alberto-m

Why should any mathematician invest decades of their life working on one of them, knowing that all their efforts could be vanified by the release of the N+1-th version of a LLM, or by the usage of 10x compute resources by companies with infinite dollars? It was VERY different when the only competition came from other biological brains that had to invest the same amount of time and effort.

We are not robots and telling people how they should feel and how their mood should not be influenced by this or that is akin to saying to depressed people to just stop being depressed. The divide-and-conquer method you appear to be using is worthless for human psychology.

The cases of a niche culture destroyed by dilution are so common that there are essays around it (e.g. Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution), so it seems to be a very normal and human thing to happen. Blaming the individual members for failing to feel differently is not going to fix that.

> So perhaps then, the sentiment being as negative as it is, is revealing something about the hobby: that many participants, considered the metagame of being the first to do it, to be "smart enough" to have figured it out, the "street cred"

This is a very ingenerous interpretation.

I am a hobby hiker. My mountain hikes are so easy that basically anybody could do them: no street cred involved, it’s not even worth to speak about them. But it is important to me that most goals are only reachable by walking and putting in the effort: if a company offered a 20$/mo service that brings subscribers to the endpoint, carried in a luxury litter by robotized carriers, I would feel that my hobby has been devoided of sense.

Mathematicians have been unpaid for centuries. The problem at hand is much deeper then just deciding who gets the taxpayer money.

OpenAI: At long last, we have created the Open Problem Strip Miner from classic Terence Tao tweet “Don't Create The Open Problem Strip Miner”.

> mathematics doesn't exist for their pleasure, it exists to provide tools to solve humanitie's problems

Who decreed that? Mathematics predates capitalism and publish-or-perish by a couple of millennia. Euclid’s Elements were not written to benefit the weapons or medical industry.

Correct: if one takes as basis not the Bruttolohn but the total cost for the company, the sum of taxes and mandatory social contribution can very well reach the half of the income. The method of splitting employer-side and employee-side deductions seems just there to hide this fact.

More precisely, given a salary of 85'000€, about 17'500 (20.5%) goes into income tax and about 16'800 (19.7%) goes into social contributions, though one can reduce the latter by taking a private health insurance*. The remaining 60% (Nettolohn) can be used to purchase things, usually paying 19% of VAT on them (though rent is exempt and food has a lower tax).

So, “half goes away in taxes” is an exaggeration, but I can totally sympathize with the feeling. Especially since the quality of healthcare is declining and the pay-as-you-go pension system is only built to benefit the current generation of pensioners.

* note that, if one is earning less than 77'000€ today or less than 84'150€ in 2027, one is prohibited to switch to a private insurance. One of the most regressive precepts of the German system.

The German value seems very suspect. Glassdoor, for the same job role, says €53,000 to €80,000 per year which is probably lower than the truth (Glassdoor overweighs junior roles) but looks much more realistic to me.

I actually think your comment reinforces the point of the author. Zero interest into making things clear or attractive to outsiders, the main point is to be smug towards those poor ignorants.

Good post, and the advanced use of the font typographic settings was alone worth the visit.

Missed that, thanks. I searched "Tyrannosaurus" on Algolia before submitting, but it was not sufficient.

> but the wind still blows over / Savannah

Is this a citation of a former work? There's a famous Italian song titled “And yet the wind still blows” (1978), built in the same format of this poem.