andrepd

The bear tax is working

Damn, yet they still hire programmers, marketers, researchers like there's no tomorrow. I thought everything would be vibe coded and we wouldn't need to even understand code anymore. Which one is it?

The proof of the pudding.

Rust has a proposal for this, in the form of pattern types. It's on nightly, but quite far from being ready for prime time.

> The whole business with theoretical prices is why Georgism was dismissed as a form of communism

This (the calculation) is addressed by the author.

Even less good comes out of corpos doing it, yet we accept it as the status quo. The ubiquity and totalitarian control exerted by the big platforms is something even the media moguls of the 90s couldn't even dream of.

And it wasn't that long ago.

Algorithmic social media amplifies and promotes our basest, vilest impulses. Crowds were always worse than people, but now these "technologies" put that into turbo-overdrive, 5 billion people at a time, pushed and prodded by the engagement-maxxing machine. I don't see a bright future if we don't get a hand on this, and I don't see us getting a hand on this.

> my cognitive surrender to the model is increasing too. Why check it? It's obviously going to be correct.

I use "frontier" AI models daily at day_job. I can confidently say that anyone who is satisfied with the output of LLM code (enough to commit it straight off) is just an absolutely shit programmer. Sorry but I don't have any other way to put it.

The code is (with rare exceptions) atrocious on every level. It is only not atrocious if you take multiple iterations of "review and correct".

>If we find no flaws in the design whatsoever, will we be less careful about the second one? The third one? What about the ten thousandth one?

Like the saying goes, if my grandmother had wheels she would have been a bike. LLMs can't even produce quality maintainable code for a trivial web service or whatever. Why are we planning for what we will do when they can "design" 10,000 nuclear power plants without any flaw?

> If I post something on the Internet today claiming that I asked my agent to do X but it went rogue and did Y

But that's not even what happened! They told it to do X and it did X! I swear to god I don't understand the discourse around this.

Honestly I use Lithium with no network permissions. It's not Foss but it's good enough for me.

> The cyclists also tend to wander out of the bike lane into the car lane

This sentence alone tells me that it's not a bike lane. A painted line is not a bike lane.

Walter I'm seriously fighting the urge to write a wall of text in response. Why the knee-jerk reaction and the hyperboles? It's not interesting conversation...

A bus that gets stuck in traffic is by definition a failure. It will (again by definition) never be a viable alternative to driving, meaning a reinforcing loop where more driving means more traffic for the bus to be stuck on, meaning the bus is even slower and less attractive...

Oh man, so much to be said about those two short, crass sentences... x)

Well Israel has defined "combatant" as "male between 14 and 55", and the Western world more or less shrugged and moved on without missing a beat. I'm not optimistic.

You hooked up a chatbot to a harness that does API calls to myriad services. That's what you did. "Claude by himself" did not "do" anything. Just like they did not "break out of containment" and hacked companies.

How much gas would be saved by turning half of each 4-lane stroad into a bike lane! :)

It's amazing how people neglect this basic fact. Free markets already often don't work in practice. But they don't even work in theory if both parties do not have at the very least the same information in order to base their decisions. These sort of scam tactics (like dynamic pricing) are simply fraud, much like hiding problems in a car or a house you sell.

I would prefer to give up algorithmic social media for 24h/day (massive negative impact) than to give up calls and texts with my friends and family for a few hours (no negative impact).

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.