Per the dictionary, perhaps. But when people use it online they rarely mean it as a neutral statement about someone’s level of wealth. It’s typically meant to imply unfairness or that the wealth was obtained through unearned advantage.
> Note that this proof while impressive does not add any value to mathematics as a human pursuit.
I don't see how this can be stated with such certainty. We don't yet know what the implications of large scale autoformalization and proof verification will be on the human pursuit of mathematics. I'm open to the idea that it might be a benefit to the human pursuit once the human pursuit adapts.
Interesting that Fable produced the Venus elevation map by training a neural net to generate it. I wonder what the prompting looked like to make that happen, I.e. was this a spontaneous discovery or the result of a specific request.
I fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum of developers the author describes. I use AI daily for limited code writing and lots of debugging. I agree with the author that things go off the rails when you stop truly reviewing its output and just click accept to get the thrill of productivity. I don’t think using AI for debugging means you have to do that though, it’s still a choice. As an AI-human team I have had the experience many times now of debugging an issue in a complex system that I simply don’t think I could have done alone or in a reasonable amount of time. I don’t think this is a reflection of my low abilities - it’s because the AI brings to the table skills that I’ll never have like reading through and correlating huge amounts of logs across many runs of the same system on different compute nodes in a cluster. Once it finds a needle in the haystack I can still take the time to understand and reason about what it found though.
I cannot fathom how people enjoy that book. I appreciate the writing (and love other CM books) but Blood Meridian felt like a gratuitous ordeal to me. I tried watching lit professors lecture about it too but I still just don’t get it.
I love reading, do it a lot of and per my Goodreads I’m “well read”. I’m less convinced how much I’ve learned from all the reading that would make me a better writer though. I definitely fell into the trap of wanting to have written a book myself. I grew out of that but still felt/feel like I want to write. The issue that remains is that I’m just not sure I have anything to say!
What about the fact that due to modern medicine many people now live twice as long and therefore need to stave off the effects of aging, e.g. loss of muscle mass and stability, to have a good quality of life in those bonus years?
> LLMs suggest that human-like "cognition" can be somewhat mimicked by purely mechanical means.
This is not a strike against that hypothesis. Quantum systems can be simulated using non-quantum computers but that doesn't make non-quantum computers into quantum computers. Similarly, mimicking some aspects of human cognition doesn't mean you can replicate all of human cognition with the same method.
It is, yeah. The condition of the subsidy is that up to 60 times a year the electricity company can pull the power from our batteries to cover higher demand. When I said "at a societal level" I was more imagining solar farms and grid level storage though.
Yep. Here in Colorado I installed two powerwalls moderately subsidized by the electricity company. It’s not going to save me meaningful amounts of money even in the long term and I would much rather see energy issues solved at a societal level. But our electricity provider is just unable to reliably keep the lights on through winter and wildfire season, I.e. most of the year. Since installing the batteries a couple years ago our home has stayed warm and lit through two multi-day outages when neighbors have had to go stay in a hotel.
This is not convincing. Many of these are debatable when you actually pull apart what is meant then and now. But there’s also a long list of things that are different about the Roman Empire and US (and the world) today.
As you say, that's just an efficiency play and, as I understand it, doesn't change the behavior of the models beyond perhaps a small amount of sampling noise.
I agree completely - behaviorally the models have changed drastically due to RLHF, RLVR and now maybe even more so due to agentic harnesses. But the mechanism of prediction hasn’t changed, that was all I was clarifying.
Just for the sake of clarity: all LLMs up to today are still only doing next-token/autocomplete. The training process got additional stages to shape the model weights, but standalone LLMs are still deployed essentially identically.
A fascinating thing about the LLM/AI blogosphere and X is watching memetics in real time. An idea like this one propagates on the order of days until everyone that speaks publicly or in workplace meetings about AI is repeating it.
I second this and would add that it's really easy to catastrophically forget things in math. I'm pretty sure that most CS knowledge I have I will retain at a level where I won't forget the general ideas and re-reading materials can quickly refresh the details. This is not true for advanced math. I did a pure math PhD and my own thesis is impenetrable to me 20 years later. It would take months, if not years, of focused effort for me to regain the understanding.
I think this should be coupled with: know when to quit. I've persisted with some things I'm bad at out of stubbornness but have never improved and it's just burned me out.
Indeed. To get "aesthetic" play you would have to mimic real human play for an interesting reason: the space of possible Go configurations and games is so mind-bogglingly vast that all of human history has only ever seen a infinitesimal sample. So any sense of aesthetics is just a consequence of chance and memetics. AlphaZero is effectively exploring a new branch of Go history so its aesthetics are completely different. Although maybe that just shows that the idea of aesthetics here isn't very meaningful.
This is the wrong way to think about mathematical (or any other kind of) creativity in my opinion. In the extremely high-dimensional space of "ideas" (whatever that means) there are almost certainly profound ideas that are the interpolation of existing knowledge, i.e. the curse of dimensionality. It's not at all clear that you need to extrapolate from existing knowledge to be creative.
There are off the shelf supplements that are widely used for this, e.g. BeetElite which contains nitric oxide derived from beet juice. I can testify that they do offer a real performance benefit - in my case I've found them beneficial when running at altitude as a (very) amateur. I'm not sure how/when something like this should become a banned PED.
Oh! I actually thought I tried to be really careful to get that right and somehow still didn't see I'd transposed the j and c. Definitely no harm intended!
I’ve found Coros to be great too. I’ve used my Vertix to track GPS for 48 hours continuously during a race. It’s been beaten up against rocks, soaking wet and filthy for extended periods and still works 100%. Just yesterday it saved me from a minor emergency when I got lost on a new trail and needed to backtrack. After years of use it still has weeks of battery life for tracking daily workouts. I don’t use any of the smartwatch features like notifications though and wear a mechanical watch as my daily driver.