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tim-kt

186 karma · joined July 6, 2024

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tim-kt··on Will it be a golden age or a dark age for mathematics (and science)?
Well, I meant that I would rather have the "old" Tao blog with less guest posts and people who want both can also subscribe to the separate blog.
tim-kt··on Will it be a golden age or a dark age for mathematics (and science)?
I also feel like many of the current guest posts have overlapping ideas and arguments and so I get less out of each one of them. Maybe a separate blog for endorsed opinion pieces would be appropriate.
tim-kt··on Terence Tao: Math 2.0 [pdf]
You raise good points. I don't have answers for them. We will see how this plays out in the next few months.
tim-kt··on Terence Tao: Math 2.0 [pdf]
I'm about to start a PhD in mathematics. The idea of puzzling out what an AI did to prove something sounds quite boring and unappealing. But yes, maybe it's a viable career path.

I'm just not happy with the presentation of OpenAIs result. Maybe they could have gotten into contact with the people of the research areas of the problems that they solved and worked with them to create a better exposition. Sure, it's a slow process and requires lots of staff. But I believe that they can afford it.

tim-kt··on Terence Tao: Math 2.0 [pdf]
The point is that so far the AI is not doing a good job at explaining the "trick", so we (humans) have to do it. And the way these results are published at the moment (that is, dumping a load of proofs with badly written explanations) is not cooperative to enable this distillation (for example, presenting results at conferences and engaging with mathematicians). I recall Tao working through the disproof of the Jacobian conjecture, stating some steps as "miracles" for lack of better terms. If a human solves a problem in an unexpected way, at least there is some reason why they chose this path, which can help in understanding. This is not available to the same extent with AI generated proofs.
tim-kt··on Mike Tomlin spent 12 years building a Minecraft city
I'm a somewhat ambitious climber (mostly indoor, however) and am in general very active. Factorio is an effective way to keep my brain busy as sometimes I get overwhelmed with my thoughts. But of course it is not the only thing that I enjoy and the remark about autumn was an exaggeration. I'm also very much against considering days "wasted". Sometimes I just need to take a day off and spend it at home, as long as there is a balance.
tim-kt··on Mike Tomlin spent 12 years building a Minecraft city
Factorio is to me what Minecraft is to Mike Tomlin. I give it a full recommendation. Oh, is it autumn already?
tim-kt··on On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem
You're correct that nobody really understands what these huge Lean proofs actually say. However, the initial statement, even for Navier-Stokes, is not very long [0]. Still, you are also right that sometimes the problem statement can be wrong but it is highly unlikely here.

[0] https://github.com/openai/NavierStokesAndEuler/blob/main/Com...

tim-kt··on On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem
They said that a customer would have paid around 15 million for the required compute. I can't imagine that this was not a significant internal spending even with "free" tokens.
tim-kt··on Finding a bug in Dummit and Foote's Abstract Algebra
I mean, yes. But "it doesn't hold that <anything>" is equivalent to "it holds that <not anything>" and since not anything is also anything... Ah, I see.
tim-kt··on Caltech Mathathon – first hackathon ever devoted to research level mathematics
If mathematicians aren't solving problems people are having (which your comment seems to imply), then putting them out of their job with AI is not a bad thing. Of course mathematicians are solving problems, just in a very different way than other professions.
tim-kt··on Finding a bug in Dummit and Foote's Abstract Algebra
It's true precisely because it's vacuous. If you quantify over the empty set, anything is true.

In other words, the statement "for every x in {} it holds that <anything>" is always true.

tim-kt··on Terence Tao explains 6 essential mathematical concepts [video]
You can also think of conditional convergence as convergence under the condition of a specific order. It then turns out that unconditional convergence (that is, convergence where it doesn't matter what order you choose) is equivalent to absolute convergence (that is, the sum over the absolute values converges).
tim-kt··on ArXiv's Next Chapter
But this defeats the point of having open access and usually a DOI points to a journal. Why have a journal that reviews journal articles?
tim-kt··on ArXiv's Next Chapter
I'm in math, so I can't give you an answer on tech journals unfortunately. And for math, I don't really read any specific journal. It's so much work to read and get something out of a research paper in math that I pretty much only read papers that are directly related to my work or have been recommended to me.
tim-kt··on ArXiv's Next Chapter
This reminded me of the fact that one colleague of mine even updates the arXiv version if any errors are spotted and says himself that this makes the arXiv version better than the journal version.
tim-kt··on ArXiv's Next Chapter
If you know the authors of your specific area of research, arXiv is a nice way to read their new papers when they are (mostly) done but the submission to a journal is not finished yet.
tim-kt··on German police probe student poster slur against Merz
Still, technically correct.
tim-kt··on German police probe student poster slur against Merz
Technically, the slogan says "Lick balls Merz" (any balls are fine).
tim-kt··on Making Firefox's right-click not suck with about:config
But this is addressed in the first sentence?

> [...] right-clicking an image while some text on the page is highlighted (to show as many buttons as possible) looks like so

tim-kt··on Motorola announces a partnership with GrapheneOS
Motorola was subsequently sold to Lenovo in 2014.

https://news.lenovo.com/pressroom/press-releases/lenovo-comp...

tim-kt··on Fentanyl makeover: Core structural redesign could lead to safer pain medications
I agree. I would say that I am addicted to caffeine. I definitely get withdrawal symptoms if I don't have a coffee. But since it is so accessible and there are no health risks, it does not affect me negatively to "feed" the addiction.
tim-kt··on What to do before thinking hard
Do you have some practical tips to reduce exposure to unwanted thoughts (except for, maybe, the obvious such as making sure that people/things do not interrupt you while you work by turning off notifications and closing the door)?
tim-kt··on Steam "Offline" status leaks exact login timestamps (Valve: Won't Fix)
> although largely because the point isn't being made precisely

I agree. I wasn't really trying to make a point. But yes, what I am implying is that posts that you can immediately recognize as AI are low effort posts, which are not worth my time.

tim-kt··on Steam "Offline" status leaks exact login timestamps (Valve: Won't Fix)
My comment was not really meant as a criticism (of AI) but more of an agreement that I am also confident in the fact that the post is AI-generated (while the parent comment does not seem to be so confident).

But to add a personal comment or criticism, I don't like this style of writing. If you like prompt your AI to write in a better style which is easier on the eyes (and it works) then please, go ahead.

tim-kt··on Steam "Offline" status leaks exact login timestamps (Valve: Won't Fix)
To me this kind of use of AI (generating the whole article) is equivalent to a low-effort post. I also personally don't like this kind of writing, regardless of whether or not an AI generated it.
tim-kt··on Steam "Offline" status leaks exact login timestamps (Valve: Won't Fix)
It does for me too. Especially the short parts with headings, the bold sentences in their own paragraph and especially formulations like "X isn't just... it's Y".
tim-kt··on Finding and Fixing a 50k Goroutine Leak That Nearly Killed Production
Personally, I just don't like the way this is written. As I said though, I am not an expert and so I may be outside the target group. I think that the original "this is AI" comment is an automatic response which alternatively carries the meaning "this is low-effort" and in that sense I still think that it is valid criticism.
tim-kt··on Finding and Fixing a 50k Goroutine Leak That Nearly Killed Production
While I agree that it's not important whether or not someone uses AI to improve a blog post or create code examples, this blog post seems like the output of the prompt "Write an interesting blog post about a goroutine leak". I don't have the expertise to verify if what is written is actually correct or makes sense, but based on the other comments there seems to be some confusion if what is written is actually content or also AI generated output.
tim-kt··on Finding and Fixing a 50k Goroutine Leak That Nearly Killed Production
This seems like an interesting problem and an interesting fix, but there is so much code and so little explanation that I am lost after "The Code That Looked Perfectly Fine". It also reads very much like AI. And FYI the "output" code blocks are (at least for me on Firefox) a dark gray on a darker gray background, so very unreadable.
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