odyssey7

True, however:

Ethics and legal requirements shouldn’t be conflated.

There are times when ethics are a higher standard than what the law requires, and in that case the ethics are no less important.

It’s not that it isn’t quite p=np; it actually isn’t p=np.

Still, an impressive accomplishment.

Is there a name for this form of article title? I find them irritating somehow.

Over a couple of years, I applied to a couple dozen CS grad programs with an admissions essay about music, AI, and CS.

The academy doesn’t give a sh*t. Nothing but rejections across the board.

How did it reach a point where doctors of philosophy don’t want anything to do with deeper mysteries?

Black swan events aren’t necessarily negative.

For example, the original black swans who were found by the Dutch mariners neither attacked, injured, nor robbed those mariners.

In research, there is always the same risk, that some adjacent field will completely change your field overnight due to some breakthrough.

Still, I have sympathy for the people who are grieving right now.

With the software industry, you kind of know what you’re signing up for, so you have some emotional preparation. However, this might be one of the very first truly disruptive innovations many mathematicians have ever seen in their fields in their lifetimes.

Should they have better prepared emotionally for a black swan event? I’d argue that the answer is no, but even if the answer were yes, the grief that many are experiencing is still worthy of sympathy.

I think it might be a result of shock to believe it’s been taken away - you have my sympathies.

Mathematicians got a new toy. It’s up to them to pick it up, play with it, and figure out what it can and cannot do.

While I cannot guarantee it will stay this way indefinitely, there is still plenty that AI cannot do that humans still can, and asking the right series of questions remains an art of its own. There is still plenty of original work to be done.

As Arnold Schoenberg stated in the 20th century, “there is still plenty of good music to be written in C major.” The search space is vast and today human judgement is still required to really navigate it usefully. No LLM has yet written anything like Shakespeare that has superseded Shakespeare in any culturally meaningful way. Although programming is supposedly just about solved, I expect to see numerous billion-dollar startups emerge over the coming decade, rather than all of the innovation running out at the speed of tokens.

Mathematics is more akin to art or a sport to many — philosophy, too. I don’t see that as a bad thing.

But there’s always a risk that someone in an adjacent domain makes a breakthrough that completely reshapes the research landscape overnight. It’s happened before AI and it will happen at some point again in years to come. Grief is understandable, but this isn’t the first time or the last time.

> is completely missing from any official documentation

Issues with readability and communication? How pythonic.

I respect and have had good experiences with mathematicians.

My take on how fields evolve is informed by the history of mathematics, computing, art, and music.

Current times offer both a sense of loss and a call to opportunity. I have heard more about the sense of loss, so I hope to draw interest more towards the opportunity.

That’s for the mathematicians to figure out. I’m not involved in their field.

Completely spitballing, I wonder what sort of sophisticated, collaborative computing effort might produce a paper analogous to the Higgs boson one, with 5154 authors.

Obviously a golden age.

I’m not bitter about this anymore — it’s been a long time. But the story holds something.

Back in the day, I knew I was talented at mathematics, and I wanted to pursue a research career. For a freshman research class, I selected a problem that was intentionally outside my comfort zone, and came up with some cool ideas. It wasn’t publication quality, though the course wasn’t really expecting publications.

Framing the problem in a way that it could be solved with calculus turned out to be a key insight. I turned to Wolfram, since the integrals were beyond what I as a freshman could have done myself, and I understood that the insight that produced the solution was my original work. I don’t think anyone in the class could have done those integrals. The instructor himself couldn’t tell me what was wrong with them if anything. Yet, he was unimpressed and subtly dismissive or critical.

Today, I might have been in the wave of researchers developing AI for mathematics work. The instructor could have been proud of shaping mathematics through his mentorship. The university might have invited me for talks. Instead, I ended up leaving mathematics as a field altogether. Now, I write software for a bank.

The world is as rich as we make it. Don’t let your opportunities and potential expire. Embrace the materials that are available to work with, or someone else will and they will out compete you and you will have missed the moment.

I get that there’s a romantic idea of what mathematicians do, and the field changing creates a sort of identity crisis. I would argue that the field has entered a new era. Exploring and shaping this era of mathematics is the opportunity of a lifetime. Embrace it, drive it, and make your mark.

There is no political will to increase taxes in the U.S.

It feels like it costs like $40+ to do anything.

People selling hardware wallets might pay good money to convince you of that. People not selling hardware wallets probably won’t pay for the reverse.