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Comment by throwaway81523 | Hacker News Reader

This is from May and there was a better article in Quanta already discussed here.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/sensational-proof-delivers-ne...

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40981272 There are 6 comments; the last one is clearly the most interesting: a link to a discussion by Terence Tao https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/112557249982780815

Terence Tao also provides links to a presentation by James Maynard and Larry Guth: https://www.ias.edu/video/new-bounds-large-values-dirichlet-... and https://www.ias.edu/video/new-bounds-large-values-dirichlet-...

I am a bit disappointed that the article doesn't explain what the introductory illustration about Sack's spiral has to do with any of this.

Sack's spiral is a variant of Ulam's spiral, he discovered in 1963 using MANIAC II.

Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulam_spiral

The somewhat cynical but honest answer is that all articles need some kind of pretty image at the top because when you share a link on any social media platform, the platform looks for an image to use as a thumbnail. If it doesn't find one, it gets posted as just a plain link and almost no one clicks it.

This is why Medium requires an image on every post, why every programming blog out there puts random pictures of laptops and coffee cups at the top of their articles, why Unsplash is so popular, and now why AI-generated images at the top of posts are so common.

It's dumb.

It's dumb but it's also why there's so much use of AI generated images as you say. I'd add that a lot of blog templates essentially require them and the random individual isn'y going to pay for stock imagery.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com