ancillary

So much of HN is half-baked anecdotes about and by LLMs or philosophizing from VCs who talked to an LLM about Rene Girard for twenty minutes or pop sci articles that appear to be posted so that some bored developer can read the abstract and one experiment and dunk on it. Tao is uniquely positioned as a mathematician who has made enormous contributions to many areas and is old enough to contextualize it all against the past and young enough to be open to its possible futures. More Tao spam sounds good to me!

Another great book of his is House, which chronicles the building of a house for a young couple somewhere in New England, complete with character sketches of the architects, workers, and customers involved. His ability to portray people in a way that is both sympathetic and clear-minded feels sadly rare to me. Nobody in that book is the hero, and some of their flaws are right there on the pages, but they all seem like people that it would be nice to get to know.

I have re-read this comment several times and cannot tell who "most creative minds" means. Artists? AIs? People who AI will help become artists?

Is "land value" the right term here? The NYC example uses assessed property value, which I think is a function of both the land under a property and the building itself. In that case, these "taller means more valuable" graphics are at least partially reflecting the fact that a tall building is probably more valuable than the short one next to it?

I've been an AC (the person who manages the reviewing process and translates reviews into accept/reject decisions) at ICML and similar conferences a few times. In my experience, grad students tend to be pretty good reviewers. They have more time, they are less jaded, and they are keener to do a good job. Senior people are more likely to have the deep and broad field knowledge to accurately place a paper's value, but they are also more likely to write a short shallow review and move on. I think the worst reviews I've seen have been from senior people.

> In fact if we're being honest, there is some weird unprompted bitterness in your response

Politely, I suggest that prefacing a claim about a stranger's emotions by saying that the claim is "fact" and "honest" is presumptuous.

But I do think you're right about the "friction [being] part of the joy". I think a better version of my comment is that enjoying those frictions isn't completely straightforward, and the temptations of a frictionless (and maybe subpar) alternative make those frictions less enjoyable still, as simonbw's comment observed.

The "cannon" one is maybe the funniest thing I've seen on the internet in months. It almost makes me want to add autoplaying music to my own website, just to add that too.

I found this bit interesting:

> Basically, one reason I’ve lost a lot of will to do anything is because of AI’s existence, and I don’t want to use it. Because I have zero personal time, zero time whatsoever to do anything, so sometimes I’m thinking, “Oh, I could do this task or that task so much faster if I used AI,” but I don’t want to use AI, so then I don’t want to do the task at all. So I don’t have the time to sit down and model something because I know there is a faster way, but I don’t want to use the faster way, so the thing doesn’t get done.

I'm not completely sure, but I think her reasoning is that AI made it a lot easier for random people to just have the idea and translate it into an image in a minute or two, and this cheapens the whole experience for her, to the point that it no longer seems worth doing.

It's sort of a funny point. I think most painters are happy that they don't have to go out and grind up snails to make their own purple pigment, but are perhaps less happy if somebody can produce a painting indistinguishable from their own effort with no manual handwork skill at all. It's like there's a minimum threshold of human skill and investment for an object to be interesting beyond its pure functionality, and functionality has little to do with art (but a lot to do with, say, software).

There's at least one paper (though pretty recent) about it: https://arxiv.org/html/2603.00164v1

This is an interesting profile of Terence Tao as an ~8 year old: https://gwern.net/doc/iq/high/smpy/1984-clements.pdf, written by somebody who seems to have been well-versed in working with mathematically precocious children. It's interesting less for how good at math Tao already is but a peek into how he went about learning and doing math at a time when the subject matter was still accessible to, say, most users here. Among other things, what might be called his "openness to math experience" and independence are both remarkable.

Somebody wrote a file encoder to take advantage of Flickr's free photo storage, too (though based on its Github repo I don't think a ton of people used it): https://alexcbecker.net/projects.html#storing-data-in-gifs

Google at least claims that noindex will keep your site from getting crawled [1]. Do people think this is false?

[1] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...

The linked article says the US has threatened to reduce its support, not committed to leave. Things are bad enough without exaggerating like this.

I did a theoretical computer science PhD a few years ago and write one or two papers a year in industry. I have not had much success getting models to come up with novel ideas or even prove theorems, but I have had some success asking them to prove smaller and narrower results and using them as an assistant to read papers (why are they proving this result, what is this notation they're using, expand this step of their proof, etc). Asking it to find any bugs in a draft before Arxiving also usually turns up some minor things to clarify.

Overall: useful, but not yet particularly "accelerating" for me.

Hm, this doesn't seemed to be backed up by, say, PISA scores [1], by which the US looks very similar to its OECD peers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programme_for_International_St...

Yeah, on the spectrum of ways to make money, running a sports betting site is pretty bad. It's zero-sum (unlike, say, founding a company and getting rich from shares that were initially worthless), doesn't really incentivize discovery of any truly valuable info (if you find out a player is injured an hour before everyone else ... ok?), and seems to disproportionately hit people who are already not doing very well.

Seeing the statistics about young American men's betting habits makes me feel old.

My understanding is that it's not subject to the same tax it would have been as income, since the federal estate tax only applies to value above ~14 million per individual. So, my understanding is that a married couple can pass 25 million in stocks to their heirs and pay nearly no taxes on it because it's under the estate tax threshold and the capital gains cost basis got reset on their death. But not everyone can do this because you need enough assets or other business the bank wants to handle for them to be happy lending you money for years, and only people with a lot of assets have either of those things.

(I'm happy to be wrong about this, since it seems unfair, but AFAIK this is how it works?)

I'm not sure if "options" is the relevant word in your post, but it does seem like capital gains tax is significantly reduced in inheritances? Here's an example source that says the cost basis gets reset to its value at approximately the deceased's death [1], and gains relative to that cost basis are likely much smaller (and thus a much smaller tax burden) than those relative to their initial acquisition price possibly decades earlier, no?

[1] https://www.fidelity.com/learning-center/life-events/cost-ba...

I think the claimed issue is that these people do receive income from those assets indirectly. My understanding is that if your assets are worth much more than the amount you're borrowing then a bank is happy to keep giving you loans, which you use like income, that incur compound interest until you die, your estate must settle up the loans, and the estate gets to pay capital gains against the basis when you died, not the basis when the shares were first created and worth $1 each.

> And that's also pretty simply explained by this classic quote: it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

I've come to strongly dislike this quote, because it's so often used on HN to decide that whoever's disagreeing with you is doing it for simple, stupid and greedy reasons, thus absolving you of the duty to think a bit about whether there might be nuance you're missing.

> The rest of the decline is (in my evaluation) best explained with the increase in average age of the 18-64 year old demographic.

I wondered about this before reading the article, but there's a chart in the article comparing narrow ~10 year age ranges to their past levels, and the decline is persistent in each group, so I don't think it can be explained by the overall population being older.

> Americans: why isn't anyone having sex anymore?? Also Americans: Abstinence only! You'll get pregnant! No abortions! STDs will kill you! Men deserve sex! We're not going to teach you how your body works!

None of that is new in America. If anything, I'd expect that these forces were stronger 20-30 years ago, when sexual activity rates were higher.

This level of generalization and certainty shouted down from the moral high ground is the hallmark of a great comment!

> The difficult part of building a nuclear weapon is and has always been acquiring weapons grade fissile material.

IIRC the argument in the McPhee book is that you'd steal fissile material rather than make it yourself. The book sketches a few scenarios in which UF6 is stolen off a laxly guarded truck (and recounts an accident where some ended up in an airport storage room by error). If the goal is not a bomb but merely to harm a lot of people, it suggests stealing miniscule quantities of Plutonium powder and then dispersing it into the ventilation systems of your choice.

The strangest thing about the book is that it assumes a future proliferation of nuclear material as nuclear energy becomes a huge part of the civilian power grid, and extrapolates that the supply chain will be weak somewhere sometime, but that proliferation never really came to pass, and to my understanding there's less material circulating around American highways now than there was in 1972 when it was published.

I'm not OP or a doomer, but I do worry about AI making tasks too achievable. Right now if a very angry but not particularly diligent or smart person wants to construct a small nuclear bomb and detonate it in a city center, there are so many obstacles to figuring out how to build it that they'll just give up, even though at least one book has been written (in the early 70s! The Curve of Binding Energy) arguing that it is doable by one or a very small group of committed people.

Given an (at this point still hypothetical, I think) AI that can accurately synthesize publicly available information without even needing to develop new ideas, and then break the whole process into discrete and simple steps, I think that protective friction is a lot less protective. And this argument applies to malware, spam, bioweapons, anything nasty that has so far required a fair amount of acquirable knowledge to do effectively.

The anger : content ratio in this article is way too high to be worth reading. If you have read a few critical articles about AI, then you have read this guy's critiques, albeit with less aping of Maddox, and you can safely ignore this article. I say this as somebody who broadly agrees with these critiques.

As far as I can tell, some fraction of Quanta articles are as much a profile of the person as an account of the work, so they send out a photographer. The results are similar regardless of gender. Here are similar treatments given to dudes in the past ~year, for example [1, 2, 3].

[1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/mathematical-thinking-isnt-wh...

[2] https://www.quantamagazine.org/perplexing-the-web-one-probab...

[3] https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-failure-has-made-mathemat...

Here's what looks like a reliable source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/style/2008/09/29/what...

I was curious about this number, so: 10 km^2 is 10mil square meters, Googling suggests that the theoretical maximum energy captured by a square meter of solar panel is well under 0.5 kW, so well under 12 kWh per day. Say 10 kWh for neatness. Then multiplying by 10mil gives 100mil kWh. More Googling suggests that 10 TWh is a comfortable lower bound for daily world energy usage, but 100mil kWh is 0.1 TWh.

So maybe 1000 km^2 is more like right order of magnitude. That's still tiny, about Hong Kong-sized. Even 100000 km^2 is about South Korea.

"whole point of being alive" is maybe exaggerating for something that most people are demonstrably uninterested in paying more than a very small fraction of their income to consume?