jasonfarnon

I think those things have a lot to do with long term compatibility, the issue is they aren't at all stable for a 22yo and liable to change in 2 years. Those things are pretty stable for a 30 or 35yo.

Why wouldn't they get feedback? They generally live next to each other as the marriage progresses. If anything too much blame: the relative of the matchmaker in the marriage blames the matchmaker for all the flaws and difficulties that everyone finds in their spouse as time goes on.

What surprised me is BBS's aren't really the Internet, right? Everything is just stored one one guy's (often a kid's) computer at a time when hdd space was expensive and we were constantly swapping out floppies etc, who could expect it to last long? For some reason in the Internet era I didn't think it would often still come down to "it's just stored on one guy's computer". Likewise I've been surprised how much film/TV/radio from when I was a kid no longer exists.

Snap isn't a new idea but the motivation, to my understanding, is completely different. It was a technical limitation in the usenet days, both hdd space and bandwidth. Goodness I can still remember what one user on alt.binaries could do to our university network in the 90s.

I wish I could not do math like LLMs

"When I was working at the library circa 2005 we were thinking about replacing all the Windows computers that patrons used to access the online catalog (and other services)"

why were you thinking of going Sun, as late as 2005? just easier to lock down, like kiosks?

Yeah. Which doesn't mean Google isn't happy to comply for its own profit motivations.

that quote is definitely making its way into a lawsuit

I don't think there's much grounds for a serious legal attack at this point, and also it would look so horrible from a PR standpoint no non-desperate would dare it. Anyway, google has been steering enough traffic away, now that its AI jumps in with an answer and the wikipedia link which 99% of the response is based on is always hidden with a bunch of other overlaid icons. Google has surely managed to kill off a bunch of reddit and stackoverflow traffic with this trick.

"Although if no one understands the frontier math (because no one is getting paid to), I'm not sure it even matters what the quality of the cpu math is?"

Presumably AI will be connect the dots to the applications. As the declaration says, this isn't just about math. Human understanding is losing economic value. You can understand stuff on your own time, I guess.

The standard justification for pure math to holders of purse-strings is something like "it might lead to a useful application down the road, like crypto, who knows". That looks pretty inefficient now. We have to entertain the possibility that AI can develop the math needed for any application we put to it. Eg if number theory didn't exist, we could have asked AI for a way to transit messages securely and it would maybe come up with fermats little theorem as part of its solution or maybe come up with an approach we can't conceive of right now seeing as most of us are constrained to available number theory. Like how in the last year when I give an LLM a programming project I see it doesnt even bother with of the many software libraries I and others have written and just codes up the calls it needs on the fly or finds some other ad hoc solution.

Actually my hypothetical is completely realistic as I've been involved in such scenarios. It's unrealistic maybe for a millennium problem to come in on a rumor and still front-run but not at all for the many other problems we work on and which manifest our ethical code. If you're saying ethical rules change depending on the prize be clear about it, because I can see arguments that they change to favor either side.

"I'd say advantage humans this time." Well LLMs were instrumental in any account of what happened. It's just a question of which company's LLMs did the breakthrough, and most of us outside silicon valley don't care about that part so much. The NYU guy himself said without LLMs the solution is maybe 10 years away.

Would this be unethical if it was a human who heard rumors about a solution then attacked the problem, solved it and published first? Often knowing of the mere existence of a solution carries a lot of information--you would know the problem is accessible, you would expect clues in recent progress (the two Spanish researchers in this case), you would probably have a sense if the solution is a counterexample or positive proof, and so on. I think there are similar examples where we think of them as maybe unsporting but not quite unethical. Does it change if it's openAI and not a human?

That sounds like PR nonsense to me. These companies have had teams of mathematicians for at least 1.5 years looking to make headlines, and they didn't bother trying all 10 millennium problems? Yeah right.