jebarker

Excellent, thanks for the paper suggestion, I’ve been needing another unnecessary luxury expense in my life!

I wonder how much bias there is in the science here. I certainly can think better with pen and paper versus computer but I’m 45 and my whole schooling through to postgrad was done with pen, paper and blackboard. It seems very plausible that digital natives from childhood will think just as well at a keyboard (maybe better since they’ll be less practiced with pen and paper).

Right. The person you responded to made a statement entirely about “right now” and used the word “currently”. You added in the discussion about the future, they said nothing about that.

Are you suggesting this is isn’t currently true in the conventional use of the word?

I agree with you about not treating programming as a protected skill that has a right to be well paid, but computers were never “supposed” to be anything. They’re in no way inevitable in their current forms and any ideas about how they were supposed to be were just desires.

> Math is not an art

My dictionary says that art is “the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination”. That seems like a definition that applies to math.

> But if it does not solve it, will you really wager 30 years of your life on the possibility that you might be smarter than the AI?

Right now it’s not a terrible bet. If the OpenAI results from the past week are representative then the AI success rate for verified proofs on open math problems is somewhere below 10%. There’s a long way to go before you can assume an AI failure to solve means the problem is unsolvable.

> And will conciseness and readability even matter in the long term?

Fair question. Right now the way for humans to understand code is to read it and that'll be easier if the code is concise and readable. But it's possible that we'll end up in a situation where the code is separate from the explanatory materials that humans need. This is similar to math where we might have impenetrable Lean proofs of theorems and then natural language expositions to explain the proof.

> AI agents can build a whole app and review PRs better than a lot of people

Assuming you're comparing to experienced human developers that are good at what they do, then I think you have to define what "better" means here. It's clear that you can get correctly functioning software faster in many cases, but it's not clear that the design will be better in terms of conciseness and readability or that it's as useful as a foundation for building upon later if nobody understands what's going on inside.

Proponents of in-office working and open plan talk about the benefits of spontaneous conversations. For me I find I just can’t get anything done in these environments and I prefer much more deliberate communication. I wonder what the situation is like in tech companies in Japan today?

This. We’ve just moved the bottleneck from during writing the code to reviewing. The failure mode here is that you can choose to just do a light review since the code “works” but if you had to write the code yourself you would have been forced to consider the design choices and broader implications of the code more.

Most helpful way I know to think about this is: if you’d been given that stock as cash would you have bought the stock. Breaks the cognitive bias of already holding the stock.

It is incredible. Sustaining 15 years at staff level will cost you a lot in other ways though!

I know these are just spit-balled numbers but getting to $25M in 10 years even with $2M annual comp would require pretty risky investment I think. Assuming you spent $300K per year and paid US taxes you’d have about $900K left over. 7% average returns would mean you’d have about $13M saved after 10 years. Getting more than 7% on the whole portfolio is going to require significant risk.

That’s an interesting perspective. I was viewing the challenge here as being driven by the fact that individual agents write worse quality and less reliable code than individual humans. The idea that the challenge is predominantly about integration at scale is different. I’m still unconvinced the medical analogy is necessary though.

Yeah, right now the juice isn’t only about the progress of math - it’s also the advancement of the LLM tech and the marketing benefit to the AI companies which feeds back into developing the tech. Those each have a different juice to squeeze ROI.

I don’t think your second paragraph is a fair representation of what Tao is saying or contradicts his argument. He is arguing that AI can be useful in the service of human understanding in math and the examples you gave are exactly that. Whilst OpenAI just spammed the AI button the mathematicians that engaged with the output were able to progress their understanding about the problems in some ways (some of which they don’t really like). You need both parts for this to be useful to the field. What’s not clear is whether the juice is worth the squeeze: will all the money spent on spamming the AI and human mathematician time spent studying the outputs progress the field “better” than without the AI?

> For example, we don't have a clear analogue for "triage nurse". What would be it?

Triage nurse seems well defined in software engineering, perhaps just without a single title. There are certainly engineers that focus on triaging GitHub issues and then fixing immediate showstopper bugs and/or prioritizing the issue for further attention from other engineers.

That role can be communicated to agents by writing down that description. The risk with saying that the role is “triage nurse” is that you can’t be sure what other roles and allowances the agent will infer it has.

If the correct analogy for a team of SW agents isn’t a team of SW engineers why is that?

At 0.82g/lb and assuming 20% body-fat doesn’t that mean average joe is weighing almost 230lbs? That seems high

It’s unclear to me what point you’re making here - can you elaborate?

e.g. climate change will likely be very important in the coming century

> This year, the airport announced plans to remove the last of the Telecar equipment from the connecting tunnel and refit the space it used to occupy as a pedestrian walkway. The $300-700 million project is scheduled to start early next year

Must be a fancy pedestrian walkway! Also amazing that somehow they can’t estimate the cost to within less than a $400 million difference

Likewise, I already have some regrets about not being as present with the first year of my second kid because of various other life distractions/stresses. Increasingly my biggest fear/worry/anxiety in life is that I just won’t be present for it - which is a self-fulfilling prophecy!

> robotic surgery could be done on anesthetized animals in a mass RLVR way.

well that's an awful image

Survival horror, my favorite genre

That triggered a physical response of tightening in my stomach and heavier breathing due to frustration.

I noticed you edited your original post to point out these “silly” objections. The point of saying “private individuals” is that they have the right to determine for themselves what is a good use of their money and your opinion about whether it’s wasteful is irrelevant. I was assuming you had some ideas about how to reduce the waste but apparently not, you just wanted to tell everyone about your personal preferences for how other people spend their money.

You seem to be suggesting that there's a problem with private individuals spending their money as they see fit because that leads to what you see as wasteful vanity projects. So I'm asking how you think the world should change to compel these individuals to spend on things you believe are more efficient and less wasteful? I would point out that spending $1.075M on food for starving people probably scores more utilitarianism points than an internet cafe though in your zero sum world.

OK - what is the mechanism by which you believe this private individual’s $1.075M should be turned into a public internet cafe?