angle" is pure fiction.

Pardon my French but bull-fucking-shit! A CEO _should_ take responsibility for what their subordinates do. It's preposterous to simple throw up our arms and say "oh well, some employees were sloppy so we lost some 100 million user IDs and other sensitive information that we promised not to store but we lied. Oopsie, silly me, pardon my wee incompetence tee-hee". No no no NO NO!

At some level, and certainly at the level where you get paychecks of 10 million a year for the "huge responsibility you are bearing", then incompetence IS malice!

As I understand there is no advantage in using a custom dictionary to compress 1 file. It benefits compressing _several_ (small) files.

There are excellent FOSS gallery apps already, like the Fossify suite. Why not use them I wonder?

> I've been at the point personally where I am reasonably confident that there's essentially nothing that I am better than Fable

What a sad thing to say. These models are not even better than me at _writing code_, which is as well-suited a task for LLM agents as can possibly be, what with the structured environment and the exabytes of free annotated training data.

Of course, they are also not better than humans at writing, let alone at talking to my daughter, running a pathfinder campaign, decorating a room, being a therapist, etc.

His video about reality TV music, and the one about the newest musescore default font, are some of my favourite yt videos of all time. Great communicator.

Slop code is already hard to tolerate, but any hint of slop in text will immediately make me chuck it into the bin / close the tab, no exceptions. My lifetime is finite, I'm sure as fuck not gonna spend time reading something that a person could not even be arsed to write themselves. I'm only annoyed that it takes sometimes a few seconds, sometimes a few minutes, to detect that I'm actually not reading a person's thoughts but only a machine simulacrum of such.

I highly recommend anybody to take up a similar rule, in any context. Slop in a website? Close. Slop in an email? Bin. Slop in a code comment? Skip.

WoW needed a purchase, an expensive subscription, and a good PC. Runescape ran on a potato, was F2P, the P2P was 5$ a month, and you could get started in 2 minutes from Miniclip.

Ultima Online is one of very few games (probably Star Wars Galaxies and that's it) that actually merit the label MMORPG. It's kind of insane when you think about it, that the MMO that most closely came to fulfilling the promise of a "shared, persistent, virtual world" was also the ~first one.

> I enjoyed it way too much

Well if you enjoyed it it's was not a waste of time! Much human endeavour (and _all_ hobbies!) are ultimately pointless.

If it negatively affects other aspects of your life it's a different story though.

Countries have wildly different needs regarding monetary policy. Those interests are sometimes in conflict. When push comes to shove, unsurprisingly the powerful dictate the rules: see the 2010s Eurozone crises.