rtpg

The "top layer" of maths being this is one thing. Now imagine another layer of this. Then another. Then another. Then another.

At one point intuition helps to build out usage of the math itself. See stuff like "oh I can do rotations through matrix multiplication"-style ideas.

It is helpful for us to be able to reach for those tools quickly. The more tools that require advanced prep to use, the less we'll be able to use the results in easier contexts. Everything will be hard

Of course nothing really prevents people from looking for the simpler tools and proofs. Lots of math stuff starts off complicated and gets simpler.

Just important that this is still a goal in mind

Can people please make something with the tools they are pitching before putting it out in the wild?

Not the stupid useless field tests that no one uses. Make a real thing that gets used by more than 5 people. Then consider whether your thing is actually useful. Then maybe put it out to the world

Perhaps you don't want to waste your time or tokens or whatever REing a thing and instead can use something someone else has distributed to solve the problem in a general way

Any time you see “Adjective Noun. Adjective Noun. Preposition Noun” as a section you know you’re in for a bad time.

It's unfortunate because like... in theory if you apply the right kind of debugging philosophy you can use this tooling to help you move through the work a bit more easily.

But just kinda randomly trying at various reasoning efforts reminds me a lot of hearing people just randomly replacing various libraries or code snippets with stuff found on stack overflow. No real theory of the system.

There's not even much of an excuse, cuz you can "just" sit there and type "why?" or "why not?" over and over into an agentic chat session and probably get things working quite quickly. Principled debugging is state space elimination for the most part!

You interpret that wiki list of 154 items as proof that we know nothing. I interpret that as "oh wow, only 154!" That list feels pretty short, but of course it's just a wiki list.

I do get what you're getting at. I just feel like for every bit of drug that is just dumb luck we have a good amount of iterative processes.

I agree that you often find effects before understanding causes (I think that math also exhibits this! Many endeavors are about finding existing structure that we sense to be there but are unsure of).

Just... well... if you go down the "we don't understand anything anyways" path too much what makes your work different from alternative medicine?

I think the important idea here in Terrence's hypothetical is that in the hypothetical there is no hill-climbing. The AI shows up with a thing and says "we don't need to hill-climb for years and waste time, here's a thing that I know will work".

And maybe it does a single finalized clinical trial.

You end up with this miracle drug (supposedly!), but no understanding of why it works or access to the iteration that would lead to that understanding (and increase in confidence that it doesn't cause people to drop dead anyways).

I think the medical example is a bit obtuse overall because "proof nobody understands for an open problem" isn't "miracle drug we are too scared to use". But understanding things feels useful and good.

So is the demo real or is it smoke and mirrors? Could you have pointed at other words and have it work?

(I think I overestimated how much of an angled shot it was the first time I saw it, on top of how easy or hard turning your finger into “actually capture this text”… but you’re totally right that in principle a camera at a non agressive angle can capture that text)

(I like this overall concept a lot! Cooking is the right example, voice interfacing’s 96% use case is basically “my hands are dirty but I must use computing”)

Is a basic webcam really able to read text at that angle for the “what is this word” example?

I wasn’t sure if any of this was real and that example looked extremely fake to me because I had a hard time believing the device being able to read text from that distance.

This is pretty funny to see, because every financial firm interview process I've seen involves some variant of solving a bunch of stuff with min heaps.

Never before has a set of engineers been more primed to solve a problem

> many have voiced other structures such as altering prices based on time/place/road driven, which would require more data than simple odometer readings.

There are people who won't care about this but I think that legibility would be a huge concern here. It's one thing to do $X per megameter, but it's another to start breaking it down into various zones etc

At that point might as well just do congestion pricing in cities.

By living off grid they are stress testing things so that when things are tougher (perhaps temporarily!) things have a higher chance of chugging along

And obviously, like, they go to places and talk to people and buy equipment etc.

There’s a whole gamut of failure modes for tech from “total civilizational collapse” down to “cell tower is down”, and time periods from “forever” down to “a couple of days”

People doing this sort of lifestyle but sharing findings and ideas and ultimately maybe pointing out how more can be done with less is part of us building up knowledge together isn’t it?

These people aren’t completely offline even! They blog and post online!

The problem is that one a person writes a 60 page proof in theory that person has spent an inordinate amount of time on the proof and can answer questions, describe some insight, etc etc.

If a random person is given a 60 page proof to digest and not the author, those hidden insights that _aren't_ in the paper might be completely inaccessible. Maybe the AI will "just" be able to provide the insights. Maybe. But pedagogy is tricky work, and despite these AIs being able to do all this fancy math we can't get them to write good cover letters yet, so....

Ultimately we might be left with just a bunch of intellectually unsatisfying proofs. This means way less drive to simplify the proofs or rework them.

End result: we generate a layer of "less efficient" mathematics, that won't get built upon. We will not actually have any shoulders upon which to stand.

IIRC I think it overclocked your PSP or something?