Recent submissions

Comment · 27 days ago
This probably sounds really obvious, but I underestimated how isolating even slight deafness can be.

Have a really nice chatty senior (70s) at my volunteering job who was very jovial with everyone, always cheered me up because I worry about the amount elder-loneliness in my town sometimes. He lost some of his hearing over the years, and even with decent hearing aids and people taking his hearing into account he participates much less in conversation during our breaks.

Comment · 1 month ago
We will all become, or temporarily be, fundamentally limited at times in our life.

It's trivial to build something that accommodates an ideal user, the challenge in software engineering is creating a solution that suits many kinds of people, at different points in their life. Refusing to engage with that challenge is a kind of proud mediocrity.

Comment · 1 month ago
Why should that be true?
Comment · 1 month ago
These kinds of arguments are obviously vacuous: The US could also "win" any war with a non-nuclear opponent by nuking every major city. But the fact that they don't is not something worth calling restraint.
Comment · 1 month ago
Is the term "One-shotting" here even appropriate? In the context of AI one-shotting means giving your llm a single prompt and having it return a surprisingly good result (usually code related) without requiring further input, but the llm (probably) still iterates heavily before showing the results. When Codex "one-shots" something it depends a ton on the fact that code is easily testable.
Comment · 1 month ago
"using the same approach that Buckmaster and Alpoge had been exploring" is imo mealy wording: it seems fairly likely that OA heard Buckmaster and Alpoge were close to a breakthrough, and decided to use their unlimited compute to quickly prompt based on their assumptions about B&As work.
Comment · 1 month ago
By default OA trains their models on codex-sessions. If I understand him correctly this is something Tristan explicitly mentions in his post as a possible reason for the fast results obtained by the internal OA team. Anthropic obviously doesn't want to challenge the idea that training is transformative, even if it means agreeing with their competitor.
Comment · 1 month ago
But there's a bunch of people already in this thread calling that stuff unfounded speculation (which I disagree with), and my point is that even if that specific thing isn't true, OA's behavior here is obviously awful.

If they're going to try to beat researchers to discoveries like this it disincentives researchers to talk about their progress publicly, and basically breaks the ecosystem of scientific cooperation / discovery. It's also immoral.

Comment · 1 month ago
So, leaving aside the idea that OA might've used data from the researchers Codex sessions: Do I understand correctly that the internal OpenAI work on the problems was probably started after they heard Alpoge and Buckmaster had made process by using their models? And they used the publicly available info about the researchers past work to prompt their models?

If compute is cheap, and the difficult thing with scientific discovery is now mostly in steering agents into promising areas, there's an obvious incentive for OA mathematicians to simply monitor closely which researchers are close to releasing exciting results, make some assumptions about their prompts based on their past work, and quickly prompt their own (stronger) model to look into the same areas.

Comment · 1 month ago
Won't deny that this is an interesting idea, but I feel like waiting on the output of an LLM for 40 hours feels like it is completely antithetical to what makes classic Hackathons appealing / educative.

More generally, I don't think the shape of a hackathon (intensely working for a short timespan) maps at all onto the way LLM Math progress has seemingly been made so far; AFAIK it mostly involves picking out something for the Model, then having it run for a week with sporadic correction / encouragement.

Comment · 2 months ago
I'm not sure what decision you're talking about. My comment just mentions that it would be convenient if disclosure of vibe-coding was more common.

I can look for myself and see that the repo was started a week ago and has had hundreds of commits since, and that the author exclusively talks about ai on twitter. I'd just like it if I could save myself some time, and it would prevent useless discussions in this thread were people argue whether the commit-messages look like ai.

Comment · 2 months ago
Lots of people seem to care about whether a project was built by hand over time by a few committed developers, or if it was vibe-coded in the past week by a single person.

Whether the distinction matters or not, it would be nice for everyone involved if projects falling into the second category were more upfront about that.

Comment · 2 months ago
K-Pop did not reach people through "Hollywood, and associated media industry", unless you define that category to be meaninglessly broad.
Comment · 2 months ago
Comment · 2 months ago

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