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viccis

2,582 karma · joined October 31, 2023

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viccis··on 100+ reactions to 100+ solutions
I think this response makes unwarranted assumptions about the ideologies and goals of the people you're talking about, which is not even supported by most of these quotes in the linked page.
viccis··on 100+ reactions to 100+ solutions
I think human mathematicians would be more enthusiastic if these frontier labs were putting out new interesting open problems. As some of them are pointing out in the responses, the purpose of having big open questions is often more about the tools and techniques used in solving them. If some can be gleaned from the AI proofs then great but, if not, the only real outcome for some (not all) of these results is that humans won't be able to develop those techniques.

If OpenAI were coming up with interesting problems that everyone could explore as they foreclosed all these existing ones, I don't think the response would be as critical. Obviously, that's much more difficult and doesn't tie into the only telos of these companies (having a huge IPO to make all their investors and equity holding employees rich).

As usual (at least, as of recently), Terry Tao's assessment is measured but trenchant. Mathematical research has been a human process of improving understanding, to an extent that if you go far back enough in time, it was not distinguished from "philosophy". Part of that involves (involved?) ac academic engagement with the pursuit of knowledge, which means that results are discussed, presented, picked apart, etc., in a community of other people in pursuit of knowledge. The end result being the sum knowledge that humanity possesses grows. The way these results were dumped unceremoniously bypasses all of that. And, because we have all seen what regard the tech leadership class have shown for humanity, even in much more concrete and significant ethical questions than "is it ok to destroy the academic community", such as "is it ok to lower the friction to surveilling and/or enacting violence on society to the extent that it's all encompassing", I think it's pretty reasonable that their complicity in the latter will extend to the former.

I should point out that this is not a categorical treatment of AI results. I think about outcomes. Would I be angry if OpenAI dropped full contents of all the Vesuvius Challenge scrolls? Obviously not.

viccis··on Classic PC demoscene productions running natively in the browser
>gatekeeping

Opinion ignored.

viccis··on OpenAI Withdraws 3 Math Papers
AI obliterating your field of study was most definitely not considered a risk with majoring in math 10 years ago.
viccis··on OpenAI Withdraws 3 Math Papers
Based on what I've heard from my math friends in academia, every talented undergrad who was set on going to grad school for math has switched to something like consulting internships or fintech, even if they were really passionate about math, because they don't want to spend another 7 years or so just to wind up jobless.
viccis··on Incident with Git Operations, Pull Requests and Actions – Resolved
It's free and you can get it up and running pretty much instantaneously with a coding agent. That's it.

They really should be partitioning their infrastructure so that their paying customers are not in the blast radius of outages from the legions of repos running their 700 test vibecoded regression suite every time they change a config file.

viccis··on Previously unheard recordings of John Coltrane, captured by Frank Tiberi
Chord scale theory is born out of modal harmony. No idea what you're talking about lmao
viccis··on Extra Big Ass Intelligence
If it doesn't look like slop to you, I might have some electrolytes to sell you for your plants.
viccis··on A Staff Engineer's Guide to Inventing Work
As a platform team member:

"almost never a product manager handing you roadmap"

Oh well wake me up from my dream vacation.

viccis··on Previously unheard recordings of John Coltrane, captured by Frank Tiberi
Absolutely. The definition of "harmony" doesn't begin and end with functional harmony.
viccis··on Previously unheard recordings of John Coltrane, captured by Frank Tiberi
Rich can easily be given with an example rather than purely aesthetics. Coltrane introduced more advanced harmonic movement via "Coltrane changes" as one example. It had been done in one-off cases in classical music (like just about anything), and occasionally in show tunes (Have You Met Miss Jones) but Coltrane was the first to isolate the specific pattern and make it into a reusable substitution technique to reharmonize other tunes.

Aside from that, Coltrane's contribution to modal jazz is significant. Though not singularly from him (or anyone else), he contributed quite a few standards and recordings to a style that was a pretty radical and rich departure from functional harmony. And if you don't consider the harmonic system this resides in (Russell's LCC is a common one used to analyze it) as "rich" then I think you might be too harsh a critic.

viccis··on Previously unheard recordings of John Coltrane, captured by Frank Tiberi
Also a jazz musician and I find that it depends on what time frame you're talking about. I like him a lot up to the very early 60s, and then he loses me around this point. I prefer the direction other hard bop players took at this time. Coltrane benefited greatly imo from Tyner's rock solid comping and Jones' aggressive drum work. His sax soloing got a bit too interested in dense excess, often fairly inscrutable even before he drifted into free jazz. Opinions absolutely vary on this point though. I think it still sounds good even if it's not what I reach for.

>an entire school of derivative jazz players had long since developed upon and retroactively made his innovations feel far more common

The worst of this to me is at straightahead jazz jams when sax players run out of ideas or lose the form and then just start honking lol

viccis··on Previously unheard recordings of John Coltrane, captured by Frank Tiberi
>And "rich" harmonies doesn't really mean anything.

I can't even begin to comprehend how you can't understand that someone can write harmonically rich music.

viccis··on How I changed teaching after AI managed to do all my homework assignments
It's crazy that we went from "we found a significant number of students used AI in our course and gave them a 0" to "yeah they all use it we can't stop it". Basically just accepting widespread cheating, normalizing and accepting the complete abandonment of the first lesson in ethics we are taught and held to in academia.

I know this is absolutely impossible because colleges and universities have headed in completely the opposite direction, but the solution: Literally just expel them. Just like they did when people cheated when I was in college. Don't make it a small punishment so that they turn it into a risk/reward assessment. Colleges are overpopulated anyway; just trim the fat of students who shouldn't be there. Do a follow up oral exam interview about their project and if they can't explain what someone like me spent 30+ hours building and can speak about for 4 hours if asked, then expel them. They can make your coffee at the nearby Starbucks, who cares.

If you don't do this then understand that you are telling your students not using AI that they will need to begin cheating like the others to be able to keep up with the changes. OP mentioned they massively increased the scope of their assignments, which means OP is forcing their students to use AI now.

viccis··on Does Georgism work? Five years later
If you ever played Monopoly, you were intended to learn a bit about it whether you knew you did or not.
viccis··on Plan mode is dead
I don't use Plan mode because I plan out work with a ticket based approach (that also works as a memory store), but I wish there were some kind of Plan mode like harness feature to try as hard as possible to stop it from beginning to code. With the newer models, I have started to have a lot of trouble with them proceeding through the QA with me where I scope out the work and refine requirements and then immediately begin to do the work rather than either making tickets or giving me the full plan to thumbs up like I tell them to do.

So it sounds like we use it somewhat similarly, just taking a glance at it before the work starts, and that's becoming harder to do in my experience. It is important because problems with the overall plan or strategy end up magnified the further you proceed with development.

viccis··on Markdown in /src
Remember that 20 commits ago is like 12 hours ago
viccis··on Pentagon says overreliance on AI contributed to missile strike on Iran school
I actually ended all govt contracts I was working on after this and ended my clearance forever. This was my "I can't keep working for them" moment. One of the purest examples of the US operating on ISIS levels of morality that exists.
viccis··on Markdown in /src
Already happens in my experience. I'll try to figure out why it keeps doing this one thing and it turns out it's from some poorly advised info it put in a markdown file 20 commits ago that CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md tell it to treat as gospel.
viccis··on Claude Opus 5.5
So it beats Fable 5.1, by quite a bit, on every metric? Interesting.

Might have to use my $20 Claude sub some more. I was moving away from it to a $100 OpenAI one to avoid the Claudese and poor token efficiency of Opus 5, given that I couldn't use Fable 5.1 with my tier, but this is worth trying out.

viccis··on MiMo-v2.6-Pro: Intelligence, Performance and Price Analysis
People often use a bunch of subagents, poor context management (though Codex's tight context limits and constant compaction tend to mitigate this), a bunch of projects at once, etc., as well as not using workflows that do heavy planning once up front and then consult it rather than thinking endlessly about what to do during the implementation part.

It's also the case that working on massive codebases is just a different beast. If they've been slopmining a monorepo for months with 200x, then their codebase is probably Lovecraftian at that point and requiring extensive effort to iterate on.

viccis··on What It's Like to Work in One of America's Data Centers
>But... data centre work is horrid, dirty, hot, and underpaid for what it is

You left out "loud" haha. Just the nonstop buzz; it's like you're working at an airport tarmac or something.

viccis··on MCP was always a bad idea?
That's where you are completely wrong. The point of MCP is that you can have an agent and a harness without running raw CLI or Python commands. Very common for relatively lightweight loads that involve shuffling data around between APIs, often run in a tiny serverless task.
viccis··on Jev – a curation of Jev demos on X, tools, skills, and integrations
Honestly just getting it integrated into mobile phone swipe keyboards would be a godsend. If I type "We need to get going " and then swipe the word "now", I really do not think "mower" should be the word it chooses. Present a set of swipe-based likely words and the preceding text message to Jev, or similar model, and pick its highest prob word.
viccis··on Spymarks, not Watermarks
Watermarking has referred to this "spy" use case for quite some time. Digital items purchased for download often have them, for example. Even before the rise of digital downloads, screeners for movies had them.
viccis··on macOS 27: Workaround to avoid downloading AI models and save storage
Yeah I use my 256gb Mac Mini for iOS dev, which has always had enough space for an iPad and iPhone simulator with plenty to spare, but this eats way into that.
viccis··on What happened to the Snowden archive
Not really.

The source of that talking point was a young black protester who wanted real investment into black communities to stop the biggest killer of black Americans: criminals in their own communities. He wanted a structural solution rather than a media circus about an issue (police violence) that is minuscule in comparison to structural racism and would be rotated out of the conversation as soon as the media moved on.

Greenwald's main point seems to be that the conversation about race was used cynically to attack one of his coworkers for completely spurious reasons, and I don't see anything false about that.

If anything, ignoring the cycles of crime and poverty that black Americans are disproportionately victim to in favor of occasional media spectacles is completely on brand for America's dominant right wing neoliberal ideology.

viccis··on MCP was always a bad idea?
Yeah but you're still assuming it's running on someone's machine with a CLI to even use.
viccis··on MCP was always a bad idea?
What if the agent doesn't have a CLI?
viccis··on What happened to the Snowden archive
Yep, exactly. People who aren't super familiar with American propaganda often don't appreciate this enough, but every stupid network here will feature you if you pissed off the other team, and when Biden's necrotic ass is overseeing our waning genocidaire state, anyone who speaks out against his baby annihilation tendencies is going to end up having to slum it up on Fox because they're desperate enough to feature you.
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