boerseth

I am myself one of them. This is just me doomposting as lightheartedly as I can muster.

My point was not that AI from now on should be done away with in mathematics research. I was rather commenting on the likelihood of AI companies continuing the "strip mining", as Tao put it, of his field.

It's a little funny how quickly the conversation goes from "AI will never be able to {my-field}" before turning into "We cannot have AI ruining {my-field} with its obviously superior abilities"

If OpenAI had never made a push to get good at maths, we might still have a sizeable group of peopne stuck at that first line. I say that because I still hear in discussions the naive rebuttal "But we'll still need _someone_ to {one-step-up-in-hierarchy}" . Although you have to be curious now how long that sentiment can last.

The good news for those doing abstract maths might be that, now that OpenAI have proven that their AI can do the job in principle, there's probably not much left in it for them to keep going. Mathematicians should know better than anyone the lack of a direct profit motive in doing the work that they do.

(Edited for clarity)

There's a lot of art out there that is totally uninteresting, at least to me, because it feels like the artist put little effort or thought into it or or maybe even into honing their skills.

But if the art instead beems with intention and effort, chances are that it will be interesting. And in order for anyone to create something so brimming with signs of effort, they must have cared about the piece, the message, the artform, or something along the process. This post talks about effort and attention, but you could phrase it as a question of reciprocal "caring". If you want me to care, show me that you even care yourself.

It is getting harder and harder to suss out what is genuine though.

This reminds me of why I despise certain works/styles of art and artists. I feel cheated if I'm made to spend more time and effort interpreting a work of art than the creator put into it themselves.

Start dancing Argentine tango. I am dead serious.

Does each service really need to collect this data from the user directly? They could instead have the user authorise them by e.g. OAuth2 to access their age with one of the de-facto online-identity-providers. I would be surprised if they didn't implement an API for this sometime soon, cause it would place them as the source of truth and give them unique access to that bit of user data. Seems like a chance and position they wouldn't want to lose.

> ... six of the fundamental concepts in mathematics ... and how they connect with our real-world intuition

While the connections are interesting, I would be as interested in the disconnects, as there's a bunch of cases where our human intuitions can fail us in subtle ways. This is actually one of the lessons I treasure from mathematics: it has helped me grow a healthy set of alarm bells for those unintuitive cases. Especially for probability and statistics.

> Hyperbolic growth is what happens when the thing that's growing accelerates its own growth.

No. That is quite literally exponential growth, basically by definition. If x(t) is a growing value, then x'(t) is it's growth, and x''(t) its acceleration. If x influences x'' , say by a linear relation

x''(t) = x(t)

You get exponentials out as the solutions. Not hyperbolic.

I always thought of the exponential as the pole of the function "amount of work that can be done per unit time per human being", where the pole comes about from the fact that humans cease to be the limiting factor, so an infinity pops out.

There is no infinity in practice, of course, because even though humans should be made independent of the quantity of extractable work, you'll run into other boundaries instead, like hardware or resources like energy.

It is understanably hard to stay vigilant with respect to individual everyday purchases, but services and subscriptions are an easy and continuous win.

That's a long list of numbers that seem oddly specific. Apart from learning that f-strings are way faster than the alternatives, and certain other comparisons, I'm not sure what I would use this for day-to-day.

After skimming over all of them, it seems like most "simple" operations take on the order of 20ns. I will leave with that rule of thumb in mind.

Not sure which way the difference puts the pressure. Does the fuzziness require more prudent policies, or allow us to get away with less?

Modularity and separation of concerns can extend into other domains than software.

For me, it seems so much simpler to keep the two separate. You won't be forced to wash the heating element every time you wash the cup. Can't heat a different cup while the other is in the dishwasher, unless all your cups are self-heating. Normally, the only way for a cup to break is if it shatters, but with an inbuilt heater there's electronics that can break too. And should the cup shatter, now the heater is unusable too, or vice versa.