a57721

> suggestions for ingredient substitutions (if they’re good, which is the crucial part!) would be a really useful feature for me

Can't they implement this feature without any gen AI? OK, the answer is that they don't want to pay someone for making a list of substitutions, but at least they can generate it and make a human cook revise the results. There is no need for calling gen AI APIs when the app is running.

People are shoving gen AI everywhere out of the hype, including tasks that have better, more reliable solutions with traditional approaches.

While there are professors who use students to ghostwrite books or force them to submit papers in co-autorship, that's definitely not common, and practically impossible outside of graduate school. Your average professor/TA is underpaid and struggles to teach basic stuff to the undergrads, that is totally unrelated to their scientific interests and "hobbies".

That's what I am doing for my classes, just provide useful feedback and mark the homework as submitted. The university wants points, but for me any submission is 100% points, even if there are errors and omissions.

However, now there are students that just copy the output of LLMs without even caring to understand terminology and notation. Should that count as a completed assignment? In some egregious and too obvious cases I ask them simple questions about what they wrote and don't give them marks/points if they have no clue.

Using LLMs as assistants for homework is one thing, and there's no way to prevent it. But students who just copy characters from the screen without caring to understand what is going on are on another level. Above all, they are wasting their time.

Regarding giving or not giving scores, that's a complicated issue. Scores provide a "negative incentive" for learning. A positive incentive would be some pat on the back for doing the assignments. However, our brains are not wired by the evolution to do things only for positive incentives when there are no grades/deadlines/etc.

In my experience, being lenient works great with graduate students, and undergrads won't do and won't understand anything in the course if there are no grades. I learned that the hard way.

It only remains to explain this to the management... That does not work with code, engages with AI only in the form of chatbots, but demands everything to be "AI native" and won't be there to deal with the consequences.

When there are 100 explanations of some topic, maybe it's not so trivial, after all, even when the bare axioms seem trivial.

I majored in mathematics and I learned category theory before touching any serious Haskell, and I still found most of the "monad tutorials" kind of opaque and handwavy, and I think there are inherently non-trivial details unrelated to the notion of functor etc.

I see increasing amounts of code merged to the codebase that is sometimes wrong, sometimes too brittle, sometimes fixes the symptom without addressing the bug. Two years ago the same code would be criticized harshly and reworked before being accepted.

Also, now people who used to manage the development but not write any code also feel their superpowers to merge LLM slop in humongous amounts. It feels like a ticking time bomb, but I am afraid of calling it out and rain on their parade of 10x productivity (or often AI psychosis). Leaving the team doesn't feel like a good decision because what I hear from many colleagues is much worse. Ah what a time to be alive...

Mathematicians care a lot about the exposition of their ideas, invest a lot of time in giving talks, writing, and don't publish too frequently, compared to other sciences.

They normally don't feel like they are in some kind of race to publish the results ASAP and claim priority. Cases like that are very rare (but they get media coverage because they are so unusual).

OpenAI did a publicity stunt, their motivation is not to make a good contribution to the field, which has very different standards and culture, compared to the AI labs.

> journals are not the arbiter of truth and getting published in them is something only academics have an incentive to do

Good, I just wanted to point out that peer review isn't primarily an arbitrage of truth, it is also to make sure the exposition is nice to read. When you get a reviewer who actually cares, you receive lots of feedback that isn't related to the correctness of Lemma 3.14.15 and stuff like that.

What kind of prestige? Peer review is anonymous unpaid work.

A good review does not merely check the correctness of logical arguments, it gives suggestions for the exposition, citing the correct references, putting everything in the right context, etc.

> the most non-trivial thing that technology can accomplish is a pseudo-form of automation for mathematics and coding

It's irrelevant that this is a pseudo-automation, what's important is that techbros can convince people who make the decisions and concentrate wealth that this is a full automation. So expect reverse centaurs in increasingly more professions in the future.

In a sense, because now journals will be flooded by LLM slop.

GraphQL uses POST for queries.

I heard the following nice metaphor from a professor: learning mathematics is like learning to ride a bike, at some point you just need to get on the bike, you don't just study some "theory of bicycles".

I don't think math is that different from other subjects, but it has this advantage that it is a whole world that you can carry with you and experiment, you don't need that many tools for your exploration.

I recognize many applications of gen AI, but copyright laundering seems the least interesting for me.

One thing is when you "distill" a working compiler from a language spec and books about compilers, another thing is when you e.g. copy chunks of GCC source code. That's definitely different, no?

Many "super-duper impressive" examples of LLM use end up being copyright laundering. Maybe the world is different now and copyright laundering is acceptable, but let's not pretend it's that cool and exciting.

I agree and that's my idea as well, exams are open book and extremely close to assignments. My issues are with the first year undergraduates, who are not mature enough to do homework that is optional, and when it's not optional, they'll do it with LLMs and call it a day.

Exactly, it's the most important part of the math education, there is no point in memorizing definitions and theorems without putting everything into practice.

But it seems like the temptation to get perfect solutions from an LLM is too big for many students nowadays, they lack the maturity to understand that using LLMs for basic assignments is counterproductive.

This is basically my solution.

Students who copy all solutions from LLMs maybe learn something, but it's like 5% compared to what someone can learn by doing the assignment without external help, or even by asking their peers. It's a bit disheartening, because I invest quite some time and thought in designing the assignments.

It was very different before LLMs.

I am teaching some math courses, and I see how LLMs disrupted all standard approaches, and I don't know what to do.

I rely on written exams that are open book, but forbid any use of computers and smartphones in class.

The university insists that homework can't be optional, but it lost its meaning. I've tried to explain to my students that it's in their interest to think about home assignments on their own, but the majority will obviously use gen AI, and it's such a waste of time to check and grade LLM output.

I just had an experience where all students were given "sample problems" to try at home and prepare for the written test. Many of them just dumped the document into an LLM, asked it to produce some "exam guide", and showed up with that thing printed out, asking me during the test to explain what LLM output meant.

It seems like the university also has many people pushing for AI use for everything, but I teach basic stuff where the goal is to make students think on their own and digest some fundamental ideas, LLMs can produce perfect solutions, but relying on them is pointless.

As someone with a math background, I don't see Russell's paradox as some interesting mathematics beyond set theory. It's just an example showing that one should be careful about defining sets.

> Having enough money to live the way you want is all you need. Hostels are fun.

Hostels are not fun, unless you are in your early 20s.

And older example: Warner brothers were born as Wonsal (or Wonskolaser), and they changed their names too (Hirsz became Harry, Aaron became Albert).

I feel like the internet used to be "cool that way", but it's not anymore. You don't do stuff for "engagement", but you probably want some audience and feedback, otherwise why bother publishing your work at all. Nowadays almost all audience got sucked up by the black hole of social media and LLMs, and most authors just scream into the void.

It seems like this project tries to replace various battle tested and widely adopted things like sdkman, serialization libs, build systems, HTTP servers and web frameworks. Even if there's something wrong with any existing solution in every category, your scope looks a bit too ambitious, even the biggest frameworks with many contributors don't dare to do and support all of that.

I don't know anything about the author, but they seem rather humble, not giving "do you know who I am" vibes at all, the writing is very humanizing, raises many good and relatable points. I enjoyed reading the whole text without being familiar with the author and context. I only wish them luck and happiness.

Most international broadcasters have left the shortwave band quite some time ago, unfortunately. I think it is still easy to find BBC, China Radio International, Romanian radio, Radio Havana Cuba, but the list is relatively short (compared to 20 years ago).

In the US, WRMI sells its air time to anyone at low prices. It's mostly religious stuff but there are some regular music shows too, I think.

> quirky California college radio stations

I listen to SomaFM (https://somafm.com/) and FIP (https://www.radiofrance.fr/fip), they have online streams by genre. When something gets me interested, I look up the artist, and I keep discovering lots of new names, independent labels, etc.

Normally you don't want to format automatically generated code, you adjust the code generator instead.

The text on all pages looks very much LLM-generated, and I think all "user comments" there are fake too. (Edit: I mean "what people said" sections.)

I like the idea of the site, but not the execution.

It feels weird to read "nostalgic recollections" that pretend to be human, while in reality come from gen AI.