odyssey7
Really, the general public isn’t that interested in a program that says other children are more talented than their own children, and that their tax dollars should therefore give their own children a second-tier educational experience.
This is the land of opportunity. Why not just offer advanced coursework for all who could reasonably succeed and whose parents are willing to drive to the school every morning?
While I seek out courses with high expectations and appreciate a challenge, I do my moral duty when I raise issues about courses that are “rigorous” in ways unrelated to that. When someone says “rigor,” unfortunately these days, you have to confirm what they mean by that word, because some faculty seem to use it as a cover for shirking their responsibilities to their students — or worse, as an excuse for being actively hostile.
We cannot allow incorrect assertions of “rigor” to lower our intellectual standards to that of our most incompetent instructors. Students should advocate for higher standards.
When I recommend for someone to try proton, I recommend they do so with a custom domain for their email address.
That way, if something goes awry at proton, they can set up service elsewhere while keeping their same email address.
Given a brief brainstorming session, there will be many reasons why this particular experiment isn't directly applicable as evidence for some other project with different requirements. An instinct to over-generalize benchmark results might not be a vibes-based judgement, but it could be a reasoning error.
The results might differ if you were building Facebook, or Instagram, or X, or a static web page for the local coffee shop ...
There will always be trade-offs, but tailoring your abstractions to the project is usually a better decision than not doing so.
Communication has lately proven itself to be as important as ever. If your team has to approve and maintain the result, then using abstractions the team already knows could be the difference between approving the PR today and mythical-man-monthing yourselves as release-blocking capacity -- yet-to-be-onboarded -- for a project that only the AI understands.
Ethics and legal requirements shouldn’t be conflated.
There are times when ethics are a higher standard than what the law requires, and in that case the ethics are no less important.
Still, an impressive accomplishment.
The academy doesn’t give a sh*t. Nothing but rejections across the board.
How did it reach a point where doctors of philosophy don’t want anything to do with deeper mysteries?
For example, the original black swans who were found by the Dutch mariners neither attacked, injured, nor robbed those mariners.
Still, I have sympathy for the people who are grieving right now.
With the software industry, you kind of know what you’re signing up for, so you have some emotional preparation. However, this might be one of the very first truly disruptive innovations many mathematicians have ever seen in their fields in their lifetimes.
Should they have better prepared emotionally for a black swan event? I’d argue that the answer is no, but even if the answer were yes, the grief that many are experiencing is still worthy of sympathy.
Mathematicians got a new toy. It’s up to them to pick it up, play with it, and figure out what it can and cannot do.
While I cannot guarantee it will stay this way indefinitely, there is still plenty that AI cannot do that humans still can, and asking the right series of questions remains an art of its own. There is still plenty of original work to be done.
As Arnold Schoenberg stated in the 20th century, “there is still plenty of good music to be written in C major.” The search space is vast and today human judgement is still required to really navigate it usefully. No LLM has yet written anything like Shakespeare that has superseded Shakespeare in any culturally meaningful way. Although programming is supposedly just about solved, I expect to see numerous billion-dollar startups emerge over the coming decade, rather than all of the innovation running out at the speed of tokens.
But there’s always a risk that someone in an adjacent domain makes a breakthrough that completely reshapes the research landscape overnight. It’s happened before AI and it will happen at some point again in years to come. Grief is understandable, but this isn’t the first time or the last time.
Issues with readability and communication? How pythonic.
My take on how fields evolve is informed by the history of mathematics, computing, art, and music.
Current times offer both a sense of loss and a call to opportunity. I have heard more about the sense of loss, so I hope to draw interest more towards the opportunity.
Completely spitballing, I wonder what sort of sophisticated, collaborative computing effort might produce a paper analogous to the Higgs boson one, with 5154 authors.
I’m not bitter about this anymore — it’s been a long time. But the story holds something.
Back in the day, I knew I was talented at mathematics, and I wanted to pursue a research career. For a freshman research class, I selected a problem that was intentionally outside my comfort zone, and came up with some cool ideas. It wasn’t publication quality, though the course wasn’t really expecting publications.
Framing the problem in a way that it could be solved with calculus turned out to be a key insight. I turned to Wolfram, since the integrals were beyond what I as a freshman could have done myself, and I understood that the insight that produced the solution was my original work. I don’t think anyone in the class could have done those integrals. The instructor himself couldn’t tell me what was wrong with them if anything. Yet, he was unimpressed and subtly dismissive or critical.
Today, I might have been in the wave of researchers developing AI for mathematics work. The instructor could have been proud of shaping mathematics through his mentorship. The university might have invited me for talks. Instead, I ended up leaving mathematics as a field altogether. Now, I write software for a bank.
The world is as rich as we make it. Don’t let your opportunities and potential expire. Embrace the materials that are available to work with, or someone else will and they will out compete you and you will have missed the moment.
I get that there’s a romantic idea of what mathematicians do, and the field changing creates a sort of identity crisis. I would argue that the field has entered a new era. Exploring and shaping this era of mathematics is the opportunity of a lifetime. Embrace it, drive it, and make your mark.
In fact, that kind of standing order for a new Curiosity every year is exactly how you would keep the technology alive in practice.