klhs

Yes, that was also a really good post in the series! And it's good for Scholze to give the author some encouragement, it's too early to abandon hope.

I know it's against the rules to be a curmudgeon, but this just reads like a lullaby for people preparing to drink the SF kool-aid. The opportunity cost of becoming an expert will remain, but the reward of pushing the frontier is mostly gone. Now, if you want to save universities as institutions(*), you'll have to offer people some other positive vision. "You won't be able to make a difference" is not one of them. After all, you can get understanding for the joy of understanding (doesn't seem very egoless to me btw) outside of academia as well.

I'm much more sympathetic to the views of this anonymous postdoc here: https://proofsandprompts.com/2026/10/22/the-rules-cannot-cha... (unfortunately also in LLM-"polished" English). Quote: "A field that fails to attract and support its next generation cannot preserve itself through inspiring statements alone."

(*If you extrapolate a little, for now you can also substitute with 'math departments' there.)

That's a charitable view point.

You could just reply to me directly, you know. I don't doubt that AI is able to fill some roles already but a company can obviously have other reasons to downsize, and maybe they just think "'twas 'cause of AI" sounds better. Then again, maybe I'm just coping, as the kids say.

Compared to the future AI-worker we might all turn out to be weak. :)

SUSE finances the maintenance of the openSUSE distro afaik.

As the article says: "One in ten employees at SUSE are facing the chop [...]".

It would be interesting to know if the reason is truly automation. Apparently the equity firm owning Suse considered selling it off recently, see last paragraph.

If this scenario plays out in full it will be a bit worse than 'inconvenient' and I hope we will be able to prevent it.

Well, let's see who will be left in a few decades. Somewhat related: Does anyone still encourage people to get into CS? I certainly wouldn't.

People haughtily declaring only those welcoming the transformation of a millenia-old human endeavor into something fundamentally different, that also seems inherently less dignified to a lot of people, to be well-adjusted, is definitely one of my least favorite aspects of the AI×math situation. It's a guest post by the way, but someone mentioned that already.

>LLMs change everything around us, how we manipulate the world, and how we get the signals back.

This is sounds a little too grandiose for me. Our physical lives at least seem quite unchanged. If you don't produce code or papers for a living you might even succeed in not thinking about LLMs at all. The "signals" we're getting have certainly multiplied and increased in amplitude, though.

Regarding Pi: If hands-off code production is the future wouldn't a harness with subagents be the obvious choice? I personally enjoy minimalism in software, if only for aesthetic reasons, but even then: Can't you spin up your own bespoke version easily?

To be blunt: This is just an advertisement, right? If you had fleshed out what the big difference is supposed to be between your framework and a harness it might have seemed worthwhile, like this it seems completely off-topic.

I see, that's good to hear!

>Like most writers, I find writing an almost-essential tool for thinking. Often it's only by writing something down, that I can really get my thoughts on a topic into coherence. I've often started an essay knowing I don't really understand something, but the act of wrestling with the words forces me to overcome my confusions. As more people delegate writing to LLMs they will also delegate thinking and comprehension to LLMs.

A very important point, which was also made more forcefully in "Human Routers of Machine Words" by Fernando Borretti, shared on this site previously. It's good that Fowler brings up a very legitimate use case in the next paragraph, though.

My previous question does not indicate more belief than that it might be true, so I can't answer you there. Should I adopt the belief any information put into words by an LLM is wrong? I don't think it would do me any good. I wish people would stop giving over their writing (or other things) completely to LLMs too, but I can't make them.

True, I should have written they misclassified it, should it work as advertised. If Google knows something that makes it not an issue, hopefully they'll let us know.

Good point, I don't know! That's why I formulated it this way. Edit: I guess what I'm trying to say is, with security relevant things it might do no harm to be a bit more credulous when it comes to initial reports. (In theory, no idea how to best handle the growing flood of LLM generated stuff. Pointing LLMs at each other doesn't seem great.)

That's unfortunate. They need to do some kind of triage then, I hope this doesn't mean that they're constantly busy now with equally bad or worse bugs, but I guess it wouldn't be too surprising.

How could they possibly give this a "won't fix" if it can do what is reported here?

University of Vienna also took a lot offline. Seems it's getting patched fast now, though.

Edit: Or maybe not? At least one service on their IT-department's list seems to be working again. :-)

This analogy is only valid if you're confident that parents would not say meaning is vaporized if you turned their 8-year-olds into 18-year-olds overnight, and there was reason to believe this would frequently happen to families in the future, probability increasing. The exact problem is that the situation in mathematics is not akin to "finally moving out" but instead to "immediately moving out". I imagine few people would be OK with it.

Also I find the suggestion that the people unhappy with the AI-in-mathematics situation are psychologically unwell to be presumptuous, to put it mildly.