j2kun

So why should your children bother to learn math? Just have them prompt their AIs.

This essay seems to say, "people don't matter; all that matters is truth." And that all the policy decisions should follow from that assumed value.

Yikes. I fear for what mathematics will become if that becomes the majority viewpoint.

tl;dr: "I wish my Wikipedia page was more detailed, therefore Wikipedia should adopt AI"

> Grok’s voracious internet searches sometimes find things that human editors don’t. The long article about me includes a substantive discussion of my research about lying in politics and my work with fact-checkers around the world, neither of which are in the Wikipedia version.

I.e., author is mad his wikipedia page doesn't portray him how he wants to be portrayed. At least insofar as the author doesn't get to dictate how his Wikipedia page frames him, this is working as intended. Maybe add some notes to the talk page about yourself if you want someone to take up the cause of glorifying your record more thoroughly.

> Grokipedia also provides some welcome balance. When it offers context, Grokipedia can be a little heavy with hype (“His work has been lauded for innovating transparency in media…”) But it also included a “Criticisms and Controversies” section that details complaints that PolitiFact is biased against Republicans. That section has a healthy back and forth about the critiques and my response. That kind of balance could be helpful for Wikipedia, which has taken heat from Musk and others for being too lefty.

I.e., Wikipedia has higher standards for what to include. Working as intended.

> Musk’s encyclopedia also has a playful spirit that Wikipedia could learn from. Grokipedia’s homepage features random samples of recent edits that provide a glimpse at how the site is being improved. Another Grokipedia feature reads articles aloud in an AI voice you select: Eve, who sounds like a BBC anchor; Ara, a serious woman with crisp diction; Leo, who might have been a professor at Oxford; and Sal, whose name suggests a sports bar but whose voice is NPR.

This really has nothing to do with Wikipedia's concerns about AI-generated edits to articles.

> My big takeaway from Grok is the importance of human judgment in curating knowledge. Grok is a bot trying to behave like a human editor. Its many mistakes and lousy writing show that AI is not ready to replace Wikipedia’s talented volunteers. Still, Grok shows that AI can be a tool that helps them research and write better articles.

None of the evidence described in the article suggests this conclusion.

> After seeing an AI encyclopedia up close through my experiences with Grok, I come away with hope. Yes, AI can be a sloppy researcher and an awful writer. But Grok’s performance, shaky as it was, highlighted AI’s readiness for higher-level responsibilities.

Literally contradicting the sentence before "AI can be a tool that helps them research and write better articles."

I think you missed the point of the article. It is using that phrase as a trigger to stop LLMs from analyzing it.

Ambition describes the big things you intend to accomplish. By my definition, this is the opposite of solving a lot of small inconveniences. If all you intend to accomplish is to optimize your personal microbenchmarks, then you're primarily navel gazing.

Holy non-sequitur...

I get what the author is saying, but his examples like "a ripgrep fork that ... is faster for my codex ripgrep workloads" don't strike me as particularly ambitious.

Perhaps we should be more ambitious in the types of problems we try to solve, and the types of value we try to provide with the software we build.

Gell-Mann amnesia doesn't really apply to the world expert on a topic discussing a paper that builds on his own work. It might apply to a world expert on a topic discussing a topic on which he is not an expert.

I think it depends on what you mean by crowded. I think the most common profession for a math major is teaching, is it not?

--sent from emacs

Coding boot camps were notorious examples of failures and grifts. They did not produce meaningful quantities of software engineers.

TIL Greek is no longer "in circulation." I guess you would also be opposed to people doing math in Russian or Japanese?

Was? Grad school applications are once a year and this happened just a few weeks ago

If it was insecure and they found it first, that'd be better than many alternative actors who would eventually find the same exploit.

You're focusing too much on semantic nitpicking and less on the part where people "wield it as a tool to fuck over artists."

Nobody cares if hobbyists make a "Star Wars but make it Monet" art piece with AI and put it on their wall. It's the part where bosses fire John Smith and then ask the LLM, "please write 100 articles in the style of John Smith." It's the part where an actor is hired once, their face scanned, and then their likeness is used (unpaid) in a hundred films.

> the companies that survived did not do so by embracing quality journalism and independent reporting

Out of curiosity, which companies embraced quality journalism and failed because of it?

> I’ll admit, I used to be excited by generative AI. I made goofy little images in DALL-E. I liked the dumb novelty songs. I thought it could be a cool tool for creative professionals to play around with. I forgot for a moment that we live under capitalism, where every new technology will be used by the ruling class to fuck over workers.

I think this is key. If AI wasn't force-fed into every industry in a rapacious grasp for more profits, our society might have been able to grow into a healthier equilibrium where AI is a useful tool for creative professionals.

Even the insiders I talk to at big AI labs express the opinion, "nobody likes where we're going, but the pressures are too strong."

Ok, so if you really believe that losing one's vocation at 25 is the same as a 75 year old losing their spouse, that paper suggests you should wait at least 6 months before you start being a jerk about it.

I think your expectations of who gets to do math is uncalibrated. One famous math researcher who solved a major open problem was working at Subway while still doing math on the side.

A very small fraction of people who get math degrees actually continue to do math in their careers. They usually have to get other jobs in order to survive (actuary, teacher, finance, etc.). Academic math funding was already drying up for last few years, and now AI will probably cause more cuts. Not to mention that academic math positions have never paid particularly well.

I feel bad for anyone who can't find a job, but the software industry as a whole has been the cushiest industry for decades, and the current turbulence seems more temporary (and driven by corporate greed) than a systematic destruction of the trade.

> I know more math now than in any point in my life because I want to understand how LLMs work

The implication here is that you wasted your time learning that math, and the fact you learned that will not actually help you contribute to anything.

Now maybe you are closer to understanding the feelings expressed in the article?

My friend, this happened a week ago. If a spouse dies you don't come back a week later and say "welp, chin up and diversify your dating pool!"

The idea that a junior software engineer who can't get a software job _and also can't get any other kind of job or move somewhere cheaper to live_ to the point that they can't afford to feed their families is what's unrealistic.

It's not like the options are write software or starve. Billions of people find jobs and can feed their families without writing software.

I also don't often meet junior software engineers who actually have families to feed. Most juniors work in the industry for a few years before deciding to get married and have kids.

That seems even less nuanced: bad economics AND they had a potentially illegal product.

Perhaps it's more that "consumer startups that want to become a unicorn" are hard.

I'm going to start using that term :)

Tort law does not. This seems like a case of dangerous instrumentality.

Unfortunately, marketing, hype, and venture capital overshadows any serious public discussion of capabilities.

That may be true, but I hate it when people repeat the false idea that functional equivalence requires only a test suite that has full branch/line coverage. Call me triggered :)

That said, I would probably follow this same approach if I were to do this, but with extensive randomized testing as well.

I struggle to believe that someone would find it worth that much money to have a decompiled version of a game they also commit to keeping private.

Functional equivalence here, of course, depends on the completeness of the test suite, where byte-identical compiled artifacts does not.

(For example, your approach would not necessarily catch all the same overflow behaviors; the OP expressly claimed that "replicating all bugs" was also important, and many bugs are caused by certain overflow behaviors)

I imagine this would go far, but also note that the variety of compilers used over the last 30 years of game dev would make this not so obviously generalizable.