edanm

Turing gave a pretty rigorous definition of the Turing Test IMO. Well, as rigorous as something that is inherently "anecdotal" can be, which is part of the philosophical point of the Turing Test.

I'm a purely amateur mathematician and not a physicist at all, but I completely agree with you that maths is missing this "midway between pop-math and real-math-textbook" kind of book.

One book that I can't recommend more highly is William Dunham's "Journey Through Genius". He picks ten or so the greatest proofs in math over the centuries, then proceeds to give you all the historical background about why they were created, who created them, etc, and then proceeds to give the full details of the proofs themselves. Including showing places the proof is considered wrong by modern standards.

It's my favorite "semi-pop-math" book, I highly recommend it.

> I never heard that. It didn’t seem like 3D-printing ever showed sings of displacing existing ways of manufacturing at scale, did it?

It absolutely was the "promise" the media spun.

I had the relatively unique experience of moving from being an outsider to this field to being an insider. While I was an outsider, my impressions, formed by the media, was exactly that—3d printing would be the next big revolution, in a few years there'd be a printer in every home, etc.

I then joined a company that allocated a lot of resources to 3d printing. It only took me a month or two to realize that the big media claims were absolutely ridiculous, and didn't make any sense as stated. They misunderstood the state of the technology, and misunderstood basic economics and how regular manufacturing works.

That's not to say there's no value in 3d printing or the maker movement. There's a ton of value that's been uncovered. But the specific media dream of "people will be printing their plates at home instead of buying them in the store" was never real.

(Btw, IMO "vibe coding" is absolutely real and revolutionary, likely the biggest revolution in the software industry since, idk, the invention of the computer itself. And AI more generally is, even beyond vibe coding aspect, a revolutionary technology that will change the world in many ways.)

I'm exactly the opposite. It'd been on my todo list for years to one day learn the difference between the different dashes. I kept putting not doing it.

Then came LLMs, and there was so much talk of them using em dashes. A few weeks ago, I finally decided it's time and learned the difference. (Which took all of 2 minutes, btw.) Now I love em dashes and am putting them everywhere I can! Even though most people now assume I'm using AI to write for me.

I agree with the sentiment in the first part of your post. But:

> AI for actual prose writing, no question. Don't let a single word an LLM generates land in your document; even if you like it, kill it.

Why? What's the difference? I'm genuinely curious about your perspective on this. Lots of people can't articulate themselves well, especially if they don't natively speak the language they're writing in. I have my problems with LLM generated text, but you seem to be taking an extreme approach here.

> self assessed developers productivity increases from LLMs are not a reliable indication of actual productivity increases.

I believe the other direction makes more sense; if the studies disagree with self-reported information, it's more likely the studies are wrong. At the very least, it's worth heavily questioning whether the studies are wrong.

This is based on research that happened at our company (Irregular), and I think it's very relevant to know about and to get the word out about this security issue.

Especially given the pervasive use of coding agents, who may without you knowing about it decide to generate a password for you, and it might seem secure but really not be.

> Only one shuffle can exist at a time, the "number of shuffles" is not a number of natural objects but rather a cardinality of a set.

I really don't understand what this means in practice. If there are exactly 50 rocks in front of me right now, I can't talk about 51? It doesn't maintain a direct connection to reality to talk about what would happen if I threw another rock on the pile? Or if that's connected cause another rock exists, what about if I have exactly 20 chickens, and I want to talk about what would happen when another is born? Is this "connected to reality" and "a number of natural objects"? Or "the cardinality of a set" instead?

Why? The number of ways to shuffle 5 cards is a relevant thing to talk about, and is a perfectly fine number we use all the time.

What about 6 cards? 7 cards? At what point does it become "not natural"?

> I wonder if they have measured their results?

This is a notoriously difficult thing to measure in a study. More relevantly though, IMO, it's not a small effect that might be difficult to notice - it's a huge, huge speedup.

How many developers have measured whether they are faster when programming in Python vs assembly? I doubt many have. And I doubt many have chosen Python over assembly because of any study that backs it up. But it's also not exactly a subtle difference - I'm fairly 99% of people will say that, in practice, it's obvious that Python is faster for programming than assembly.

I talked literally yesterday to a colleague who's a great senior dev, and he made a demo in an hour and a half that he says would've taken him two weeks to do without AI. This isn't a subtle, hard to measure difference. Of course this is in an area where AI coding shines (a new codebase for demo purposes) - but can we at least agree that in some things AI is clearly an order of magnitude speedup?

Aaarg I was typing quickly and mistyped. :face-palm:

Thanks for the correction.

Serious question - what kind of example would help at this point?

Here are a sample of (IMO) extremely talented and well known developers who have expressed that agentic coding helps them: Antirez (creator of Reddit), DHH (creator of RoR), Linus (Creator of Linux), Steve Yegge, Simon Wilison. This is just randomly off the top of my head, you can find many more. None of them claim that agentic coding does a years' worth of work for them in an hour, of course.

In addition, pretty much every developer I know has used some form of GenAI or agentic coding over the last year, and they all say it gives them some form of speed up, most of them significant. The "AI doesn't help me" crowd is, as far as I can tell, an online-only phenomenon. In real life, everyone has used it to at least some degree and finds it very valuable.

You're choosing to focus on specific hype posts (which were actually just misunderstandings of the original confusingly-worded Twitter post).

While ignoring the many, many cases of well-known and talented developers who give more context and say that agentic coding does give them a significant speedup (like Antirez (creator of Reddit), DHH (creator of RoR), Linus (Creator of Linux), Steve Yegge, Simon Wilison).

FYI I think you can email dang and ask to delete old posts. Or at least I think he said that once.

It is not possible to vouch for any discussion, afaik. Only comments.

So does getting your kid's ears pierced. So does fixing their teeth for aesthetic reasons.

> The productivity studies on software engineers directly don't show much of a productivity gain certainly nowhere near the 10x the frontier labs would like to claim.

Which studies are you talking about? The last major study that I saw (that gained a lot of attention) was published half a year ago, and the study itself was conducted on developers using AI tools in 2024.

The technology has improved so rapidly that this study is now close-to-meaningless.

What does "actually exist" mean? Does Pi "actually exist"?

> There's just no way in hell ChatGPT at its current level is going to guide you flawlessly through all of that if you start with a simple "I want to build a raytracer" prompt!

This is the entire crux of your argument. If it's false, then everything else you wrote is wrong - because all that the consumer of the book cares about is the quality of the output.

I'd be pretty surprised if you couldn't get a tutorial exactly as good as you want, if you're willing to make a prompt that's a bit better than just "I want to build a ray tracer" prompt. I'd be even more surprised if LLMs won't be able to do this in 6 months. And that's not even considering the benefits of using an LLM (something unclear in the tutorial? Ask and it's answered).

That's awesome! Sounds like a cool tattoo.

And I totally relate on the obsession, I've been a big Sanderson fan for 15 years at this point and read almost everything he's ever written :)

Really? I read both, though fairly far apart, and I never connected them before.

Wow, that's a lot of reading! Cosmere is, what, 20-ish books at this point?

What was the tattoo if you don't mind sharing?

What about letting customers actually try the products and figure out for themselves what it does and whether that's useful to them?

I don't understand this mindset that because someone stuck the label "AI" on it, consumers are suddenly unable to think for themselves. AI as a marketing label has been used for dozens of years, yet only now is it taking off like crazy. The word hasn't change - what it's actually capable of doing has.

I didn't love the opening caricature either.

But, to be fair, that wasn't the kind of critique it was talking about. If your critique guns is moral, strategic, etc, then yes, you can do it without actually trying out guns. If your critique is that guns physically don't work, don't actually do the thing they are claimed to do, then some hands-on testing would quickly dispel that notion.

The article is talking about those kinds of critiques, ones of the "AI doesn't work" variety, not "AI is harmful".

You're seriously insisting that the definition of novel in science only includes things that thousands of people have worked on for decades and haven't solved?

An example problem includes the "Erdos set" problems (see problem 124).

But also, LLMs have solved Olympia problems, see the results of IMO 2025. You can say that these are not interesting or challenging problems, but in the context of the original discussion, I don't think you can discount them as "novel". This is what the original comment said:

> Not so much amazing as bewildering that certain results are possible in spite of a lack of thinking etc. I find it highly counterintuitive that simply referencing established knowledge would ever get the correct answer to novel problems, absent any understanding of that knowledge.

I think in this context, it's clear that IMO problems are "novel" - they are applying knowledge in some way to solve something that isn't in-distribution. It is surprising that this is possible without "true understanding"; or, alternatively, LLMs do have understanding, whatever that means, which is also surprising.

Wait, you're redefining novel to mean something else.

If I prove a new math theorem, it's novel - even though it's unlikely that thousands of humans have worked on that specific theorem for decades.

LLMs have proven novel math theorems and solved novel math problems. There are more than three examples already.

I'm pretty sure parent poster meant they understand Python, the programming language, not that they have the understanding of the animal python.

Right! It's well known that technical people never make mistakes.

The plot is about the people trapped in the Cube trying to figure out their situation and get out.

The construction of the Cube is kind of a backstory, not the main part.

I wouldn't call it the plot of the Cube, more like the setting/world-building.