stouset

The pricing isn’t extortionate. It’s literally just them having to pass on the insane price of RAM (itself priced due to the massive demand and supply shortage).

And you’re right that Apple is hesitant to change prices on models. But that cuts both ways. Apple notably held off of bumping prices across their product line for a considerable amount of time, very plausibly eating the cost of RAM price increases.

It would definitely be atypical but given the unique and extreme nature of the current situation, I wouldn’t be shocked if they cut prices somewhat once the RAM situation relaxes.

Shallow or misguided criticisms of Apple—of which there are countless—get shredded on this website. This is not a shallow or misguided criticism of Apple. It is clearly and obviously unacceptable.

Better luck next time.

Maybe this is too pessimistic an attitude, but we may be ten years from it not even mattering.

I’ve heard Grant Sanderson’s take. But I suspect math is going down a dark road where humans have little reason to pursue it any more. We’ve crossed a threshold where computers are regularly solving problems that have remained open for decades. Humans barely stand a chance today; ten years from now we’ll be irrelevant in terms of pushing the field forward.

AI might be around to produce new techniques for other AI. But will it be relevant for humans? Will humans even need to be part of the loop? Will the new techniques be presented in ways that are intended to be conveyed to humans? Will there be humans interested in or capable enough to use them? I have my doubts.

You’re upset that it wasn’t exploited as fast as people were concerned it was going to be?

It may not have happened this time, but we are rapidly approaching a future where this will be the case for every exploitable bug.

> Why aren't you excited for pushing the frontier of knowledge.

In mathematics specifically, having answers to open problems is often not inherently all that useful. The value of open problems typically comes from new theories and techniques that mathematicians produce attempting to drive towards solutions. The open problems themselves are a means to an end.

Suddenly having the all the air sucked out of the room by having all of math’s open problems solved—without producing fruitful new areas of research—is not inherently a win.

Any sufficiently complex set of principles is going to have situations where two principles conflict with one another. This exact situation is one of them.

That's always the case for a novel exploit. There isn't a lot of value in popping somebody's PHP blog, so people who've invested time and money into a zero-day exploit have little incentive to use it for that purpose.

The white hats want to extend the time before an exploit is in the hands of the masses who might do so just for the fun of it, and the black hats want to use it on high-value targets.

Yep. My old Honda Fit did this way before CarPlay. I believe it’s a holdover from external mp3 devices using track numbers in their filenames.

It was always a stupid decision to start playing your music alphabetically, but it became a more stupid decision when music libraries were no longer carefully curated folders in the filesystem.

Mindlessly repeating slogans like this is not convincing anyone this is an opinion to be taken seriously.

Maximizing value to shareholders is a literal legal obligation of public companies. A company being unprofitable today does not mean they are not seeking to be highly profitable tomorrow.

I’m pretty sure many of us are actively unable to afford the private energy we’re having to pay for today.

This is true of literally any proof of sufficient complexity, human-authored or otherwise.

It takes time to convey the core ideas. It takes time for other mathematicians to come up to speed on the new techniques and approaches or the novel combinations of existing ones.

The actual experts in this field have asked for the argument to be explained to them, and are now at the point where they believe this is plausible. Another person in this thread has produced a Lean proof and presumably is not trying to pull a fast one on us by exploiting a bug in the solver.

TL;DR chill bro.

That’s not entirely true. There is joy in being someone who pushed the frontier of knowledge forward, even if only by a hair.

This is evidenced by the scant few people who get into math just so they can rediscover group theory or differential calculus on their own with no spoilers.

Solving problems and advancing the field are two related but separate endeavors.

Nobody has solved the Riemann Hypothesis, but it has been highly fertile ground for new mathematics. Answering the question is of far less value than the question itself.

> If the machines understand math but humans don't, we're going to be in a bad bad bad spot.

With potentially plummeting value for human involvement in these skills, I think that’s precisely what many people are worried about.