ThrowawayR2

I condemn deplatforming regardless of who it's being done to.

"Free speech absolutist" was a strawman used against anybody who spoke out against deplatforming as a dangerous idea, which included a lot of liberals. (The pro-deplatforming crowd are very much not liberals.)

Watching the pro-deplatformers get burned by their own illiberalism is very satisfying; watching some of them not having learned any lesson from it, doubly so.

Edgy but I would agree that struggle doesn't give existence meaning in any cosmic, philosophical, or mathematical sense. However, the need for it seems to be something hardwired into living beings, without which they wither away. Struggle and suffering might be considered a necessary, if unpleasant, nutrient of sorts.

Don't forget earlier media like the movie Desk Set in 1957 or the ST:TOS episode "The Ultimate Computer" in 1968 or Colossus: The Forbin Project in 1970.

It might be Banks utopia but the Culture seems more like Calhoun's rat utopia experiment to me or Douglas Adams' "long dark teatime of the soul". There's nothing to strive for, there's nothing one could do that hasn't been done better by a quadrillion other beings and utterly eclipsed by the Minds. It's so spiritually sterile that a ships crew collectively gives themselves a cold (normally prevented by their medical tech) just for the sake of the experience and breaking the monotony of their existence.

How are they repetition? Being transitory and being consistent are unrelated characteristics.

What marketing benefit are they going to be getting when all existing noteworthy problems have been addressed? They're just going to spend money on having the AI generate proofs of no value at random to thunderous public indifference? Clearly not. There will be a need for more noteworthy problems for their AI to publicly solve to get any marketing buzz and the consensus for what is noteworthy comes from mathematicians.

Right and the AI labs will stop just as soon as the need for marketing is over. We're agreeing.

> "Or if the existence of the teleport machine halts exploration."

You're overlooking that the teleport machine costs lots of money to use. The AI providers are not going to waste money by teleporting randomly around.

Someone is going to have to find a new destination that is worth spending the money to teleport to (or walk by themselves) and that someone is mathematicians.

It's fantastic for the rent seeking AI providers. They can squeeze users any which way the want and if anyone so much as utters a peep of complaint, they can be banned for life without recourse.

I'll say it again: AI is capable of answering the questions put to it but AI is not yet capable of knowing which questions are worth asking. Mathematicians have no cause to weep, they will be fine.

> "Earlier this year, Shanmu Jin, a Chinese medical resident, used ChatGPT to solve a problem called Crouzeix’s conjecture, which professional mathematicians had failed to solve for decades."

I note that that these conjectures being solved by AI are named after people, minds knowledgeable and and brilliant enough to come up with the question in the first place and recognize its value. What we have in these AI math solving systems is the equivalent of the chess and go software that can beat humans: something that can adhere to a set of rigid rules to reach a win state once given a starting point. But, as Pablo Picasso said, “What good are computers? They can only give you answers.” These AIs are a magnificent achievement and will change mathematics and coding but can they ask earthshaking questions? Could an AI identify conjectures that mathematicians recognize as a worthy question that will lead to new insights? Where is HAL9000's theorem or the M5 Multitronic's conjecture? Maybe they can someday but I don't see any immediate prospects for it.

Please spare us the "AI will surely keep getting better forever" (unlikely and don't call me Shirley), "moving the goalposts" (I myself haven't set any), etc. non-arguments.

Good luck doing "every possible thing" in Minecraft or Factorio.

Building something custom often is re-inventing the square wheel. I'm dreading the idea of switching jobs only to find the LLM generated software equivalent of Terry Pratchett's “Ordinary madness he could deal with ... But Vorbis had passed right through that red barrier and had built some kind of logical structure on the other side. Rational thoughts made out of insane components.” from Small Gods.

That's just one account that unmasked itself and was noticed. Doubtlessly that didn't stop them from moving on to the next one.

Those who slip promo of their own sites among a stream of other legitimate submissions or just space it out enough across multiple accounts can fly under the radar for years. People know how to game HN and already are, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49517728

Ironic that the parent poster should use the phrase "code monkey" since most would likely agree being an "LLM prompt monkey" is an even lower rung on the ladder than that. The business people can surely find a LLM prompt monkey for much less salary than what a code monkey gets so I'm not sure anyone would want to embrace that future. In fact, if the AI gets good enough, the business people won't need the LLM prompters at all; they'll talk to the AI themselves.

"Both" requires more engineering staff on payroll, more wafers to fab/dice/package/test, more boards to manufacture, more inventory to manage, among other things. If their math says it isn't worth it (granted that they don't always get it right), then they don't do it.

I imagine Linus Torvalds would be surprised to hear that he should have had two teams when he wrote the Linux kernel as a clone of UNIX.

Why make consumer margins on consumer GPUs when they could be making enterprise margins on enterprise GPUs?

Good luck with that, nobody reasonable wanted World War II either.

Fun trivia: Hotta's book "Japan 1941: Countdown To Infamy" suggests that the Japanese military collectively knew they would lose if they went to war against the U.S even as its rival service branches egged each other on into starting it.

Somebody whipped up a website with GPT2 that does that and it was discussed on Hacker News at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23169962 I don't think anyone is going to argue GPT2 is doing thinking of any kind, let alone novel.

Calculators have overflow and underflow conditions, among others, that are limitations that don't exist in the actual math. Those who to understand the limitations of your abstractions (which is what the AI bros who keep bring up calculator argument are demonstrating) will be screwed when the abstraction breaks down and they don't know what to do or even have an inkling of what the nature of the breakdown is.

I beg to differ, I loved the TA campaign. Going from one lone commander with their side on the brink of defeat to orchestrating a final titanic clash of armies as you conquer the homeworld of your opposition was epic. SC never clicked with me in either gameplay or story.

IIRC, that's how Compaq cloned IBM's PC BIOS, with humans doing the analysis instead of an LLM, without leaving IBM any legal grounds to sue Compaq for the cloning. Being a clean room re-implementation is also why Linux was able to clone UNIX without getting sued out of existence by AT&T or SCO so we'd all jolly well better hope that it still provides legal protection.

The advantage presumably is that a player gets to experience Total Annihilation's gameplay as it was originally released, without any rebalancing. It's interesting historically as the root of its own lineage of RTS games, it's interesting from a nostalgia perspective, and it's a great, if dated, game in its own right; the campaign, music, and narration still hold up nearly thirty years later.

To whoever put it together, thank you.

> "high converting UX patterns"

That _is_ the problem: ostensibly serious writing laced with marketing / clickbaity patterns is off-putting.

For the firmware case specifically, some embedded processors support encrypted, signed firmware and encrypted memory. The physical defenses of the processor would need to be defeated to recover the unencrypted binary. That's not impossible (defeat of protections on game consoles being an example) but it would take physical access to the hardware and specialized tooling to even attempt.

Maybe that's a possible future? Chips are not that expensive compared to the price of an app so each app can come on its own SOM in a cartridge to run its core logic. The computer just serves as a terminal and auxiliary compute server to the app cartridge.

Increasing the refresh rate means much higher power consumption, negating the advantage of an e-ink display requiring zero power when not being refreshed. I've used an e-ink reader with fast refreshing enabled to browse the web and observed that it burned through battery as fast as a tablet with an ordinary illuminated display; at 30 FPS, power consumption would undoubtedly be even worse.

> "Even if we ignore the distinction between "no evidence it experiences" and "confidence it does not experience", cruelty hurts the person performing it and the people witnessing it too!"

The 2026 equivalent of "videogames cause violence" and Wertham's "comics cause delinquency" and will age just about as well.