NonHyloMorph
NonHyloMorph on Hacker News
Small annotation on the texts structure:
don’t know other principled ways to hill-climb on text artifacts, >> unlike for updating the weights of differentiable neural networks <<. [...]
In this post, we share very early results that allow us to argue that the paradigm of reasoning-driven optimization is now coming >> even for differentiable neural networks. <<
-> Seems like a 'non' is missing at either or.
In the magic system of DND that would be part of the school of Conjuration, whereas elementalmagic would be part of the school of evocation.
Have some conjuration engineering and conjuration injection (which woukd probably fall into the school of enchantment in the next edition SnM (Systems and Meaning)
One: the ontological status of the mathematics is not so certain
Two: most effects of LLMs result from applying what you describe to natural language. Without it the formalism would be meaningless, it is the insane fact that language can store knowledge and is itself a somewhat decentralised thoughtprocess (independent on the individuals that produce the language, since those individuals die, whilst language is preserved). Point 2 is of course the outcome of certain presuppositions on what laanguage is - which is the point: LLMs being in the question for a theory of language. Its research seems not only informationtheoretical but also linguistic in nature. A lot of the proposed terms of (one of the) parent comment(s) are the fields that somewhat are engaged with that intersection in a way. With the noteable omission of cognitive science and cybernetics/systemstheory (the latter of which might be in the list; not a 100)
Definitely the use of AI to review filings. Calling it prompt injection doesn't make the fact, that you just slip in the line "look at it superficialy" to prep the mechanisms of court any less ludicrous.
Now that is an technical sngle that I'd be really curious about. How is the energy footbrint of cutting and machining stones in comparison to pouring concrete? How for the whole of mining tarnsporting cutting stone in comparison to mining sand and lime, firing the concrete, transporting and pouring it? Would seem like the energy that is already invested through geological processes to make stone (sedimentary, metamorphic, pyrophoric) would be a huge share of the energy. The whole chemical energy needed for concrete should be huge comparatively to blasting once way through a rock deposit and cutting it. But then that is entirely unsubstantiated and I'm very aware that such intuited assumptions are very prone to erring.
This is really important aesthetically. Difference and repetition. I get the feeli g that that finished carmelite gothic "cathedral" will look a bit like it was drop spawned. The photo in the article where you see the constructionsite gives of that impression. I wonder if that will feel like it was taken from some japanese anime, somehow a simulacrum.
None of the statements you paraphrase addresses what the parent referred to as the meditative work with material resistance. What you point out is the logic of efficency and capital. For monks who vow to live in poverty that's less of a concern in theory than it is for all other areas of society.
According to "3blue1brwn" (I'm aliasing here, no disrespect intended by not recalling his legal name), it is because of the sensation of aesthesis in understand, having your mind form the abstract structure etc. In the end I did not pursue some form of mathemathesis, but I did tip my toe in and think I know what he's talking about and his description resonates with me personal. And the way understanding changes reality is still quite informative in a lot of other engagements with the world. (Also the virtuality of me being someone who has pursued a deeper mathematical faculty is still sometimes intriguing, more on the side of applicability though.) What is curious to me with pure math is how the aesthesis could potentially happen at all, when one is dealing with stuff that isn't representable in the usual mental faculties of spatial reasoning and time. I got some impression of dealing with infinities, but wonder if anyone could try to lay out an account how something like an intuituon for something really abstract (say dealing with quantum mechanical mathematical formalisms like the schroedinger stuff) presents itself as a qualia/phenomenological) or high dimensional non euclidean spaces or what have you. (My understanding here of what potentially exist is already limited I have to admit for the sake og being humble).
Is there some visual/spatial sensation with it? Some abstract anticipation of continuity in thought? I have to think of accounts of aphantasia (not as a correlation on the register of the individual capable of something as a form of naturalism, but as an analogy to the pursuit of engaging with a form of experience that is not ones own and (presumably) can't be ones own.
Please elaborate. Immediated Q's Pumping costs energy. Condensation and rain implies water vapor. How does energy get down as not heat (otherwise whats the point). What makes you think it can change anything significant about the selfregulating thermodynamic system we refer to as climate.
I'm genuinely curious, just wanted to make that explicit, bc. ladt sentence might evoke the opposite impression. (Also not sure if it's intended as a joke on the other hand)
And so they told the world ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Wtf is going on with the discourse here lately? Are you advocating for effective "euthanasia" by neglect?
do you think about where your resentment is coming from?
Might have to do with the circumstances of Open AIs conduct that was quite sketchy to say the least?
There is 25 people who see it as their responsibility to use their status in the field of maths to weigh in on public discourse regarding that field.
There's some interesting stuff in a book on Katathymic Imaginative Psychotherapy where patients are asked to picture a mountain. As far as I remember it's about using the process as diagnostic tool. What does the mountain look like? Is it a steep rising, rugged massif or a shallow hill. Are you looking up, do you picture yourself climbing it, or are you on it's top etc. While it said that it's always a contextual matter and in the conversation there was a suggestion of imagining to climb the steep massif, being potentially related to narcisim. Whenever I think of it i associatr that with casper david friedrichs painting.
hopefully this attitude won't be whats going to do the decisionmaking
Thanks for building the elevator though, guess I'll hit the gymn(asion) now.
"The FT’s Gillian Tett reported that a senior financier’s New York firm now seeks out humanities students, because “AI-native” Stem graduates are entering the job market with “alarmingly shallow ideas”."*
I don't advocate for the dichotomy of stem and humanities. A good counterecample from the 20th century being Ernst Mach (Mach-speeds are named after him) and his work in phenomenology ("bodies do not produce sensations, sensations produce bodies")
Your incatation of contextless 'technological progress' still kinda calls for a quote like the above
*https://www.theguardian.com/books/ng-interactive/2026/aug/08...
Maybe fix energy and heat on earth first. Fusion would be nifty. How's the AI progress there?
A lot indicates the answer to your latter question might just be 'no'
Bioinformatics, the underpinnings of llm's in the theories conceptualizing high dimensional vectorspaces, material sciences, MRT's, signal processing..
don't think one gets far with with calculus only there. Probbly also the inner workings of CPUs and GPU's, CAD-kernels..
Probably there is so much domain specific knowledge that makes use of quite some advanced mathemathesis that most just don't know. The sentiment of "not much more needed then calclus" that appeared in this discussion might be explained by this. Curious if people from some of these or other fields are around that could share some mathematical applications they deal with in their work?
And by surprised you probably mean "not really surprised" hm?
Just in case btw.: the world tends to get poorer in material ressources since around the 70s e.g. regarding habitable space, harvestable energy and the destruction of the integrity of earths biosphere - lots of things that establish value that is not bound to labour.
Knowledgework isn't everything, some tend to forget that.
You could store the salt. You go up far beyond saturation. Salt sediments on the floor (which also might seal it). When you need brine you pump in seawater into a tunnelsystem in the sediment. The saturated brine should be lighter and further up. Overflow to second basin, where it's pumped into the cavern. Thus size comes down to whatever size is needed to store enough salt and or, be big enough to guarantee a certain rate of volume of fully saturated water per time; so basically dimensions that guarantee a phase separation and high enough diffusion rate. And some bad ass pumps (or have the basin be below sealevel and a dam with gates; probably the pumps for reasons of security>efficency in that case)
Seems legit. I speculate their are emergent mechanisms for the development of memory that are not dependent on what ever mechanism is behind the "improve $model for 'everyone'"*
Is someone knowlegeable on research that engages the question on the development of something that could be considered as some emergent mechanism of memory, that is independent of instances and their contextwindow an specifically also independent of the use of conversations for trainingsdata?
*(This is regarding the value of selfhosted models - maybe small selforganisations that share ressources to do though to do so? Generally the value of machine learning seems to be to big to reject)
"And maybe I could have tried to gain that respect in a different way, such as thinking very hard about an area of mathematics until I was able to demonstrate to others just how well I understood it. But I’m not sure how motivating that would have been for me. I very much hope that there is a pool of young people for whom it will be a powerful motivation, because I think the survival of a human mathematical tradition may well depend on it. [...]
Thus, the primary risk, as I see it, is that a lot of people who would have done a PhD in mathematics and gone on to become custodians of the mathematical tradition will no longer wish to do so. Those of us who have PhD students, including me, need to try as hard as we can to come up with imaginative ways for them to use their time productively (in consultation with the students themselves, obviously)."
When I read this I'm trmpted to read "imaginary" instead of imaginative - that is: in the sense lacanian psychoanalysis uses the term imaginary in contrast to symbolic - the latter of which would mean that it's having consequences within the symbolic social order. From their own, quite selfhonest evaluation the author assumes that without those they would most likely not have persued the mathematical profession. Which also relates to:
"A related risk is that the perception among policy-makers will be that mathematicians are no longer needed and that funding will become much harder to come by: we urgently need to come up with good ways of explaining the value of having a large pool of human mathematical experts, even if it is no longer part of their role to find new proofs of theorems."
Note that there isn't any attempt to establish a possible horizon as to how that coule happen.
It seems to me that the end of the article has a strong tendency to a somewhat stoic attitude of one might phrase as: it is going to happen anyways - the systemic context in which these corporations act makes it inevitable ("However much we might regret that, there is no chance that the impact of such models on mathematics will persuade AI companies to stop their release, though perhaps concerns about safety will lead to some delay and give us a bit more time to work out how to adapt. Assuming that they are released, there will be a flood of new results, whether we like it or not, and it will no longer be the AI companies producing them, though perhaps the pattern will continue that the AI companies will have access to more powerful models and so will obtain more than their fair share of headline results.")
- which makes me kind of wonder if it is not some sort of cognitive dissonance within the authors view of the situation to not also think 'it's not going to happen' in regard to their stated requirements (students that don't need to be motivated by a desire to be symbolically valuated as explorers of the mathematical frontier, and policy makers that acknowledge the value of funding the social "production" of human mathematical experts /enable such a community through funding).
So basically they see the same problems as the authors of the letter (which they also state in their letter - their should be no room for a misrepresentation of that fact: "I felt that I could not sign the letter, despite agreeing with much of what it said. Instead, it seemed better to do what I did with the Leiden Declaration and set out my own position in a blog post. But it should be understood that by doing that I am not setting myself up as a member of some opposing camp: indeed one of my worries at the moment is that the mathematical community might become bitterly divided, something I would very much like to avoid.")
So what stays is mostly their disagreement on that conceptual understanding is more important than the solving of problems for all mathematicians. - which kind of makes the problemfield of ai in mathematics somehow more urgent, as far as I have thought it through. And I'm not really convinced that the displacement of the problem into some sort of pedagogy (and it should be appreciated that the author implicate themselves in the responsibility to establish it) instead of finding solutions in the realm of policy and regulation. Seems realistic though, that they see that as an effort unlikely to succeed in a meaningful way.
Can someone argue against that reading? Am I missing something? My conclusion as such is that not only are they not opposing the authors of the fields medalist letter, but also that their evaluation of the situation is much more dire without them giving in to resignation.
I asked a question, and it's not a rhetorical one, even though it's formulation indicates that I have some serious doubts that there is a factual answer - it's called capital-ism for a reason.
edited for typo