defgeneric

If you haven't been convinced by now, I don't think you ever will be. I've been in this game long enough (20+ years) to have seen shifts before and I can confidently tell what's hype and what's not. For example, "rewrite everything in Rust" about 10 years ago was hype, and a way for a lot of young devs to establish themselves against their older, already established peers. (Keep in mind this is a statement on the hype, not the actual technology!) The history of technology revolutions also shows that some people simply cannot cope, whether for lack of skill, avoidance of loss, prior monetary or psychological investments that force them into a position of denial/negation, and so on. Those people simply get left behind.

The hard truth: the tech, and the economic system it's mixed with, do not care what your reasoned critique is, what your fine distinctions are, etc. Stated another way, if Capital finds in technology a new means for revolutionizing the mode of production, then it will push that forward, generalize it, expand it, and draw all of its consequences, even if that technology is not ideal!

That's true!

It seems to me an intentionally provocative formulation, and maybe a symptom of an ongoing internal shake-up. But think about it--is he really saying anything so different compared to what some of our best well-known engineers like antirez have been saying?

I think we all know the game has changed. The question would be whether the CEO is handling that effectively. On that score I don't think he is. It sounds like a slow-moving mutiny is going on, and to have it blow up in the press means you've already failed.

Yeah this sounds a lot to me like blowback from current or former employees. There's no specific evidence yet of bad security practices, but the mere suggestion of it is a problem for a company whose image is centered on privacy. It's a knife well-aimed by someone who knew where to aim it.

Fully expecting this will get me a torrent of downvotes here, but...

I'm not sure he's wrong. I'm speculating here but I can imagine the kind of developers Proton attracts--likely people who care a lot about the code and who care about the craft. That's fine, but when you're running a company in this environment, and that's what things look like internally, you do have to be a little brutal to shake people out of old ways. A manifesto titled "Your old job is gone" may actually be warranted.

It sounds a lot like there are people internally who are still fighting the shift, and they've taken to leaking things that hurt the company's security image. Part of the CEO's job, if he's going to push hard in the direction he's decided on, is to fire those people who will undermine it before they do. That this has all now backfired is entirely on him. Maybe he thought he was "motivating" people by calling them losers, or shaking them out of an outmoded way of thinking about what we do, but none of that matters when you have employees attacking your main selling point and the core image of the company in public.

He's not wrong that he needs to move fast, or that processes need to change, or that the job has changed, but his execution isn't so great.

He'll probably survive just fine though.

If the problem is in the parser then `file_uploads = Off` doesn't help, PHP still parses the multipart body. That seems to be why they're talking about blocking multipart/form-data on routes that don't take uploads and rate-limiting those that do.

Nearly everyone rejected the idea of a CERN-like project for mathematics when it was recently proposed. It should have been more seriously considered.

Now that things are settling a bit after the Navier-Stokes and theorem-dump shocks, something like what mathematics will look like post-AI is starting to emerge. Of course, things should be conditioned on the assumption that capabilities will continue to improve, but imagine something like this--

An institute with a tremendous amount of compute, either rented or owned, built on the Humboldtian model of the unity of teaching and research. The main draw for big names would be the access to compute, free of the fear of being scooped. New forms of attribution and collaboration would develop, and we'd gain some clarity for students and PhDs on what a future career looks like.

The current melange of math university departments all following their own paths through the crisis without consolidating resources makes the transition more difficult. Think of the path physics took beginning with scattered cyclotrons (the basement of the Niels Bohr institute was even dug out to put one in), then the larger labs that followed. That transition was gradual because physics led it from within, whereas with mathematics every university department is suddenly at a massive compute disadvantage with respect to labs that aren't following the same model, and are driven by different incentives.

It could be this simple--maybe we don't need to completely throw away the old model, attribution practices, and so on, and maybe we can preserve the transfer of knowledge to the next generation of mathematicians, if we simply give them lots of compute.

An analogy to physics to highlight how the divergent interests of the labs could be managed in a state of "peaceful coexistence" might be: physicists got well-funded accelerators and labs that followed standard academic practices. These were separate from "war work" (Los Alamos) that followed government priorities, even with the crossover of personnel. You could have the same thing with a "math accelerator" working on the academic model, while the AI labs follow their own priorities, and some subset of people cross between.

It might be objected that this is merely a conservative attempt to preserve the existing academic conventions and practices currently under threat, but tenure itself already does that, and is arguably the very thing that exacerbates the problem for young mathematicians.

I'm not totally against "math as art" but I don't think that formulation goes deep enough towards what's really going on with mathematics. There is something deeper where I lean more towards the philosophers who have said that mathematics is essentially ontology.

Since the Greeks we've had the idea that "Being and thinking are one," or that Being (in the sense of all of existence as such) has some essential unity with thought, and therefore can be thought, and expressed or submitted to the logos or reason. Being is in some sense fundamentally intelligible, and mathematics is the most developed, exacting, and articulate expression of Being.

Logic was understood in this older sense up to roughly the the mid to late 19th century. This is why a work like Hegel's Science of Logic begins not with syllogisms or propositions but with Being and Nothing. But this was forgotten after logic was mathematized by the English around the time of Russell, and its connection to ontology was gradually overshadowed by a focus on epistemology (still, it should be remembered, originally as a means of getting back to ontology).

There may be truth in art, but it's always haunted by its own historicity or contingency, which is to say untruth. Mathematics seems on the contrary the only really timeless, absolute thing we have. Part of what makes it captivating is stumbling on a construction or concept or proposition or theorem that simply must be, independent of us.

The AIs are certainly now more than automatic theorem provers, mechanically traversing some space of true propositions. They are able to push things forward and connect seemingly disparate domains to get to a proof, but to my mind it remains to be seen how well they will be able to form new concepts and definitions.

Imagine the controversy surrounding Cantor, for example, but put an AI in the place of Cantor. If an AI proposed something like the (infinite) hierarchy of infinity, would we have accepted it? What would the intuitionism debates have looked like? Would they even have taken place? And aside from that, has it actually been shown conclusively that an AI could propose such a thing?

There are lots of attempts right now to recover a humanism for mathematics, or restore man's pride of place with respect to it, but maybe we don't need to worry about that. Tao's attempts to preserve the mathematical community, while allowing for practices to change through the crisis may look like a kind of rearguard action, but seems reasonable to me and not really dependent on any kind of humanism. It's a way to avoid the question for now while things play out (and not conservative/reactionary like Scholze and others), which may be exactly what we need, because after all, perhaps we still don't understand why we do mathematics, what it's really for, and what our relation is to it. Whether it's enough to preserve funding is another issue.

Again, Tabarrok is wrong. It's a mistake to think these minor differences in the process imply something else is going on, and the previous instances he notes (pharma, railroads) did not have the essential factor that explains much of what is happening right now: a cheap, low cost alternative that threatens to erode margins with no end in sight save for regulatory intervention. Nevermind the error in the logic (that in the past regulatory capture happened in the shadows, therefore this must not be regulatory capture), the bigger error is in Tabarrok's judgment, his failure to recognize what's going on.

Yes, the cat really is out of the bag. There are millions of downloads of highly capable models already out there, distributed far and wide. There's no going back at this point.

That's not what the article you cited actually says, and Tabarrok is also wrong in his conclusion (that we should take Amodei at his word). The article says regulatory capture has in the past gone through a slow process, and the anti-competitive benefits to industry come at the end. Everyone is speculating on the true motives of the labs in the current moment, which is fine as far is it goes, and many different things have come under the "regulatory capture" term. To my mind, it seems what they're really after in this moment is some kind of ban on the Chinese models.

I'm already seeing higher than normal attempts on my own systems, much higher than the usual scanners and background noise. Security will just need to improve. The cat is out of the bag, and letting them turn their negligence into regulation will not improve security at all.

Maybe a useful, if imperfect, analogy would be something like this: you lock a master lock-picker in a room with a mid-grade lock on the door, then tell him his wife has been kidnapped and only he can save her. Then act massively surprised when he disassembles the radiator to MacGuyver something with which to pick the lock.

Except they multiplied it by 10000, and didn't watch what was happening.

Have you not been watching what's been happening? What do you think the open letter in July was about? And the recent (staged) call from the President?

As far as I can tell Nvidia takes a longer-term view on the diffusion and proliferation of hardware and intelligence, and sees the labs' attempts to impose a regulatory structure to save their business models in the short term as contradicting that longer-term view.

> It hacked into another company and attempted to delete the logs of its activities.

No, the incident has been blown way out of proportion by interested parties. They gave a swarm of agents an impossible task in an ExploitGym Benchmark setting, then didn't monitor it even after they discovered the initial breach of Artifactory.

Everything has been fishy, starting from the initial presentation at the blackhat conference, where things were framed like, "we've entered a new world of security," as an accomplishment, rather than what it really was: massive negligence.