rubikscube09

right but that's why i did a math phd lol! To be part of that group of humans.

never thought i'd see bonzai records mentioned on hackernews!

How do I know my calculator is outputting the correct answer to a 10 by 10 digit multiplication problem?

who cares what the llm is doing? most of the time when there is disagreement, the llm is right and you are wrong anyways.

loved reading this

that's not nearly as exciting as uncovering something new first yourself, but I agree to some extent. Also that's not something you'll get paid for, it's basically coursework at that point.

yeah but it's fun to discover things with your own brain

The point is that what was once a life's calling is being reduced to a hobby. All these activities were more than hobbies, for example for people like myself solving significant math problems all day or at least for a significant portion of my day was my life's purpose. I felt like I was contributing to something greater than myself. Math can still be done but that feeling is gone now and with it is much of the motivation to do it in the first place.

Ok, but science is not intuitive for humans. Things like hunting, or picking up sticks is because they've been evolved for many hundreds of thousands of years. I'd give science a few thousand years at most. Something something moravec's paradox.

What are the contributions humans can make, other than the usual cop out "steering" answer I hear?

what is the point of organizing results into something other researchers can use if other researchers aren't going to be doing research and research can be delegated to LLMs? (a la - humans are the bottleneck)

what is your "inherent value" to society?

I agree - to quote my goat Paul Halmos:

"Don't just read it; fight it! Ask your own questions, look for your own examples, discover your own proofs. Is the hypothesis necessary? Is the converse true? What happens in the classical special case? What about the degenerate cases? Where does the proof use the hypothesis?"

It's a fight! I envision myself as Jacob wrestling the angel.

Ok, most PhD students don't consistently work 80 hours a week (although a good number occasionally do, say before a paper deadline) - I'll retract that. But they still work very hard, while many are capable of working much higher paid jobs if they wished to.

There can be something satisfying about typing on a keyboard just like writing (calligraphy) can be satisfying. For example, I love writing on a chalkboard. But it's not my primary reason to do what I do. So I think the people commenting will mostly be like that.

I don't understand your last part about the hagia sophia

I will say, as a mathematician who likes to make simulations, this part of GenAI has been a boom.

At the same time, I do wish it wouldn't do my proofs as well lmao

I guess when I said what you quoted, I meant for most people (developed and developing world) throughout history, or at least as long as "work" has existed.

maybe demand will catch up over time. who knows. same thing probably happened with mass production of clothes and whatnot.

Don't really see much of a reason to keep going. LLMs basically have the whole mathematical corpus internalized, and can just practice endlessly through RL self play and autoformalization. Don't really see what my role would be in such a process other than passive appreciation and digestion.

Eh, mathematicians themselves have started embracing it. Terence Tao talks about how LLMs will be on the frontlines, proving new results and humans will just be there to digest and explain them (if the LLMs don't end up being able to do that as well). It's valuable work but not what I really signed up for.

Sure, this is in agreement with some people's view that math will become an empirical science. Basically humans probing/mining the brain of an LLM.

PhD student in math here. Doing LLM math is soulless and takes most of the fun out of solving difficult problems (for the most part - my opinion only, I'm happy to talk to mathematicians who like this kind of work). But ultimately the public funds us to produce and understand as many mathematical results as possible for downstream use (if you ask OpenAI/Anthropic, to cure cancer). In that case it doesn't matter who figures a result whether it be a human, LLM, or dog.

So what are we to do? Follow our duty to the community and the public, which is to produce as many results as possible? Or to follow our duty to ourselves and enjoy and understand what we are doing? To someone like me those things seem to be incorrigably opposed to each other now. At this pint the only option is to quit and find a new domain where human input in problem solving is still necessary.

Sure it is a construct (it's how I feel at least).

I didn't mean to say sewing and knitting weren't impactful - on the contrary, they are analogous to programming: they were impactful but now they're basically hobbies. Maybe there are more developments left in the clothing making process - not sure.

Fair enough. I don't mean to speak for all programmers (I'm not one). In fact I'm an academic so that's probably why I'm upset.

yes, that's my point.

when i say haven't worked a day in their life, I mean it in terms of the aphorism "if you love what you'll do you'll never work a day in your life".

I'm just saying that before programmer feelings used to be loosely aligned with advancing society: fun work (for some people) was useful work. Now that's starting to be decoupled and it sucks when your choices are hate your job and contribute or do fun stuff and don't contribute. Granted this is the dilemma most people have faced, but for people who like their work as it is right now it sucks.

for sure but the point is that sewing isn't really necessary anymore. if all the knitters disappeared tomorrow, the majority of society wouldn't feel it . If (say a few years ago) all SWEs disappeared, that would be a problem for a lot of people. The feeling of impactfulness is gone when things are reduced to a hobby.

probably not, but my main gripe would be that there would be no way to punish anyone if something went wrong with the car, not (necessarily) that human judgement or expertise is still needed as part of the car design process.

So yes, maybe we will all just exist to get sued at the end of the day.

No you're right - I guess I meant moreso that you seemed to be expressing incredulity that people live this way. It's natural to identify with something you spend the majority of your day doing (especially if you like it or perhaps have stockholm'd yourself into liking it)