alestainer
Re:Terence Tao: Mathematics in the Age of AI [pdf]
on Tuesday July 28, 2026 @05:01AM (#49081219)
It matters a lot what kind of tasks AI would be able to solve.
Two completely different worlds arise if AI can do what I call a modern PhD grunt work vs it being able to produce genius of Nash/Einstein/Lovelace etc.
And the way to test it is trying to produce modern math and science results with those historical LLM models or something similar:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46319826
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47927903
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46319826
Re:What Can We Gain by Losing Infinity?
on Thursday April 30, 2026 @01:32PM (#47965723)
Some might say that 2 is as made up as infinity.
Let me elaborate a little - your brain together with society made an abstraction "apple", and only by not distinguishing between these "sets" of atoms you can have numbers.
Re:The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you'r...
on Sunday April 05, 2026 @02:21PM (#47652302)
I was in academia in the pre-GPT-3 era and I don't see a difference between the superficial pass-the-criteria understanding of things then and now. People already rely on a ton of sources, putting their faith into it, recent replication crisis in social sciences had nothing to do with any LLMs.
The problem of academia lies in the first paragraph of this article - supervisor that has to choose doing incremental, clearly feasible stuff. Currently it's called science, but I like to call it knowledge engineering because you're pretty much following a recipe and there is a clear bound on returns to such activities.
Re:Gemini 3 Deep Think drew me a good SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle
on Saturday February 14, 2026 @03:51PM (#47018260)
Interesting thing: I've got my internal request that is similar to this pelican. And there was 0 progress on it in the past ~2 years. Which might have at least a couple of explanations. 1. Spillage into the pre-training: some real artist had drawn a pelican riding a bicycle. 2. Seeing it as an important discourse for model intelligence in the training data might affect allocation of compute into solving this problem, either thru engineers or the model itself finding the texts about this challenge.
Show HN: Advent of Habit
https://github.com/Alestainer/advent-of-habit
Some research suggests it takes around 21 days to build a habit. How about instead of doing another tired New Year's resolution you start now and enter New Year with a habit in place? :) I made this app for myself and then noticed it is 21 days until the new year. It is recommended to pick habits with a relatively easy criteria of "done", and don't beat yourself up if you skip some, even if you...
Re:Review of /e/ – Android-based alternative for mobile phones
on Wednesday August 10, 2022 @05:58PM (#32418949)
/e/ docs say it uses Android keyboard, wouldn't that be a source of a data leak?
Ask HN: How do you unplug from tracking infrastructure?
Is there a guide on what steps I need to take to get rid of most of the tracking? I know basics - browser switch, migrate email, etc, but they don't cover much. Any suggestions? Is it at all possible?
Ask HN: Is it possible to write without pain?
I was always told that writing becomes easier with practice. But I have found myself in the opposite situation, where my resentment towards the material and the process grows over time. Would really appreciate advices and opinions. P.S. I am mostly doing academic writing in ML, if that changes anything.
Re:Superior IQs associated with mental and physical disorders, researc...
on Monday October 14, 2019 @11:56PM (#21255423)
The study did not add income as a control variable, so the article is basically about how rich people go to the therapist more often.