d4rkn0d3z

To share my experience, 25 years ago I looked into AI and had inclinations to see what scaling compute would do. It took no time to find advisors who told me the whole program I had in mind could not gain ethics approval and was mathematically limited. The former road block is now lifted due to the fact that nobody cares about ethics any more, the latter seems to be the remaining hurdle.

Oddly, in a bubble the highest valuations come just before the burst. This is obvious mathematical certainty that can be read by anyone viewing an exponential growth curve.

The central theme is very hard to disgree with; claims of productivity increase being self-reported are oftem misleading. The way forward is math and meaningful measurement, this bears repeating.

I find that getting from zero to 80-90% functionality on just about anything software these days is exceedingly easy. So, I wonder if AI just rides that wave. Software development is maturing now such that making software with or without AI feels 10-100x faster. I suspect it is partially due to the profound leap that has been made with collaborative tools, compilers, languages, and open source methodology, etc..

Wow, comments read like a usage anxiety help forum.

This study says that when you tell young people underage drinking is illegal then underage people report their drinking less.

Right, because age verification has totally put a stop to underage drinking and drug use.

Q: If I am a teenager wanting to access content that is prohibited by age verification, who is mostly likely the party that will provide access?

A: The local drug dealer or extremist.

This means a new market is born.

*shudder*

Does honesty make you untrustworthy?

Its a view of life as unstable equilibria.

Intelligence as a byproduct of pitched battle? A spatio-temporal convergence scheme? Really, is that novel?

Intelligence itself may be a virus, literally. The chemical activity in your brain is not that unlike viral activity. The reason humans can do math may be that some kind of salamander-like creature millions of years ago contracted a brain virus, that virus happened to produce behavioral effects that helped it spread and ultimately become symbiotic. We may be little more than a pitched battle between what we would call bacteria, viral load, and the cells that we would like to think of as our own but which are really combinations of earlier forms of life that joined together for practical reasons.

On this view, we are not exquisitely designed machines but rather accidental pitched battles occurring in nature. The question is does this ontological view produce new predictive capacity? Can you see yourself as a being entirely driven by microscopic life, rationalizing everything after the fact so that you are the master of your destiny? Is intelligence something that you partake in rather than possess? What is technology and what does it want from us?

Skepticism is best expressed by repeating the experiment and comparing results. I'm game and I have 10 days off work next month. I wonder what can be had in terms of full source and data, etc. from the authors?

Not sure if others mentioned this but one can abstract away the configuration and sys-admin type tasks using a declarative language. Then the setup can be recreated effortlessly by others, reviewed and verified on an ongoing basis.

If the author found a self-hosting setup that works, it should be packaged and automatically reproduced elsewhere. It is always 10% of the work to make something work, 90% of the work is arranging it to be self-reproducing, self-maintaining, and self-documenting without excessive toil. I call this "self-*" computing.

This would not be a problem because human hands are limited, their output is bounded.

This seems like a good example of a more general issue; when you have a machine that produces bullshit mixed with gem-like phraseology, at a pace that we cannot possibly match as humans, we may be faced with intellectual denial of service attacks.

Nobody will do this, there are only so many questions that can be asked.

Generally, a test like this will ask you to derive some result then to expand on it in several ways. I concur with other posters that the important part is how you set up the fictions you will rely on. If you get that wrong then all that follows is wrong, if you make a mistake you turn in many pages of garbage. I found one either achieves near 100% or abject failure, there is not much in between.

The thing is with very hard physics, when you are around people who understand you get the feeling you understand too, and maybe you do, but in the end there is a 1/r understanding potential around the people who really do understand.

As a graduate student I was actually given tests that more closely resembled the second scenario the auther described. Difficult problems in GR, a whole weekend to work on them, no limits as to who or what references I consulted.

This sounds great until you realize there are only a handful of people on earth that could offer any help, also the proofs you will write are not available in print anywhere.

I asked one of those questions of Grok 4 and its response was to issue "an error". AFAIK, in many results quoted for AI performance, filling the answer box yields full marks but I would have recieved a big fat zero had I done the same.

I insist on only accepting the true true Truth not your paltry double truth, I have the truest truth of all Truth.

You've been taught what to think, not how to think.

"Let's do the math. "

This phrase is usually followed by some, you know...Math?

I think the difference between you and I is that I am trained to adopt whatever ontology I must in order to understand the subtlety and nuance of various physical theories, without experiencing existential angst or cognitive dissonance. My education did not infect me with epistemology disease.

In case you want to understand the differences further, your "Truth" is to me a figment of your imagination; to be quite clear the existance of an objective physical reality is not a given, the error of insisting the opposite is an enormous failure of imagination, and imagination is more important than intelligence.

Agreed but we can call them as we see them.

"different and dynamic truths" = fictions

We can not play the game.

In your parlance, in order for there to be "no contradiction or embellishment" between your "Truth" and your "truth" there must be an isomorphic mapping between what entities you deem exist and the symbols you use to reason about them. Furthermore, there must be a logical law of noncontradiction upon which you will erect the notion of things, categories, and concepts. We need not fear embellishment, the most successful physical theories involve forms of existence that are unlike anything related to the human experience, and there was never any reason to think they would be otherwise.

I have no idea what repeating the word truth does to prove a point.

You come at this from and interesting psychology angle, so I can't tell if you agree, disagree, or something in between.

I think Einstein and GR is a perfect example. He simply did what had previously been unthinkable by making time a dynamic variable subject to transformation. He arrived there by fantastical thinking involving riding light beams and what not. I can go on about Maxwell, etc.. The common theme is not truth-seeking but curating fictions for predictive capacity.

Truth does seem dangerous while fiction seems innocuous and extremely useful.

That is the reason for the predictive capacity test.

Two enthusiastic thumbs up.

'Yeah you can, tho...'

I can do no such thing. The idea of a "force" as known to Newton, being "action at a distance" by "mutual attraction", is not at all present in GR.

'Only for a useless definition of "wrong"....'

The definition of wrong is given in the second part of the sentence you quote. Newton was usefully wrong in a scientific sense; His theory and ontology of time as immutably flowing from moment to moment is fine for beings in a relatively stable gravitational field but fails miserably anywhere else. GR is a theory that gets time less wrong, but entails completely different ontology wherein "forces" disappear. In your parlance, Newton put time below "that level" when he should have lifted it into that which must be reasoned about physically. This means he was wrong conceptually in taking something as an absolute when it was not so.

'Only for a useless definition of "parlour tricks".'

If you look at Newton's work it amounts to little more than a first order approximations, rules to model linear portions of a nonlinear reality. I think you have a very romantic picture of Newton's work. Don't get me wrong, Newton was a giant in his time he had mastered linear curve fitting and to some extent I think he knew what he was doing and that it would be supplanted. I actually think if Newton stood here today he would disagree with you, side with me and take up GR straight away.

"Newton being absorbed into relativity is like the one case where they are commensurable."

Newton's theory was not absorbed, it was supplanted. One cannot absorb the idea of a "force" into GR. This is precisely what incommensurability means.

"Obviously it contains new math and new abstractions..."

It is not about the data, Newton was wrong because non-euclidian geometry wasn't there,

"Postscript"

I have degrees in electronic engineering and theoretical physics. I graduated number one in my class both times. I am not a philosophy interloper as you point out in your ad-hominid attack.

IF you want to make progress in your understanding of physics you best heed the words and thoughts I have provided.

For the record, Newton was vastly conceptually wrong which is not the same as saying his work is useless because being wrong in a precise way is science. Time does not "flow immutably from one moment to the next" and there are no gravitational "forces" acting magically at a distance. Even if the linear approximatiins he made hold on a narrow domain they offer little in the way of conceptual framework. In fact, mostly Newton played mathematical parlour tricks.

If you are waiting for science to tell you "why" things happen you will wait forever because science answers "how" things happen.

There is no way for a successor scientific theory to completely subsume all of the predictions of its predecessor because they are often incommensurable. Which is to say that there is simply no way to define one in the terms and concepts of the other.

If you think of GR as some extension or modification of Newton's work you're doomed to misunderstanding the mathematical facts.

Are you not concerned that force-feeding might be unduly disparaged by your comparison?