dev_dan_2

Cautionary note (and a serious one, not to be snarky): Being well off financially is not a protection against gambling addiction (which can also take the form of day trading, for example); which is a pretty efficient way to ruin ones financial wealth, amongst other things.

As with many other psychological phenomenona, finances and education only protect to a certain degree or not at all, depending on what one is talking about in detail.

This is not a comment about correlation or causation of wealth with mental health, but rather a warning to keep in the back of ones head; success and a sharp mind don't make one immune against mental health issues in general and gambling addiction in particular.

Always nice seeing others arriving at similar conclusions! Those two jump out to me:

- "Most compilers hard-code a cost model. Vx reads one. A machine file describes the memory hierarchy and interconnect of a real part, and the compiler admits or rejects placements against it." I also designed it so that the target system is described by a single file that is picked up by the static analysis - cool!

- "Where data lives is part of its type" also doing that - when I got my project to an mvp state; I need to check out how vxlang does what it does: do they use a literal typesystem, or also compile checks outside of that? If its a type system, is it a dependent type system, or another flavor?

Yet another motivation to finally get my side project starting (forth-adjacent, many similar claims with regards to compile-time checks as vxlang; however, I still have to achieve that, while they already seem to have at least those and more in place; kudos to the vxlang team!)

I am sorry about the negative feelings and associations you have towards RC. Let's think constructively: What are 1-2 points you would do differently?

What is your point? Please don't be obtuse, it is more constructive to make your points clearly.

As a software engineer, I could not care less about how a bug was found or by whom, as long as I can quickly verify it is correct, I always appreciate being able to improve my work. I don't see why it should be different for mathematicians (the ones I knew would think similarly, I would assume.)

> Please do not ask the LLM to break the universe :)

Eh, every school db should be able to service a student called "Robert'); DROP TABLE Students;--", and every public facing LLM should still work even if asked to calculate the last digit of pi - that fulfills two noble purposes: 1) is fun and teaches whoever is responsible for the service some valuable lessons in craftsmanship or 2) if the service is built robustly (i.e. simple token limit and time limit per user), that's an easy way to gain street cred

> If this turns out to be true I think my take above is not correct, in the short term people will have to stop sharing updates because otherwise openai will dishonestly race to finish their work.

Which I don't see a reason for Anthropic and "Open"AI not to, given their not so stellar track record with IP of individuals/entities-that-are-not-rich-enough ;)

It is a strong argument in this case though, because Terence Taos expertise is directly linked to his ability to not misstate the history of mathematics.

Also note how the quote by Tao is in all likelyhood not meant as an absolute; rather than a statement of a trend - a handfull of counterexamples do I no way change anything about the truth value of Tao's quote.

On the other heand; consider how absurd it would be if "... in the direction of no longer sharing any promising research directions with the broader community, which would reverse centuries of traditions of open science ..." would indeed be a misstatement; which would imply that far more promising research directions were not shared with the broader community (i.e.: published). I wonder what different reading of that counterfactual there could be other than secret societies that kept their discoveries and research directions to themselves - which we just learned about (since we would otherwise not be refering to the secret societies and their supposed promising research directions).

All pretty straightforward, I would say - both that "misstatement" is hopefully based an overly strict reading of Tao's quote, and that mentioning Tao's background as one of the fields leading practitioners is relevant as well. Again; to make sure: A few counterexamples achieves nothing here. It would need to reach a certain threshold of such counterexamples before we will have to write the history of mathematics; and before Tao actually made a misstatement here.

It should obviously not come as a surprise that having areas of the brains working differently can explain an awfull lot of things... but to answer your question directly, yes of course of course there are!

Simply look up all the many, well -supported and -researched known correlations with ADHD first. In the second step, you can construct the set of all possible correlations, and subtract the well-researched ones if it. What is left is the set of correlations that are either not explained by ADHD (the big majority I would assume) or explained by ADHD, but as-of-yet unknowingly so.

This might be a bit anticlimatic, but clinical psychology is pretty straightforward study design and statistics, and set theory is not that new either, so... no big surprises I am afraid.

100% agree on the ad angle. Ads normalised using digital products/services by paying with data and attention.

That is one of the reasons why I would love to see - reasonably priced - paid services, or even have governments offer them (as in: Source is open, hosting is being paid by the government). Given the role social media, the internet and so on plays today, it might make sense to treat this as a common good.

But that side track aside; I think that privacy respecting, ad free products can be offered for cheap, if their goal is only to finance themselves, development and gain a small margin. And true, network effects / buyin is real, but I also think that the market for ad-free digital spaces/services will continue to grow, as hopefully people become more and more aware of how precious and limited their attention really is.

Given your position and the responsibility that comes with it; I sure hope you updated your mental model in another way than simply "they are acting irrational"... It's not clear from your comment that you did, but it sounded a bit like it.

> Even the early medieval period has a lot of blanks. Did you know a homossexual bishop called "Flora" lived in first millennium France?

I did not, but like all the facts you mentioned so far, this is not a surprise at all for me (if that was the intention), since it does not contradict any belief I had about first millenium france. It is an interesting fact, though!

> Anyway, you don't seem to be taking me seriously

That's not the case, and I am sorry if I came over as such; I would not have tried to argue my points if I would not have taken you seriously. English is also not my native language, which might contribute to more subtle points being missed/misscommunicated.

> to be reading as a confrontational argument something that I meant as a friendly and helpful nudge towards digging deeper instead of making assumptions

You see, that's the issue; your nudge would only be helpful if I indeed did not dig appropriately deep yet already; which may or may not be, but instead of verifying it first, you told me things that I either knew already, or that did not address my point at all, which was irritating. I am all for infodumps, everytime, everywhere, love 'em. What I took issue with was that you seemed to assume a lack of knowledge, and decided to nudge, seemingly not considering the possibility that you might have completely missed my point.

Which is, succinctly stated: "Surely we should be able and are able to make educated assumptions about all aspects about anytime anywhere of human history; with the strong assumption that we do not have time machines and are therefore are limitited to guessing (or theorising, if one wants to use the fancy word), not measuring or anything or anything of that sort. It is perfectly understood that it's all guesswork, that might be mightly off regarding how it really was - and if we are lucky, the theory is not totally off".

You seemed to take this as a much stronger claim, as is evidenced by you bringing up exceptions to the "rule" more than once; that would only make sense if you literaly believe that statements such as "most of the books in the old testament were written for with an audience in mind that mostly viewed being the first born son a special, higher social condition" was meant in its absolutes (or with absolute certainty), which it was not. Anectodes, counterexamples and so on are meaningless when it comes to statements of bigger trends. They would only be relevant if they would turn out to be a common occurance, or when the source mentions the homosexuality of a monk in passing, without making a big fuzz about it for example - a possible indication that non-hidden homosexuality amongst monks might have been at least tolerated, and maybe even not-rare in first millenium france in at least that monstery. Or was not an issue to the person who reported that. Or it was a smear campain (not all sources are reliable). And so on and so on... (Note: I don't doubt that a homosexual monk named Flora existed back than, it might be well established that he did. I am just using that fact as an example)

---

To wrap up: Infodumps/facts? Heck yeah! Exchange? Yes please. The two of us talking past each other? That's not an exchange, yes. Simply assuming I do not know something instead of verifying it? Heck no, I firmly reject that. If you would have shown me where I was wrong, a nudge would have been appreciated, but as I read it, even now, you simply misunderstood my claims - then, the nudge was missplaced, and came over as patronizing to me.

I think I understood now where it went wrong and what you tried to bring across. Appreciate the facts you droped; I am more the top-down than bottom-up type, but facts like those are interesting to me nonetheless.

I will also stop this thread; in case it helps resolving open ends: "most of the books in the old testament were written/edited/composed for with an audience in mind that mostly viewed being the first born son a special, higher social condition" was and is my intended claim; independent of who the individuals where that wrote these books, of periods where social hierarchies within the intended audiences at time of writting/editing/composition changed, and so on and so for. Yes, that audience encompasses a bit amount of time and space. Still, people who are paid to think and write about this seem to majorily agree with "most of the books in the old testament were written for with an audience in mind that mostly viewed being the first born son a special, higher social condition", if I did not wildly misread the current consensus of academic research. Again, this is a big picture claim; no singular counterexamples or short time periods can change the assumed validity of that statement, only once new sources or new interpretations of old sources indicate a different quantitative historic reality than previously assumed.

---

All the best & happy nerding!