nritchie

Until there are no more scientists...

This comment totally misunderstands why scientists get into science. Let me tell you, it isn't the money. It is for the joy of exploring the frontier. LLM's are taking this from us. Maybe they will be better than us but I'm not sure how many scientists will get into science for the joy of being an understudy to an LLM.

Spot on!

We live in a time where there isn't enough focus on giving life meaning. Without meaning, it is too easy to become cynical. Some of the happiest people I know believe that the greatest source of meaning is serving others. Many of those at the forefront of research believe there work, while individual, serves all of humanity.

Meaning in life comes from contributing to something larger than yourself. Work is one way but there are others. Just be careful when you dismiss work that you don't end up leading a meaningless life.

The entire cryptographic underpinning of the Internet is based on mathematics that, when I learned it as an undergraduate in the 1980's, was considered just an impractical curiosity. Non-Euclidean geometry became special relativity. Math underpins all science - "totally useless" phooey.

I'd like to believe Grant but I find this assault on mathematics to be dehumanizing and demoralizing. AI has destroyed a major source of "life's meaning" for many people who pursued mathematics. Imagine waking up one morning to find that an alien technology has solved the problem you had dedicated your life to (and many more to boot.) Not another mathematician but an alien technology. As a scientist, I don't want to end up as a laboratory assistant to an AI. I can take not being the smartest human in the room, but I'm pretty sure I don't want to spend my life serving a silicon master.

Professionally, writing my own code is critical. As a scientist, it is how I really understand what that journal article I just read really means. When I write the code, I discover the edge cases that the paper overlooked. If I left it up to AI, I would have the same superficial understanding of someone who just read the article. Code is where you assumptions are challenged. It is easy to make an theory that works 90% of the time. Writing the code forces you to go from 90% to 100% or at least understand why we are stuck at 90%. Not to mention the joys of wrestling with the code that the author describes.

Is anyone using Elm with Tauri to produce a front-end for a Rust library? It seems like it could be a really nice combo.

Ever look at how much energy a laser printer uses?

I have no idea what you are babbling about. Sure, the evolution of the climate is recorded in the geological record. Climate scientists largely understand why these geological timescale events happened. What we are now undergoing is orders-of-magnitude faster than any geologically recorded event. Except for catastrophic events like meteorite impacts and mega-vulcanism there has never been such a rapid change. And climate scientists understand why. Look in the mirror. It is us.

Right, science, while not perfect (being a human endeavor), is our best mechanism for getting closer to the truth. Sure, fraud happens (occasionally). Not all "results" are a step forward. But the system is inherently self correcting. The problem is the politicization of science funding when scientific results don't fit into a dogma driven view of the world.

Science funding in the US is in crisis. We need to stand with those bold enough to point out that the emperor has no clothing.

The product they sell is trustworthy news but they still have accountants. The high-quality news business is a rough business and few are profitable. I can understand why they might feel defensive and a more than a little spooked. How many profitable quality newspapers can you identify? NYT and WSJ - any others?

Not true for everyone. I learned Rust from The Rust Programming Language ("The Rust Book") and "Rust for Rustaceans." Sure, coming from C/C++, I could have learned the syntax online but learning best idioms and styles required the time and commitment to read a book cover-to-cover. In fact, I've probably read each page in "Rust for Rustaceans" at least twice to ensure that I understood some of the more subtle points. I could have developed a half-baked notion of how the borrow-checker worked by fooling around and reading blurbs on Stack Exchange. But Rust for Rustaceans made clear the more subtle points that might have taken years of tinkering to understand. Thank goodness people still write excellent books on computer programming.