cjohnson318

That's not the real question. Humans make incremental progress and sometimes have a brilliant inspiration that seems to change all of mathematical thinking after it. The question is: is AI making predictable incremental progress? Or is it discovering fundamentally different ways of thinking about math?

The question for me is, would OpenAI have been able to solve this without Hong Wang's work?

And the level of effort required to have these laws applied to false marketers is unrealistic. Unless there is a case of disfigurement or death, it's just caveat emptor.

Teach them how to use tools to solve their own problems; give them real tasks to do, and trust them to do them, without watching over them. I want my kids to be curious about the world, and understand that they have the agency to fix things. The other thing I try to drive home is that failure is a natural part of learning, if you want to get good at something, you have to fail a bunch first. My biggest failure as a parent is completely flying off the handle when they don't eat their food, but I'm trying to be less psychotic about that. You'll have your own problems. Try to get ahead of them and course-correct before it defines their whole personality or ruins your relationship with them.

I used some check marks and x-es in a work chat, because it was easy to do, and so I could highlight the good and bad outcomes, and someone immediately asked me if I was using AI. I was caught totally flat-footed, because I hadn't used AI, but it looked VERY MUCH as though I had.

Well, I've enjoyed it. It's easier to set up an run from a virtual environment than Jupyter notebooks. That was a big problem I had for years.

Well, my bad. I won't ask dumb questions like "was this written by AI".

Was this written by AI? This is just "I automated some things, use skills instead of scripts". Like, what did you automate? How much time did you save? How can I reproduce that?

100% I picked up shorthand to take notes quicker, but I'm still half-in/half-out of the conversation, mentally deciding what's important enough to jot down. This sounds like a great solution.

I went to an old engineering school for grad school, all the older buildings had this color scheme.

I typed in my dentist's full business name and location, "<name> family dentistry <city> <state>", and it was still #5 in the results. I still, out of habit, tapped the first link and called that number instead. It's ludicrous. In 2010 that would have been the top hit, next to the Wikipedia page on dentistry.

Yeah, and cameras changed art forever.

Can confirm.

I was consulting like this too, but my wife also had a full time corporate job. It all kind of ended with her team having layoffs around the same time that most of my clients figured out that they could use AI to do most of my work at a tiny fraction of my rate. I had built up a lot of experience working with oil and gas software, and I thought that was pretty solid, but it's hard to compete with $20 a month. Anyway, after all that, I found a stable job with good health insurance.

This spacing reminds me of Turing patterns, or activator/inhibitor systems, but I'm gobsmacked that this occurs in random matrices.

What would I use this for? Everything in the examples is pretty easy to do in scripting languages like Python, JS, and Ruby.

I got a stable job! I was unemployed for a few months, we paid a small fortune for health insurance, and I got ulcers from the stress, but things worked out! I enjoy my team, and I'm hopeful about 2026.

Same.

Bro you can't just leak operational secrets on the world wide information highway like this.

They probably use Excel, maybe Microsoft Access.

Yeah, this is the kind of thing that makes me really enjoy the internet.

The thing about language is that words have a weird distribution. The most common 100 words show up in every single sentence, but then tons of "common" words show up statistically almost never. Like, "octopus" is a common word that is only going to be useful if you're talking to a marine biologist, or a three year old that's obsessed with octopuses, otherwise you're hardly ever going to use that word. There's a lot of words like that. "Spine" of a book? It's probably not "spine" in your target language.

So much for being a safe and lucrative place for all the best minds of the world.

It would REBOLutionize everything.

I disagree about the thicker paper part. It's the "sizing" of the paper that's important, that's the preparation of the paper that makes it more or less absorbent. Moleskine/Lechturn and similar notebooks have a sizing on the paper that makes it less absorbent and easier for a fountain pen to glide over. Printer paper is way more absorbent and creates more drag causing you to use more effort. Source: I use a cheapish but decent Lamy fountain pen on both kinds of paper, and I write cursive and shorthand for speed, but print for long term legibility.

That an interesting perspective, about working on a lot of your client's vibe coded fever dreams. Yeah, I'm don't envy 19 year olds looking for software work right now. God help them.

Well, I moved into a more conservative role, which I think was a good move considering the economy and the job market.

Racism? Lack of social awareness? Problems with impulse control? Trolling? Pick several.

I've lost consulting work because I'm a lot more expensive than $20 a month. I've literally had clients say, "yeah, I would have called you, but I was able to figure out that bug with ChatGPT."

Yeah, well, I was trying to be generous.