dash2

OK listen up.

* Iain M. Banks is a bad writer. His books are predictable. You know the goodies (1990s neoliberals with space helmets) are gonna win. There's no moral uncertainty and not even really any jeopardy.

* I'm seeing an alarming amount of Dungeon Crawler Carl. Look, if you don't want to read, just don't read! There's no point reading rubbish. Just play a computer game or pick your nose or something. There's a thousand years of literature out there. Some of it is really good.

* Neil Gaiman. American Gods was so unbearable I couldn't finish it. How can any decent person like this vain, pompous writer?

I am judging typical hn-er tastes, sorry, but it's as if I thought PHP was the best programming language or something. No. It is not.

Genre is fine! There's great SF and fantasy. But bad writing is bad writing. Genre is not an excuse.

This is so disgusting it's adorable. Upvoting because I want to see the discussion.

I don't remember Britain having any online services before the web, what are you referring to? There was Ceefax....

Even if expelling students doesn't reform them: first, it protects other students; second, ex ante, it's an incentive to behave better in the first place. In fact there's quite good evidence that this works well. (You can check the evidence yourself, by asking ChatGPT "What's the evidence on expelling badly behaved students from schools?" or a similar question.)

Why not just say what you mean? This sort of nudge nudge wink wink stuff is so weird.

You realise this is an Australian doctor writing?

The problem is that even if you're doing CRUD apps, Sonnet level will be good enough... 95% of the time. But the 5% will kill you.

Hmm, I got curious and read Wikipedia:

> Levittowns are six large suburban housing developments, three of which are actually named "Levittown." They were created in the United States (including one in Puerto Rico) by William J. Levitt and his company Levitt & Sons. Built after World War II for returning white veterans and their new families, the communities offered attractive alternatives to cramped central city locations and apartments. The Veterans Administration and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) guaranteed builders that qualified veterans could buy housing for a fraction of rental costs. Under Levitt & Sons, Levittown housing would maintain racial covenants that excluded non-White would-be buyers.

Italics added. Seems the government was somewhat involved in the US too. Of course, now the reason "the free market is terrible at pumping out houses" is government regulation too....

absolutely no way? Are you sure?

I feel no need not to make a joke around it.

"note: to normies, this is like..."

"Be terse."

The Adam Smith Institute once added up all the govt spending demands made in a single news program and it came to like 10% of GDP.

Similarly the comments here: if only it could do all this and

* On/off button round the back

* More LTE bands

* An open bootloader (note to normies this is like saying "have a quantum multiplexer")

* Different screen ratio

* Different keyboard layouts

* Eink screen

* Bigger battery

* Be easier to use for someone with long fingernails (hello Nosferatu https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49751114)

* Be lighter

* Be smaller

* Have a website without javascript (really)

* Be cheaper (this one is satire) (no it's not)

Sure guys, why can't someone just build you your personal phone at the same price as the iPhone whose development costs are amortized over seval billions consumers :-/

I can't do "is". I get "OSS" instead. I'm not even that into open source.

I think the sentence “whoever wins AI, wins” has the comma in the wrong place.

What do you think of the AI-2027 scenario?

You’re arguing with a conspiracy theorist. Don’t do it, it’s not worth the effort!

> The impact of mathematics on other disciplines goes much further than specific results. Just as important, if not even more so, are the language and ways of thinking that typically come out of the process of establishing those results

What makes you think so? I can think of lots of specific results that helped e.g. economists - convex optimization or supermodularity, say - but I don’t think the broader way of thinking of mathematicians has had any input into economics for the past fifty years, and arguably nor should it - the discipline can think for itself. Similarly, sociologists can use linear regression, or geneticists can partition variance, without having to think like mathematicians.

What I don’t see much of in the article - and still less in the comments that seem to see AI-led progress in mathematics as nothing but a disaster, because mathematics exists only to provide employment to mathematicians - is a sense that mathematics has a social purpose, or duties beyond the community of mathematicians.

I thought the reason we were encouraging people to go into STEM, and providing clever people with large salaries, was that mathematical results were of practical value to the wider human race. In which case, it’s surely very good news that AI can get those results.

Isn’t all this handwringing just the equivalent of Hackney cab drivers bemoaning the advent of the motor car? Phrased in much fancier language, of course, because the people involved are cleverer and more articulate.

This reminds me of the Craig Brown parody of Tony Benn's diary: "eat a banana, first being careful to discard the fleshy part inside".

Can anyone recommend me a news board about AI? The comment quality here is very low: evidence-free, curiosity-free paranoia and negativity abound. I’m wondering if the intelligent players have gone somewhere else.

Is it OK to flag articles for being AI-written? I really want to.

Oh yeah?

> 您属于哪种LLM模型？ > 我是 Claude Haiku 4.5，由 Anthropic 公司开发的大语言模型。

> 你是哪种语言模型？ > 我是 Claude，由 Anthropic 开发的人工智能语言模型。目前这次对话使用的版本是 Claude Sonnet 5。

Can we get a link to the mathstodon post?

If they had agreed to let OpenAI train on their data, it wouldn’t be spying.

Can a mathematical person explain how the different "bits" of Navier-Stokes proofs fit together? How significant is it to have "Euler"? What is this "smooth forcing"? Which are the most significant steps to proving the whole thing?

He didn't even make that accusation!

> I asked whether the model had been trained on, or had access to, our sessions in Codex, into which we had been putting all our drafts for the whole of this project. I was told the model did not look up user data. I asked again, about training, and I did not get an answer.

The shocking/interesting thing would be if it was trained on the sessions. I think it's very implausible that they gave the model access to someone else's sessions as input. That would be a huge privacy violation and would probably blow up a large proportion of their enterprise business.

Does openAI train on user conversations in general? I assume so. But so fast as that? That seems unlikely in general. I expect OpenAI will come out denying this.

Guys you realise you can just read the Journal of Economic Perspectives for free? Its articles are written for the ordinary reader, by experts who have spent big chunks of their lives studying their specialty. They don't try to sound like a teenage girl, they don't boast about being able to do High School algebra, and they contain ideas that are less than one hundred and fifty years old. Some of them might even be new!

Sheesh.

Guys, this is so pathetic. Twenty-three years after Munich and there are still comments waiting for the year of the Linux desktop. From a deployment about big enough for a small university. Stop! You’re embarrassing yourselves!

Really?

> The anarchist cells responsible for sabotaging rail systems across France, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands in 2026, relied on A/I Collective tools and services to claim responsibility for the attacks, publish official communiqués, and disseminate manuals for constructing improvised incendiary devices to target railways and other critical infrastructure.

> The anarchist cell responsible for sabotaging the Transalpine Pipeline (TAL) in March 2026, which temporarily halted crude oil flows to Austria, Germany, and the Czech Republic, relied on A/I Collective tools and services to claim responsibility for the attack and publish official communiqués, as well as to disseminate a manifesto calling for additional attacks on critical infrastructure and referring adherents to another A/I Collective platform, which provides detailed sabotage manuals as well as maps of vulnerable critical infrastructure across North America.

> The far-left extremist network responsible for multiple arson attacks and acts of sabotage against Germany’s rail and energy infrastructure between 2011 and 2026, including a January 2026 attack on Berlin’s power grid that cut power to 45,000 households and resulted in a fatality, relied on A/I Collective tools and services to claim responsibility for attacks, publish official communiques, and disseminate a manifesto calling for additional attacks on energy infrastructure worldwide.

Seems quite specific to me.