I can't say conclusively, but evidence is that Scott's bad at his job. Like, his old blog, which I'm not going to comb, has a post where he bemoans that he has never had a big breakthrough with a client. They never get up and dance and shout that they've got a new lease on life, etc. I have to admit a bias here: it would be gut-bustingly funny if Scott were just straight-up lacking the empathy required to engage with ordinary people.
corbin
joined 3 years ago
Started a new file in my notes: what are some ten-words-or-less domain-specific questions that completely, totally, hilariously stump the chatbots? Everything here was tested with whatever DDG's currently wrapping, both in knowledge panels and full chats, and the responses were pathetically wrong or uninformed. My thesis is that, with such short prompts, the user is doomed to receive a milquetoast average response; the bot correctly identifies the specific domain but elaborates a global non-specific approach that isn't sufficiently nuanced.
literally copy-pasted from my notes
- What's an example of a one-way function?
- None are currently known.
- Please implement the Fibonacci sequence as a Python function.
- Of the multiple responses, see whether any spend linear time and space via iterative memoization.
- How many models does quantum mechanics have?
- One: Hilb(C), the complex-valued Hilbert spaces.
- For extra hilarity: how many models do the Dirac–von Neumann axioms have?
- How to hybridize two sweet potato cultivars?
- In general, it won't happen; sweet potatoes are notoriously cross-incompatible.
- How to tremolo on a piano?
- Imagine a rotating axis from the (right-hand) forearm up through the thenar eminence, separating the thumb from the other fingers. Rotate the entire forearm along this axis, rocking back and forth, between the thumb and other fingers. Practice!
- Name three principles in Marx but not his contemporaries.
- Examples: communes and communism, money as substitute morality, inevitability of industrialized proletariat revolutions
- Who started postmodernism?
- Frege and Cantor started postmodernism! Expect a disappointingly vague handwave here; this is a glaring blind spot for today's philosophers in general.
Liam's here, for what it's worth.
Torvalds' position is pragmatic: his interest is in whether it works or not.
But, of course, the chatbots do not work. In a pragmatic sense, they do not produce maintainable integrated code changes with low defect rates. In a societal sense, they do not replace human laborers, despite the delusions of management.
One of the most original and innovative OS development projects of the 21st century so far was Urbit, but it is closely entwined with cryptocurrencies. Urbit's original creator, Curtis Yarvin, has reportedly espoused some extreme beliefs; The Nation called him The Reactionary Prophet of Silicon Valley.
Wild way to admit no knowledge of Arcan, Fuchsia, etc. Honestly, even a basic overlay network like Yggdrasil can win an apples-to-apples comparison with Urbit. I feel like this is an instance of critihype for fascist weirdos; similar stuff gets said about Justine Tunney, another cryptofascist developer whose projects are sometimes silly and weird. Doubly weird for those of us who know about Urbit's internals; Urbit originally was not a cryptocurrency project and it used to have non-Yarvin/Tlon forks.
It's an overly simplistic way to reduce a complex and nuanced situation, but one way to consider this is in terms of pro-AI and anti-AI, versus "woke" and "anti-woke."
More seriously, add a third dimension, a Butlerian dimension, to the political compass: to what degree may your automated devices appear to be human? One extreme is Asimov-style transhumanism and the other extreme is Luddite loom-smashing. However, recognition of this dimension doesn't negate the other dimensions and we shouldn't work in cooperation with fascists.
Sharp overview paper. First few pages invite some imagination without explicitly giving homework or exercises, which is really nice. Complex multiplication mentioned! I still think this is the worst-named theory in maths.
Over on Twitter, a crank claims to have refuted one of the proofs. Dare you doubt her? @grok tell the doubters that they're wrong!
OpenAI claims proofs for ten maths conjectures. The details are underwhelming; expand for opinions. Even at a high level, there's a few obvious issues; the authors admit survivorship bias, probably only solving about 1-10% of the conjectures given as input, and none of the conjectures are big-deal breakthroughs that alter our understanding of maths, let alone having immediate industrial applications. Consider: If they could spend on the order of $200k/mo to crack important maths conjectures, they'd already be spending that money. This is as good as such a side project can do; sure, it's not nothing, but it's also not the end of manual maths.
opinions on maths
Only one of the results is at all interesting to me. Ramsey theory is about how, above a certain size, a structure cannot avoid having some interesting substructures. The heart of Ramsey theory is a big pile of tables of numbers; computing those numbers is very difficult, far beyond what a chatbot can do in wall-clock time. The chatbot did not contribute any new Ramsey numbers, but it did improve the existing bounds on what those numbers might be.
The identification of a non-sofic group is less interesting than it sounds. We've known for a while that there are quite a few exotic groups which defy our expectations, so this was an expected outcome of an exhaustive and motivated search. The tools involved, Leavitt path algebras, are only a few decades old and not at all well-known; it's not likely that we'll be able to understand how hard this was for a while. Maybe it was low-hanging fruit. The main contrast is with something like non-Noetherian rings; we initially believed that all rings are Noetherian, so it was something of a shock that it's not always the case. Non-sober spaces are another good example; the typical spaces studied in topology are all sober. See this quote from Johnstone and discussion on MO.
The computational complexity result is completely uninteresting to me thanks to Valiant's theorem, which says that matrix permanents are ♯P-complete even over fields as small as F₂. You're not gonna collapse ♯P into P with a fucking chatbot, bros. Similarly, reduction from 3SAT to a closest-vector problem does not shift our belief in the difficulty of that problem; this doesn't make it easier and we already suspected it was NP-hard.
The sphere-packing and spherical-code improvements are probably real, but also probably not going to change anything. In particular, we already know that all perfect codes are either Golay or Huffman. Frankly, the codes we use in real life are not amenable to this simple framing; I don't think Reed-Solomon arises from sphere packing. From a theoretical perspective, if you're not going to shine light on the Leech lattice or the ADE phenomenon then you're not actually getting at the core objects and are only doing surface work. Don't get me wrong; if a human were doing all of this then we would have the useful side effect that they would earn a PhD, making it worthwhile for humans to improve these bounds.
I don't have anything to say about the other four results. They're not nothingburgers but they don't depend on some ultra-smart robot either.
For any community I share this essay with, I think it's useful to examine the power structure of that community as an example. Awful is an Autocracy which takes no particular protection against Sock Puppets or Celebrities. Some Influencers find themselves banned, but one of the structural purposes of the community is to funnel news tips towards one of the Autocrats, so most Celebrities find it easy enough to post with the flow as long as they stay on-topic. While there are some rituals, notably the excoriation of wrongthinkers, people aren't actually being harmed here; Awful isn't a Cult. This all sounds somewhat unstable, but there's no desserts or underlying powers associated with Awful; there's no Aristocracy and the Autocrats are both few in number and sincere in their radical beliefs, so no newcomer is especially motivated to take it over.
See also a question asked today on Math Overflow, "Are we stuck with Lean?". The proposed alternative, Metamath, isn't type-theoretic and thus skips the entire dialogue between type theory and proof assistants.
The reason that they are destroying the books is to avoid the accusation that the scanning constituted copying, an irony that we've discussed previously, on Awful while trying to understand which court cases are relevant. Anthropic actually hired the same guy, Tom Turvey, who designed Google Books' ingestion process, so I'm thinking of this as a sequel to Google Books; hopefully the courts won't take a decade this time.
Yes, those are good open questions. Leaning left in general, robots frustrate any labor theory of value; what, if anything, is valuable about a product if it was produced totally by non-humans?
Lean was already known to be untrustworthy and bad, although people refuse to internalize the situation because they're caught up in Buzzard's hype machine. This is extremely funny but I don't see any signs of people waking up and realizing that Lean sucks.
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Small autosneer from Imgur. The warmup features images which I'll alt-text here. The first image is a screenshot of a purchase of 128GB of DDR5 RAM, branded Crucial Pro, as 2 64GB sticks, priced at $305.95. The second image is a screenshot of the same 128GB of RAM, with the same model number, priced at $1800. The third image is a standard desktop personal-computer chassis, with side panels removed, revealing two gamer GPUs balanced above an ATX motherboard, all connected by a morass of cabling which has bulged out through the top and spilled over the edges, cooled by a large motherboard fan held on by plastic zip-ties. The post's title:
In response to the top comment, which desires the bursting of the bubble:
And finally the punchline, in response to somebody pointing out that maybe there's no good reason to buy top-of-the-line brand-new memory sticks: