BrenBarn

This is just a side point, but:

> We have much more control over how we hire mathematicians, publish papers, and train students than over the behavior of trillion-dollar companies, and that is where our efforts would be better spent.

We should also make sure that there are no trillion-dollar companies. The existence of large and powerful companies is a problem, whether or not the field of mathematics is in crisis. All these companies should be shattered so that they cannot do things until after society as a whole is sure they're okay with those things.

The leg bone connected to the aging bone.

> given that we have forty years of bugs that humans were unable to find but LLMs are quite capable of discovering, how are we ever going to catch up, and how will PostgreSQL continue to innovate?

I mean, maybe just innovate less? "Innovation" is one of those words that makes me queasy nowadays. It's been true for decades that a good deal of what's touted as "innovation" is just stuff that is not actually as important as fixing what's already there. Most software releases new versions far too often for far too little reason. So overall it's good to see Postgres slowing down rather than just barreling ahead with a new release.

This is one of the big differences between the "disruption" of AI and previous technological "innovations". When people blithely say that the rise of AI will just result in a shift of employment from certain tasks to others, or compare it to things like cars replacing horses, I think they're not totally grasping this. AI is the first technological "revolution" we've seen in this era of deliberate, explicit gatekeeping, combined with a pre-existing consolidation of the requisite resources.

Cars were mechanical devices; you could take them apart and try to build your own. The internet was an open protocol; people built their own websites, there were multiple browsers, it was an ecosystem. AI is not like that. All the major providers are doing everything they can to kneecap competition, not by being better, but simply by fiat. They're angling for regulations that benefit them, they're including automated short-circuits like the one described here, they're pushing restrictive licenses that say, in almost so many words, "Anyone who uses our tools is not allowed to do any of the things we used to create them."

That is not a healthy or sustainable situation. Such mechanisms should be banned and the companies involved should be hit with a sledgehammer to shatter them into tiny pieces. There is the possibility that the underlying technology has the potential to benefit society, but not with the fortress mentality and consolidated corporate landscape that we currently have.

How about antimatter?

> Editor’s note: This ruling was translated in DeepL from its original Portuguese to American English.

That adds an interesting meta-twist to this.

I haven't used it as much recently, but to be honest I think low volume could be one of the best things for it. The aggressive moderation that a lot of people complain about was largely a consequence of the colossal traffic that existed in SO's heyday, with people posting duplicates of basic questions constantly. A quieter site based on the same concept might be more useful to all concerned (except maybe venture capitalists, but screw them).

It's not correct that Basque is the only non-Indo-European language in Europe; this is also true of Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, and some other minority languages in the far north of Scandinavia. However, it has been hypothesized that Basque is the only language in Europe that is pre-Indo-European, having existed there before Indo-European languages spread to that area (although it's hard to know this for sure). Either way, you're right that it's a fascinating language!

I think there is a meaningful difference between an Intel 486 and a portable device like a tablet, especially if the former is not connected to the internet (or is connected to the internet as it was circa 1995). I think it could be fine and even beneficial to give a kid a desktop computer to write games using QuickBasic, and at the same time very harmful to give them a tablet.

Total time of what? Like what is the end goal that people are trying to achieve? All of the examples I can see in the post are similarly about development-internal stuff like tests and performance (or games). What I mean by true ambition would be stuff that is actually aimed at helping people in the world at large, not just helping developers develop.

Ambition doesn't scale with the number of small things you get done. Ambition is the size of the big thing you are trying to do. It's true that improving small things can help you do that big thing, but that's not the same as the ambition itself. Wanting to build a better mousetrap is just a modest technical ambition. The kind of ambition I'm talking about is wanting to eradicate the plague, and then maybe building a better mousetrap as a means to that end.

> In other words, the primary impacts of AI art will be on culture and society rather than the macroeconomy.

In that case we're in deep shit. It's already worrisome to see the effects that various technological "advances" (like smartphones) have had on culture and society. This is likely to make things even worse.

Amen to that. I was surprised to see yours seems to be the only comment with this sentiment. This post was kind of depressing to read. Like if AI is so amazing and can one-shot so much astounding stuff, why is anyone wasting their time on pointless "projects" like making ripgrep faster?

"Small" as in tens of thousands of users on a site that has existed for 10 years. I don't think most people in their lives wind up making a decision that has as broad an impact as that.

Another lo-fi site trying to create friendly community without corporate greed bites the dust, in this case apparently due to burnout on the part of the main person running it. I hadn't used Pillowfort much but did browse and explore some blogs on there and it seemed like a positive community. Always sad to see stuff like this happen.

We'll never get past this as long "well you didn't update" is considered an acceptable rebuttal. The problem is created when vulnerable software is released. We would be better off slowing things down by a factor of a hundred or more rather than continuing the current approach of "update every day to fix the new vulnerabilities introduced by the last update that fixed the old vulnerabilities".

Just more self-serving hokum. If they really wanted to serve the public benefit they would just shut themselves down.

> fair point. it depends on how fast you want to get it done.

I want it yesterday. :-)

> going to fast will produce to much resistance. instead of attacking the rich, let this generation die out, and make things harder for the next generation.

But this generation will just pass their wealth, and their determination to protect it, to their heirs. There has to be some point at which the flow reverses and the accumulated wealth of the super-rich actually begins to decrease, not just increase at a slower rate.

Well we could start by destroying Facebook.

I agree, although I think it goes beyond that in a way. What you said also shows that it's not just a matter of whether the base activity is legal, but what kind of apparatus grows up around it. The tricks you mention (gamifying, ads, endorsements, VC, etc.) have also been applied to all kinds of other markets (food, cosmetics, music, cars, "wellness", etc.), and they are all worse for it. It's true that when you combine something inherently destructive like gambling with these amplifying factors, you get a particularly toxic result. But I think that, for instance, we would be a lot better off if 90% of current ads, VC, and big corporations were themselves banned.

This is what we get when we go all in on a monolithic bloated platform, and then let its direction be primarily determined by one company. We'd be better off with a simpler, albeit less featureful, platform, or at least one that's more modular.

I mean an obvious reason is that people tend to write rationalist blog posts if they're really into overanalyzing things and if you're into that you're likely to write a lot about what you're overanalyzing.

The real "how" is in the last section: Amazon pushes up prices by being so big that people feel they have to sell there. That is the root of the issue and the place to solve it, by destroying Amazon and breaking it up into small pieces.

In my view all of the conveniences that people are referencing in the comments (e.g., easy returns) are also consequences of that, and they are also bad, in the same way that it is more convenient to eat a bag of potato chips than it is to cook a meal, but the potato chips are worse for you. The convenience derived from large market share (Amazon's or any other similar excessively large market player) is not worth the downsides. We need to rip the band-aid off and accept that less convenience is better.

That isn't a problem with AI writing per se, at least not in the sense that it's a problem in a particular instance of a person encountering the writing. It's a problem with the existence and availability of the tools. I agree it is a problem, though, and it should be addressed by drastically curtailing the development and availability of the tools.

It seems to me there's a massive irony here that the article misses: the education system was supposed to cultivate "moral and cultural formation", "a brave, helpful, truth-telling Englishman, and a gentleman, and a Christian", "religious and moral principles" . . . and the result was an elite that believed above all in the rectitude of its own supremacy and had no scruples about exploiting and oppressing millions of people across the globe. If the purpose of the Victorian education was to produce good people, it failed miserably.

> Also, the salt content was probably higher in the ultra processed foods, and that was not controlled for.

Salt is listed as among the things that was matched between the two meals.

Those are good ideas, but they are ways to prevent wealth accumulation, not to undo it. I think we also need to consider direct transfers of existing wealth to remedy the current situation.

> And our community will need to explicitly re-evaluate its criteria for education, publication, and career advancement, to reflect the "Math 2.0" era.

I think most academic disciplines would benefit from such a re-evaluation. AI is still a scourge on the earth, but I suppose if it spurs such changes that's a modicum of a silver lining.

Take wealth from rich people and give it to poor people. It's simple, although not easy.

Fortunately there's a pretty obvious way to address both those problems at once. . .