vector_spaces

You need to do some serious work on your presentation, both in your write-up here and in what you show on your homepage.

You spend far too much time interrupting the flow of your write-up describing the product with biographical asides and implementation details. I would place each of these in their own sections/paragraphs -- first few paragraphs describe the product, the next few describe how you did it, the last is for you to talk about your background. This is roughly in order of what your readers are prioritizing and skimming for.

Next, what is shown on the landing page looks like a trivial to-do application with additional polish. Only from reading your write-up do I know it's somewhat more sophisticated than that. I'm not a designer so I can't provide guidance here, but there should be some signal that this app is doing more if you want to command even half of what you're asking pricewise.

And for the love of all that is good, you need to drop the bracketed parentheticals. They are an eye-sore and make your writing painful to read and skim.

Parentheses signal to the reader that while their contents are not essential to understanding the sentence, they might provide useful additional detail. Therefore each time you use one, you impose a little extra friction for the reader. You are asking them to hold a little extra information in mind to understand the sentence.

If your instinct is to bracket something, usually it's a sign you should simply leave it out. But if you really can't imagine leaving it out, then a bracket is probably inappropriate anyway. Most of yours fall into the former category. I would budget at most 2 parentheses for a write-up like this. Most of your sentences contain one, and some have two!

I remember seeing a clip of him describing Hollow Knight as "wow, I am in a different room now, cool" and saying such games weren't for him. I understand what he meant in the sense that I know he is very mechanics-focused and is far more interested in plumbing a small number those to their deepest depths, where HK has many comparatively shallow mechanics but with a rich space of interesting interactions -- generally this is what you want in a game where exploration and world building are more central.

I still found it really strange though for an indie hero to be so reductive in how he described such games, particularly when one could more easily produce similarly reductive readings of his games without even being too uncharitable

OpenAI is concerned about math and physics insofar as these skillsets enable their current staffing model. That is not exactly durable.

I mean, many companies operate within particular domains but don't have much skin in the domain itself in a way that is meaningful to other participants there -- like Oracle builds software for healthcare, ostensibly, but any actual user of their products will tell you they are nightmarish with regard to usability, and research shows that patients are often harmed as a result. So healthcare isn't their game, it's selling healthcare software.

Likewise OpenAI doesn't have "skin" of any shape or value in e.g. the mathematics community or even in mathematics research per se. In my cynical view, they are exploiting the exposure of mathematical research to automation in an effort to create a case study of their product obsoleting a highly visible and well-leveraged and relatively small profession. Regardless, I doubt even they would say they have durable skin in mathematics in any sense, certainly not in either of the senses I mentioned above. But their output inhabits the same space as mathematicians, who have to contend with the consequences

There are orders of magnitude fewer mathematicians with full time academic positions than there are software engineers. The economics are different and consequently academia tends to be more slow moving in reacting to market trends. It doesn't mean it isn't coming, but it will look somewhat different

I don't personally grieve for the likes of Strogatz or Tao, it seems likely both of them will be fine however this pans out. But many more mathematicians have been toiling away in precarity and obscurity and without tenure for years and years. And of course many mathematicians went into private sector roles as software engineers, actuaries, analysts, ML engineers and similar, and have been displaced there, too.

And highly visible blog posts written by famous mathematicians with large audiences and closely aligned with the news and hype cycles getting frontpaged on HN doesn't mean that mathematicians are disproportionately whiney, nor that software engineers aren't also writing about their plight or ending up on the front page as well.

Mathematicians aren't homogeneous. There are mathematicians valuing pedagogy, collaboration, bridge-building, theory building, along with those that chase the 'difficult theorems', to name a few, and there are lots of flavors within each class, with lots of blending and blurring. You infer that mathematicians prefer the status quo simply because it is the status quo -- with a little thought, you'll recognize that this is a fairly silly notion.

There are myriad circumstances where the values of most practitioners differ from the status quo, which is nevertheless well-entrenched. This can arise from inertia, or from outside forces, such as broader cultural milieu, integration with larger institutions, or contending with economic realities. If you think that these do not and haven't historically played a role in determining the job economy and that math is a pure field where mathematicians could comfortably shape it according solely to their own ideals then you are naive

It's just a name you write so many times as a math undergraduate or first year graduate student due to the number of load bearing results and objects named for him. The name even appears in lower division coursework

Yes, you can be an amateur mathematician who manages to avoid such classes and may not know those results or objects, but if you haven't read and written down the name enough to avoid habitually misspelling it, you are outing yourself as a meat proxy unless you are dyslexic.

Not to mention it's got that signature Claude Clutter UI design

As someone who sometimes helps companies figure out content strategy, I am sorry to say that it is not true that linking in comments is safe -- this tends to penalize your post nowadays.

LinkedIn isn't alone here -- virtually every platform with an algorthmic feed penalizes both links and the obvious workarounds.

Not to defend the practice -- it's unfortunate because it trains younger users that attribution isn't important, it enables and incentivizes outright theft of content (good luck chasing down original sources after convincing yourself that it wasn't AI in the first place)

Judgments are not generally impossible to automate -- judgements are typically binary or quantifiable interpretations, so in some sense are perfect targets for automation, but the sheer volume of judgements needed to build something coherent is overly cumbersome to specify to the point of being intractable. There are also many hidden judgements, ones where the thresholds may not be well understood, and interactions between them.

But humans still manage to wrangle these, sometimes seemingly effortlessly, through a process which we call by shorthand "taste". This is a largely vibes-based heuristic that combines expertise with life experience and cultural training -- intuition, more or less.

This is likely not possible to automate either -- aspects of it may be automatable for a given expert, in small pieces in narrow subsets of their particular domains of interest, but even those likely will require some manual intervention.

This is in part because it is, to a large degree, a black box, even to the expert deploying it. With some self-awareness and strong language skills we can articulate approximations of the judgements that go into taste. But even those will fall short, as even the most self-aware individual will fail to notice certain judgements and dependencies.

In practice many of these are not even explicitly articulable. Humans are idiosyncratic and messy and dynamic, and the suggestion that we can build a machine that approximates this in a way that pleases our sensibilities and doesn't require supervision is kind of ludicrous, even in light of recent developments.

The certitude with which you condemn your peer without the slightest consideration for subtlety or alternate explanations for what you've understood to be true -- this comment is such a beautiful encapsulation of the state of discourse today. In some ways it is the modal comment of the moment. Tastelessness and mediocrity and inability to grasp nuance or feign at humility are on full display, not to mention a fantasy for violence

It's a work of art

Do you "know", in any meaningful sense, any of OpenAI's recently publicized proofs? Do you suppose that there is any large community of non-academics that does?

One of the points the parent makes, along with the TFA, is that academia -- or more specifically, the "mathematical community"-- is a setting primarily for creating and ingesting mathematical knowledge, and disseminating it to the next generation and to other fields. Humans absorb this material slowly, through lots of discussion and collaboration -- it is necessarily a slow process. Facilitating this is one of the important functions of academia. Your usage of academic as a slur here is a bit silly for this exact reason.

I don't claim it is perfect, and we can argue about pedagogy in elementary courses till the cows come home. That's not really material. But this is one of the only settings in which such knowledge is broadly valued for its own sake, and in which there is a semblance of incentive to help others "know" this stuff as well, be they future generations of mathematicians, science and math educators and communicators, practitioners in other fields, or genuinely curious amateurs.

"What if I made X?" is basically Product Development Antipattern #1. Most feedback you get here is incredibly low signal. The stakeholder you're talking to isn't a technical person in all likelihood, so they probably aren't visualizing what you're describing in the same way you are. There is a high probability that they are telling you it sounds great as social lubricant or because they don't really understand what you are talking about and don't want to look dumb. Not to mention that positive response is the path of least resistance for most people -- the hard work of thinking critically about an idea so that you can locate potential flaws requires caring in the first place, and most people assume positive feedback is what you want to hear anyway.

I have never been in the situation of knowingly taking salary from any fascist and would never tolerate it. I've left jobs I needed over this. My "walking away" was more about wanting to work on stuff in my day job that felt somewhat more worthwhile and tangibly useful to humanity