kurthr

It’s so big we can see it with a telescope, and so small that the chance of something similar hitting any single spot on the surface minuscule in the next 100 years.

Professionals aren't developing at home unless they have a darkroom, which were fully capable of doing color negatives in the 1970s. If you can shove color into a self-developing mobile consumer device, a professional can have it done.

Somehow this needs to be about poor constrained do-it-yourself professionals?

   You can process and print B&W yourself. Color needs to go to a lab.

The consumer "street" photography of the time was mostly Polaroids, or little tiny box cameras you had developed at a booth.

This has all to do with a feel, and It could be that it was mostly shot in color and converted to B&W. Or, the wonderful dynamic range of B&W could be the reason. That's fine, but it has nothing to do with lack of choice.

Color Polaroids came out in the mid 60s. Color SX-70s were commonplace in the 70s.

If only they could add some Jar Jar in there and sell more co-branded toothpaste?!?

https://investor.colgatepalmolive.com/news-releases/news-rel...

https://nz.pinterest.com/pin/jar-jar-toothpaste--18577355335...

There was also a comic book that came out before the movie.

In the scene where the sand people shoot R2D2, it looked like the other way around so it was quite confusing to see them captured in the next frame. Who knew the little guy didn't have a blaster?

These unaligned near frontier human agents have escaped containment and are out of control!

Beautiful picture of Mt Rainier!

I'm sure there are other places that have similar phenomenon, but Mauna Kea often casts great shadows. Here's one with the moon in the cast shadow on the cloud layer below.

https://twanight.org/gallery/inside-the-shadow-of-mauna-kea/

Your response reminds me of The Onion:

https://theonion.com/15-000-brown-people-dead-somewhere-1819...

Something must be done, this is something, we must do it!

Just because something can be done doesn't make it good for the society. Japan has a shrinking population and is currently dependent on immigrants for low wage work. Plenty of actions can make the current problem worse and have unintended consequences. Whether they happen or not is a political question, not a moral one.

Who determined "what they want?" Did you want your government to attack Iran? Are you responsible for it? Why not?

You do realize that agriculture uses 80% of the (mostly free) developed and deliverable water, while urban cities use about 10%?

That's true of basically all of the West and the Colorado River, too.

It's not clear how much of the latest chips have even made it on-line yet.

The claims of many GW of installed training/inference have come under scrutiny lately. The first VeraRubins aren't even there yet, so it's all GB300 NVL72s as the peak performers and probably <<1GW of those so far. Even xAI Colossus is mostly H200s and B200s.

Electricity costs are also a huge differentiator. When drawing 100kW the difference between >50cents and <10cents per kWh is pretty big! One is almost $0.5M and the other is less than $100k.

I agree students are big users. It just seems like they use it for HW rather than for communicating with each other (I could be wrong). The one big counter example I can think of is AI generated meme art. That is just rampant!

It's like "Grok Light".

I wonder if normies can also just outsource bullying of their classmates and anti-social behavior to their agent, and claim it "went rogue", if there is any blowback?

At least for now, it's still very biz-tech with most users in their little bubble. It's more awful office emails than actual conversations. Claude is only ~50M active users (I'm sure Gemini, Copilot, and GPT are larger, but they have different quirks) so it's still more of a "valley girl" quirk than standard.

If the slop really starts to take off on theTok, and teen girls start to say, "You're completely right, we're not just focused on the load bearing substrate, we're delving the seams of our relationship", I'll start to worry.

Mathematicians who do work on "real world" problems are mostly doing so with theoretical physicists, genomicists, and cryptographers. None of these count as what people consider valuable other than because they are hard.

That said, few 50 (or even 40) years ago would have predicted that completely abstract number theoretical computations about primes, discrete logarithms, and elliptic curves would be the foundation of our monetary system.

"I was just downloading those videos of children being raped to make sure they were still available in their full un-redacted format!"

Let me know how that works out.

Arguably, the most significant difference is between "free speech" and commercial/paid speech, or distribution vs viewability, but not distinguishing the two and calling both "internet censorship" creates a phrase without much support or meaning.

Although I can't personally imagine re-reading YA lit, it still requires you to use huge amounts of grammar, vocabulary, and cultural knowledge in a seamless automatic way. To imagine an alternate world, people, and culture, while your eyes scan constantly across page after page invisible to your captured mind.

Those are the same language tools you need to use to create and evaluate your own writing. You're using a mental tool at a high level, even if it's not Ulysses (or Homer's Odyssey). This is fundamentally different from passively viewing cat videos, or thirst traps, which may well not involve language at all.

A 2 year old can be entertained by short form video, but can not even sound out a single word of a book.

Some would argue that the entire framing of AI is in itself religious.

Jaron Lanier's humanist perspective:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTppvBU2rU4

It all depends on what you're censoring.

Is it a bad sign if CSAM, Personal (medical, financial, etc) Records, Snuff, and Malware/Ransomeware are censored? What about manufacture of WMDs, terrorism, hate speech? Free software, and copyrighted music? Historical records of genocide?

No. It should have been Gowers' rather than Gower's.

The link is:

https://gowers.wordpress.com/2026/09/17/why-i-didnt-sign-the...

This goes in a necessary direction, from my personal take away of Gower's recent post on the subject.

Mathematics is suffering from Goodhart's Law:

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

Uh, John von Neuman didn't discover anything of significance at IAS? Just Hilbert Spaces and Computer Architecture, forget String Theory or Godel's Incompleteness, LOL!

New best prompt:

Write me a really cool math proof that will make me lots of money fast!

Why not let it just spit out the next token on its own without interference, if you can barely fool yourself into believing you understand what it proves... or hallucinates.

As a sometime experimental scientist and occasional manufacturing engineer, this is hilarious!

Discoveries for abstract theory, entertainment, and perhaps regurgitating media, or even basic education can be done with the help of LLMs, but you can't make anything. You can't test anything. You aren't living in the real world. You'll just be lulled into the false belief that everything is simple and fine and beautiful, just as you always wanted, and as airplanes fall from the sky.

Hey, maybe it could work on Cosmology, if you gave it access to the data?

You are absolutely right!

So we should return to a renaissance world where only the wealthy or sponsored can do research, teach, and promote the wonders of creativity. Just hope the oligarchs give us prols enough gruel to create our own solipsistic knowledge no one else knows much less cares about, entertained by LLMs optimized to placate our desires and extract money/attention.

I don't think that the main issue either discussed by Gowers or the others who have signed the letter is simply that mathematicians should be paid "for merely understanding things". The main issue is outsourcing, laziness, and learned helplessness.

Outsourcing understanding, teaching, and proving maths to LLMs is just as dumb as outsourcing food production, manufacturing, or entertainment to a foreign power. It's not that we haven't already done most of those things in the pursuit of temporary profit optimization, but each of them has obviously bad impacts on both the individuals in society who perform those tasks, and on risks to everyone when that outsourcing fails for any reason.

As described, using LLMs is like navigating with GPS. It's fine when you're using it to optimize a path due to traffic conditions, but it can be deadly if you're flying a plane and suddenly don't have it, or any training to deal with that situation. That is where we're headed. I don't really have a take on signing the letter in particular, because as mentioned it seems a bit pointless. At the same time it also seems a bit pointless to spend $10s of millions proving a conjecture a few months sooner than a group of mathematicians already were. I don't imagine they were going to make millions doing it. The definition of material waste.

Perhaps it serves a temporary marketing win for OpenAI, or a medium term improvement in LLM performance on some productive output, but longer term it certainly risks ceding whole swaths of human endeavor to a tool we may not always have. Just as falling demand for farmers, or skilled machinists, or writers, or artists is not an immediate crisis, in the long term there is no one left to transfer the knowledge to the next generation, if something goes wrong.

It's regularly the case that they are simply too long to fit, so editorializing is necessary. Either cutting them slightly short, removing descriptors, excess verbs etc, is better than chopping a word in half.

What a weird question, does that include Chiang Kai-shek? or limited to the "communist" party?

You don't remember the '79 Vietnam War? The Chinese one where they invaded North Vietnam with thousands tanks and 10s of thousands on both sides died over the course of months. Relations normalized in '91.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_War

China supported the Khmer Rouge, maybe Pol Pot is memorable?

The idea that most any modern "interesting" aspect of mathematics is going to be understood (or often even explained in enough detail to reveal what is interesting) in an hour is pretty rare. Either the student's aptitude, the tutorial, or the mathematics are unique. There is a reason that these are PhDs and not undergraduate HW sets.

I think we often delude ourselves as to how well we understand problems and their solutions. Some instructors even make you feel that you understand better than you do by pointing to a few approximations or simple solution spaces that obscure the larger complexity. Just looking in wonder at the many categories of three-body solutions (currently on hnews) is enough to remind me of this.

It's worth noting that the Sun-Earth-Moon "system" is much more complex than a three-body problem just due to momentum transfer from tides/bending. That's ignoring the effect of all of the other planets and asteroids or solar wind.

The 3BP is just the simplest chaotic system showing the limits of simple models and approximations.

For those who would minimize the effects of social media on teens, I would highly recommend looking at this report of Meta's own research on the matter, published after it was revealed in discovery by States AGs.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6069268

Or listen to just a few minutes of Patrick Boyle talking about them.

https://youtu.be/IUMUJgjDvU0?list=TLPQMDYwOTIwMjbX3y5H-uRecw...