ancillary

So much of HN is half-baked anecdotes about and by LLMs or philosophizing from VCs who talked to an LLM about Rene Girard for twenty minutes or pop sci articles that appear to be posted so that some bored developer can read the abstract and one experiment and dunk on it. Tao is uniquely positioned as a mathematician who has made enormous contributions to many areas and is old enough to contextualize it all against the past and young enough to be open to its possible futures. More Tao spam sounds good to me!

Another great book of his is House, which chronicles the building of a house for a young couple somewhere in New England, complete with character sketches of the architects, workers, and customers involved. His ability to portray people in a way that is both sympathetic and clear-minded feels sadly rare to me. Nobody in that book is the hero, and some of their flaws are right there on the pages, but they all seem like people that it would be nice to get to know.

I have re-read this comment several times and cannot tell who "most creative minds" means. Artists? AIs? People who AI will help become artists?

Is "land value" the right term here? The NYC example uses assessed property value, which I think is a function of both the land under a property and the building itself. In that case, these "taller means more valuable" graphics are at least partially reflecting the fact that a tall building is probably more valuable than the short one next to it?

I've been an AC (the person who manages the reviewing process and translates reviews into accept/reject decisions) at ICML and similar conferences a few times. In my experience, grad students tend to be pretty good reviewers. They have more time, they are less jaded, and they are keener to do a good job. Senior people are more likely to have the deep and broad field knowledge to accurately place a paper's value, but they are also more likely to write a short shallow review and move on. I think the worst reviews I've seen have been from senior people.

> In fact if we're being honest, there is some weird unprompted bitterness in your response

Politely, I suggest that prefacing a claim about a stranger's emotions by saying that the claim is "fact" and "honest" is presumptuous.

But I do think you're right about the "friction [being] part of the joy". I think a better version of my comment is that enjoying those frictions isn't completely straightforward, and the temptations of a frictionless (and maybe subpar) alternative make those frictions less enjoyable still, as simonbw's comment observed.

The "cannon" one is maybe the funniest thing I've seen on the internet in months. It almost makes me want to add autoplaying music to my own website, just to add that too.

I found this bit interesting:

> Basically, one reason I’ve lost a lot of will to do anything is because of AI’s existence, and I don’t want to use it. Because I have zero personal time, zero time whatsoever to do anything, so sometimes I’m thinking, “Oh, I could do this task or that task so much faster if I used AI,” but I don’t want to use AI, so then I don’t want to do the task at all. So I don’t have the time to sit down and model something because I know there is a faster way, but I don’t want to use the faster way, so the thing doesn’t get done.

I'm not completely sure, but I think her reasoning is that AI made it a lot easier for random people to just have the idea and translate it into an image in a minute or two, and this cheapens the whole experience for her, to the point that it no longer seems worth doing.

It's sort of a funny point. I think most painters are happy that they don't have to go out and grind up snails to make their own purple pigment, but are perhaps less happy if somebody can produce a painting indistinguishable from their own effort with no manual handwork skill at all. It's like there's a minimum threshold of human skill and investment for an object to be interesting beyond its pure functionality, and functionality has little to do with art (but a lot to do with, say, software).

The linked article says the US has threatened to reduce its support, not committed to leave. Things are bad enough without exaggerating like this.