The quickest way to redraw a screen or otherwise copy a memory region on Spectrum of is to use POP/PUSH instructions while flipping the stack pointer. Good luck getting that with C.
I think it is easy to just roll of a local maximum, however, you may get stuck in a local minimum.
I kid, of course, but I do wonder where the use of local "maximum" comes from, what is maximum there? Why do you not see this as a landscape of hills and valleys where marbles with certain energies may indeed get stuck in deep enough holes... Of course, I just assume and picture gravity pointing down in that landscape, but hey. I'm human, I feel it is expected of me.
There's some interesting stuff in a book on Katathymic Imaginative Psychotherapy where patients are asked to picture a mountain. As far as I remember it's about using the process as diagnostic tool. What does the mountain look like? Is it a steep rising, rugged massif or a shallow hill. Are you looking up, do you picture yourself climbing it, or are you on it's top etc. While it said that it's always a contextual matter and in the conversation there was a suggestion of imagining to climb the steep massif, being potentially related to narcisim. Whenever I think of it i associatr that with casper david friedrichs painting.
This pattern of argument keeps repeating in every place.
Pro tech people: technology removes bottlenecks. Sometimes we use those bottlenecks as a side effect to build muscle and so on. But removing bottlenecks gives us much higher degrees of freedom. It is up to us to coordinate and make use of the technology.
Anti tech people: bottlenecks are fundamentally useful. They should remain and technology shouldn't remove those so easily. Humans cannot coordinate as well when the bottlenecks are removed, so lets not remove them so quickly.
>It is up to us to coordinate and make use of the technology.
1) Coordination is hard, and 2) "us" is a hopelessly nebulous term that appears inclusive but is almost always exclusive.
I think people would have said the creation of social media platforms like Facebook was neither good or bad, but rather it was "up to us to coordinate and make use of".
But did our society really have a say over how Facebook and other social media sites were able to embed themselves in our everyday lives? I would argue the answer is no.
Its not a conspiracy. Its 25 fields medalists who think exactly like how I put it. Ideally, they can just take whatever the technology gives as soon as possible and use it. They don't want it because they don't think the community can rearrange and coordinate such that they can make use of the new found degrees of freedom.
That's literally all there is to it - they don't believe in the rearrangement.
I don’t think the letter is even anti-tech progress. I also don’t think the tech companies are primarily pro-math progress (not that I think you think that). It’s primarily “anti-unnecessarily-destroy-the-human-systems-of-mathematics-just-for-benchmarks-and-marketing”
> … the push by AI companies to solve mathematical problems as a benchmark is detrimental to the science of mathematics, and to the mathematical community. The goals of the AI companies and the goals of the mathematical community are severely misaligned.
Counterpoint: I'm not anti tech at all. In fact, I sell an AI harness for legal.
I think you've set up a false dichotomy. I'd propose to you the middle ground that a lot of us are concerned that VC-backed AI slop is "solving" problems in indigestible ways that hollow out the core. This applies in OSS as well as mathematics.
Please help me understand this and I'm asking this in good faith.
Why can't OpenAI publish whatever it wants. And the math community can use it or not use it. Fundamentally OpenAI's solutions are high signal - they are incentivised to not deliberately mislead people. Let the individuals in math community choose to read it or understand it? If OpenAI wants to publish something, let them do it in the current channels using peer review using whatever time is required.
What's wrong with this? The math community thinks this will destroy previously unwritten ways of prestige allocation and remove incentives that used to exist. I say that the community can rearrange and allocate prestige and time in different ways to maximally use the technology.
>Why can't OpenAI publish whatever it wants. And the math community can use it or not use it.
The "math community" is not an isolated entity that is free from the confines of society. It's made up of lots of people who coexist in a system that requires you to assert your right to live.
Furthermore, the "math community" is overwhelmingly supported by outside donations to keep it running. That's not to say people don't practice math for the fun of it, but that if you're researching problems like Navier-Stokes, you almost certainly are being paid by another party to do so. But those parties may hold new forms of technology over the professional mathematicians head in the name of "productivity", or they may even believe in light of this tech that paying a human to practice math is no longer worth it.
Therefore, mathematicians find themselves coerced by the market to adopt new tools in order to get by, even if the mathematical community largely finds it distasteful.
It feels like the scene from Blazing Saddles where Mel Brooks' character says "We've got to protect our phony-baloney jobs, gentlemen."
If the math community was previously not entirely aligned with what society was expecting, and these changes threaten that previous arrangement, that sounds like a "you" problem for math, not a problem for OpenAI.
If they can't align with society's needs and demands then some creative destruction is coming their way.
Next time you devote 20 years to developing the skills to further humanity only for an unethical group of people to replace you with a stolen version of your work let’s talk.
Well said. It’s on them to adapt. They make it look like it’s society’s problem (which it is) but also put the ball on OpenAI’s court which it shouldn’t.
They can use the new proofs as foundations for future proofs.
But many folks just won't be motivated to attack or help digest solved problems because there's less extrinsic value in doing so. Tao and others argue that it's this human effort that finds human-relatable abstractions which spurn further investigation. Take the humans out of the loop, and they'll stay there, is the argument as I understand it.
I read this multiple times and also recollected the original letter. You can’t really blame me for thinking this is a straaaange request.
“Don’t help me solve my problems because it removes the incentive to be in this field” is how I hear it. Honestly.
I would say the incentives HAVE to change because of new found capabilities.
Imagine accountants asking companies to reconsider producing calculators because we used to value accountants for how well they did arithmetic!!
Edit: my main point is that the math community has full agency to do what it wants with new found tech. Instead, asking to change external entities like OpenAI to be careful with releases is a strange thing to do. Why not change yourself and adapt?
You're describing an improvised surgery on a living organism. Developing a complex system involving humans that is productive and doesn't collapse is extremely hard, so if it ain't broke don't fix it.
Might have to do with the circumstances of Open AIs conduct that was quite sketchy to say the least?
There is 25 people who see it as their responsibility to use their status in the field of maths to weigh in on public discourse regarding that field.
Fields medalists aren't made on some Fields factory. These are 25 people from different backgrounds, generations, educational institutions and countries. It's kind of incredible you guys think they decided to collude against OpenAI rather than simply addressing a concern about their field they believe is important.
Never said they were colluding. I said I have no patience for incumbents asking for restrictions on a technology that threatens the value of their expertise.
The Math community can "not use" a proof? How would that work? It's a little like coloured functions (async etc) - you have 'human proved' vs 'machine proved'?
I'm pointing out that the way Mathematics works as a discipline is that a new proof builds on existing proofs. If we have a bunch of machine-generated proofs, then a human Mathematician has to decide whether to reference any relevant machine proof that has been put out there.
If, as you suggest, human Mathematicians 'choose to ignore' a machine proof, then another human decides not to, what then? Mathematics bifurcates into 'pure human' proofs and 'mixed machine-human' or maybe 'pure machine'?
Consider that 'calculator' used to be a title for a role a human used to do. That went away, which is probably fine as there were other jobs and likely it was tedious.
Then consider that "just adapt" could be "adapt or die", and that maybe, just maybe there is no way to adapt to well-funded corporations churning out millions of proofs a minute.
I don't know, maybe AI companies have "agency" to not break everyone else's stuff, just to get more funding and a higher share price?
The way you get out of a local maximum is to force yourself to try something radically new every so often, even if what you were doing before was working just fine.
This is the 'stochastic' part of 'stochastic gradient descent,' and it's as important for human minds as it is for ANNs. These math wizards seem to be stuck in a rut of their own digging.
This isn’t true, as there are plenty of things proven beyond reach.
And plenty of things, eventually solvable, can create major problems that could both be avoided and the problem solved by taking a much better path.
Having technology and the ability to safely and sanely use the technology needs to progress together at a similar rate. The failure to do this is even a reasonable and common solution to the Great Filter. Jared Diamonds book “Collapse” has ample examples of cultures that wiped themselves completely out via not having this balance, so it’s not simply a theory.
as a society of researchers we've tended to cultivate pretty effective strategies for escaping local maxima. I think of it like ants, where you can see if you place an obstacle in between their nest and a foot source, they develop a path that loops around it. if you remove the obstacle, for some time they continue to follow the old looped path. However, some ants deviate and go around at random, exploring. eventually by chance one happens to find a quicker route. he gets a couple of his friends to follow him, by pheremone, and over time more and more take the quicker route, and they end up abandoning the old route
It works this way with research, with most following the current trends, and some curious souls searching around for other ideas, be they contrarians, dreamers, or just convinced of some strange truth. But if we're right, signs tend to slowly begin to point their way, and we can shift the whole hulking edifice of science towards their point of view.
The problem of llms is that while they may be able to find a shorter route, we can't follow them unless we understand the route. So the forces that slowly begin to change everyone's behavior are lost
The letter is not incompatible with “pro AI in math” unless one thinks arguing against extreme behavior such as corporations using millions of dollars to scoop results makes one “anti AI”, which is not a reasonable stance in my opinion.
> AI offers the potential of enhancing and accelerating genuine mathematical study and understanding. Mathematics as a profession will need to adapt to these changes in several ways. However, whether these changes ultimately benefit the field or have a destructive effect will in large part be determined by the decisions of the humans in control of this new technology.
You can say it about becoming collectively overdependent on any technology. And I think there's a good case to be made that a similar phenomenon is true for other technologies e.g. over-reliance on (normal) computers has done similar things in my opinion, at least in my field of physics, where you get a more precise result but much less insight.
It is getting a lot harder for those people to justify using OpenAI to assist such endeavours. Afterall, OpenAI might just front-run you if they hear a rumor you solved some marquee problem that they can brag about in PR campaigns.
And because driving is slower and less convenient than public transit there. Seriously in Berlin, Paris or London I would prefer the public transit options in nearly all of my trips.
Yup, the arrogance when barging into unfamiliar domain that was previously reserved mainly to physics grads seems to have spread everywhere. I also had people opining on my expert area via their LLMs and the problem is they can't even ask the model the right question, let alone evaluate the nuance of their answer.
As an unfamiliar, I find it interesting how you specifically called out physics grads in the pre-LLM era. Is that just snark or is there some widespread truth / stereotype of that behavior?
Physics, and to a large degree pure mathematics, has attracted a critical mass of the personality type that needs to feel like the smartest person in the room in any given situation. It has given them a slightly notorious reputation in academia.
As a mathematician, this is far from my experience of actual professional mathematicians, because they encounter people much smarter than them quite often. Maybe more true among graduate students, however.
I don't know why mathematicians got lumped in with physicists further down the thread. In my experience this is a well known stereotype of physicists and while of course not universal you don't have to look very hard to see where it came from. In my experience mathematicians stay very much in their lane and often seem to be overly modest even within it.
The best/smartest professionals I meet operate this way (because we know we're wrong quite a bit and don't know everything). It's definitely a personality trait. Inquisitive, curious, intelligent, but also there's some metacognition involved where we can be confident in what we do NOT know.
In contrast, I studied chemical engineering for a short stint. First year, first semester chemistry classes and labs were riddled with these types of students. Tell you you're wrong, IQ 197, scoff when you ask a question, etc...
Listen, if you're the smartest person alive that's fantastic, but please don't talk down to me or the mere mortals that I prefer to hang around with. We get along much better and have a lot more fun saying "I don't know, let's find out".
From a one-time physics grad student, I do think there advantages to being ... like this.
The flip side of being confidently wrong sometimes is that we treat understanding new systems as something approachable. So, yeah, it's annoying that we don't stay in our lane, but, from my boss's perspective, I'm the only one who's actually willing to just read code, investigate, possibly read a paper, and figure out what's going on instead of punting and saying it's someone else's turf I'm blocked until they get back to me.
Like, ultimately you can't be a knowledge worker by just waiting for answers and instruction from experts and relaying them back and forth. Eventually you have to understand something. And part of that process is being wrong and annoying people.
Like your sibling comment I saw this mainly with physics people doing data science:
> Eventually you have to understand something. And part of that process is being wrong and annoying people.
There is nothing more frustrating as a colleague than having a smart person walk in, insist you're all wrong, and then burn all the energy and goodwill in the organisation having to rebuild absolutely everything from the principles they currently understand because they refuse to listen to the experience that has built up already (in the entire field, let alone the organisation), only to produce something worse on every dimension than what already existed.
But there is a difference between not listening to experience and examining whether the resulting implementation/decisions based on the experience are actually valid. I doubt that someone smart (as you put it) would deliberately want things redone because they don't understand it, that's a trait borne of arrogance not intelligence.
At least in my experience (as a physics grad), me and all my fellow grads are much more likely to apply Chesterton's fence and then make decisions than not doing that and steamrolling existing decisions.
> I doubt that someone smart (as you put it) would deliberately want things redone because they don't understand it
You're actually doing the problem behavior right here: denying the validity of the experience of seeing exactly this happen, not as a one off, but repeatedly in completely separate situations and institutions.
> that's a trait borne of arrogance not intelligence.
I mean the problem is they're arrogant. The two aren't mutually exclusive, far from it.
My point is that wanting things redone because you don’t understand it is dumb behaviour, not smart behaviour.
There wasn’t even a denial of the validity of experience, I was just trying to examine the problem - if this behaviour is something you see often exhibited by “smart” people then: either you are unable to convince them of your side of the argument for different reasons, or you are not actually arguing with smart people. Do you see the distinction?
> The two aren't mutually exclusive, far from it.
Intelligence and arrogance are somewhat contra-indicative. While you can be intelligent and arrogant, you can’t really learn things without the humility to say you don’t know stuff. In my experience, most physics grads I know constantly say they don’t know stuff, way more than people from other disciplines.
> My point is that wanting things redone because you don’t understand it is dumb behaviour, not smart behaviour.
Smart people can do very non smart things when they feel their status as smartest-person-in-the-room is threatened, which is the entire point.
> There wasn’t even a denial of the validity of experience, I was just trying to examine the problem - if this behaviour is something you see often exhibited by “smart” people then: either you are unable to convince them of your side of the argument for different reasons, or you are not actually arguing with smart people. Do you see the distinction?
Now you're gaslighting, bluntly.
> Intelligence and arrogance are somewhat contra-indicative.
I've never seen any evidence of this, but a _lot_ that many physics (and pure mathematics) grads are enormously more arrogant than the general population, enough that the trend under discussion has actual basis.
> The flip side of being confidently wrong sometimes is that we treat understanding new systems as something approachable. So, yeah, it's annoying that we don't stay in our lane, but, from my boss's perspective, I'm the only one who's actually willing to just read code, investigate, possibly read a paper, and figure out what's going on instead of punting and saying it's someone else's turf I'm blocked until they get back to me.
Eventually you have to understand something. And part of that process is being wrong and annoying people.
GP here is suggesting that accepting established status quo at face value (i.e relying solely on other people's experience/letting them deal with problems you face in their domain without being able to examine why they arrived at the decisions they did) can lead to worse outcomes, and I agree.
Your response was that it is frustrating to have someone walk in and question things (precisely what GP is suggesting), only to have the final product of whatever decisions these people make be worse than the status quo (not what GP is suggesting).
I responded by saying - there is a difference between not listening to experience and examining whether the resulting implementation/decisions based on the experience are actually valid.
You did not address that. Is there not a difference between these two things? GP is suggesting to do the latter, not the former. i.e question why things are the way they are, crucially not that people should make decisions based on things we don't understand about the status quo.
You only responded to - * I doubt that someone smart (as you put it) would deliberately want things redone because they don't understand it, that's a trait borne of arrogance not intelligence.*
Your response claimed that I am denying the validity of your experience, when I made no such statement. All I said was there is a difference between questioning things and forcing decisions based on things they dont understand - smart people don't do the latter, arrogant people do. Someone doing what you are suggesting, is not doing what GP is suggesting, they are different. The former is smart, and the latter is not smart.
When I pointed this out here: I was just trying to examine the problem - if this behaviour is something you see often exhibited by “smart” people then: either you are unable to convince them of your side of the argument for different reasons, or you are not actually arguing with smart people. Do you see the distinction?
You accuse me of gaslighting you.
> Intelligence and arrogance are somewhat contra-indicative.
There might be a trend of this in academia (which is where the xkcd joke stems from), but in my personal experience I dont see this much in industry, and you can disagree with that.
I also don't see an xkcd joke being an actual basis of anything either. You are making declarative statements - but a _lot_ that many physics (and pure mathematics) grads are enormously more arrogant than the general population, enough that the trend under discussion has actual basis. - without any backing of this other than anecdata, and I was pointing out a different anecdotal experience.
> You only responded to - * I doubt that someone smart (as you put it) would deliberately want things redone because they don't understand it, that's a trait borne of arrogance not intelligence.*
> Your response claimed that I am denying the validity of your experience, when I made no such statement.
But it is exactly what you are doing in the exact quote of yours you even put there.
I am being nice, but it's quite clear you are a near perfect example of this stereotype (if actually a relatively polite one), right down to the wall-of-text when cornered.
I'm being nice too and all I've been trying to do in this thread is point at a distinction between GP's point and yours which you seem unwilling to engage with.
It is valuable to ask questions about why things are the way they are in order to understand the fundamentals of it vs we should change these things because I am 'smarter than you' and I don't understand why things are done this way (which I called dumb, and not smart). Perhaps the issue is that these two behaviours are easily confused.
I had to write the long comment to illustrate this difference. I'm saying in mine and GP's definition doing what you are suggesting people usually do is not smart, its dumb, and that is not what GP or I are suggesting people do.
> It is valuable to ask questions about why things are the way they are in order to understand the fundamentals of it vs we should change these things because I am 'smarter than you' and I don't understand why things are done this way (which I called dumb, and not smart).
But you expressed doubt of stated (and frankly not even remotely subjective) experience, so if we dropped you in an organisation your immediate response to anything you don't understand is "That doesn't match my mental model, so I doubt it actually happened", followed by either everyone giving up or you insisting everyone persuade you of absolutely every last detail of everything. It's enormously tedious, and the reason it comes across as arrogant is the demands put on everyone else to explain everything to you because you clearly see everyone else as incapable of the same level of insights that you are, all the while you are telling people what they experience is them being mistaken.
Just look at the way you questioned whether or not I could tell if someone is actually smart or not. It's just plain insulting. And it's not just me, it's everyone that has this same experience which forms the basis of the stereotype.
You seem to be imputing a lot of intent into my comment and then extending that to value judgements about smartness etc. I don't know what any of this has to do with what GP was saying. Yeah, there's a balance between questioning everything and questioning nothing, but there are a lot of bureaucratic things that happen in organizations and its generally a good thing to question certain things that don't have clear explanations, isn't there?
The doubt was simply about whether or not what GP is saying is smart behaviour to exhibit - Eventually you have to understand something. And part of that process is being wrong and annoying people. is the same behaviour that you are saying you've experienced ( i.e you are talking about different things).
I'm not even questioning if you can tell if someone is smart or not - its just obvious that forcing decisions based off things that are not understood is not a smart thing to do - which..we all agree on -, and neither I nor GP were saying people should do this?
Maybe I could've phrased it better but my whole point was GP says X, you are saying Y. I think there is a distinction between X and Y and I doubt that the people GP is talking about are the same people you are talking about (hence, smart as you put it vs smart as GP put it).
I see you don't understand the point, and you're doing that thing of imposing on me trying to help you understand it, which seems highly unlikely to work. Going back, again, to your quote:
> I doubt that someone smart (as you put it) would deliberately want things redone because they don't understand it
And yet that is quite simply exactly what I have seen multiple times in multiple organisations on multiple continents, but for some reason you "doubt" this because it doesn't fit what you think of as "smart behaviour" when spelled out like that, and then spend ages arguing that now there's no intent to this comment? Or any of the others . . .
I am going to do what I always end up doing in such situations, of just giving up and walking away, which every normal person does way earlier in proceedings. Ils sont fou ces physiciens.
Its clear that you are taking great offence to that particular quote and determined to misunderstand my point due to your pre-existing bias, despite my many attempts to clarify it, so let me finish the quote for you.
I doubt, that someone smart (as you put it) ..and not as GP put it..who..would deliberately want things redone because they don't understand it..are..the same people that GP is talking about when they say there are advantages to being "like this".
This is no longer fruitful, but I only hope that this thread might to be a reason to more charitable in your interpretation next time regarding such a discussion.
It's possible to step out of your area of expertise in a way that's confident but also humble. Arrogance is not necessary. The person who signs everyone's paychecks might be making it mandatory, but that's not quite the same thing.
> we treat understanding new systems as something approachable
And, computer scientists, mechanical engineers, and chemical engineers don't?
> from my boss's perspective, I'm the only one who's actually willing to just read code, investigate, possibly read a paper, and figure out what's going on instead of punting and saying it's someone else's turf I'm blocked until they get back to me.
Humblebrag alert! This has little to do with being a physics grad student, and much more to do with your motivation.
I guess all I'm doing here is arguing that a little hubris can help a person avoid being timid, and far be it from me to say that computer scientists, mechanical engineers, and chemical engineers have not been imbued with any hubris by their educations.
You can get pretty much all the same benefits with additional upside and fewer downsides by just showing curiosity and eagerness to learn from others' expertise. Yes, on the internet you might get better answers by being confidently wrong rather than asking for help, but when talking to other humans directly you'll get a lot more people who will just try to end the conversation as quickly as they can if you're arrogant, whereas people tend to respond really well to respecting their intelligence and experience.
I've personally found that doing the opposite of what you say and being willing to look like the dumbest person in the room by asking whatever questions I need to for my own understanding often ends up working out quite well; people are often wonderfully willing to share their knowledge with me even if I feel like I'm asking something very basic as long as I'm actually being friendly and humble, and there are plenty of times where there have been others who told me they have same question but didn't feel comfortable asking.
In some ways, it's similar to when I played bass in two different bands in college. In one of them, I was probably the most talented musician in the group, and it was fairly boring for me to practice with them, but we needed it as a group, whereas the other was with a friend of mine who was an insanely talented guitarist possibly more talented in music than pretty much anyone else I ever met. I loved practicing in the second one because I'd learn so much from him just by exposure and getting to pick his brain, but I imagine it got boring for him sometimes as well having to wait for me to "catch up" to what was easy for him. Being the smartest one in the room feels like it would get old after a while, but having smarter people around to learn from is endlessly engaging.
It’s not about being in your lane. It’s about approaching things with an open mind plus the desire to solve the problem instead or proving yourself right.
Yeah, I guess my point is that IMO a lot of people have so little interest in solving the problem that they aren't even approaching it at all, open mind or no.
It's not my experience that I'm constantly arguing with people, for what it's worth. I get positive feedback for being willing to work on areas of the codebase I'm not already familiar with, and develop an understanding of areas of the codebase no one is familiar with.
It is quite possible to be wrong and not annoy people, and it's not even terribly difficult to learn. It does require a bit of humility and introspection though.
You don't have to not stray into areas you don't understand, but be humble when doing so - if you think something is being done in a stupid way, you probably don't understand it yet.
I think that's a common trait of tenured academics in the top 100 universities in the US. Don't know about Europe and elsewhere though. Not so much of nontenure track sorts who do all their dirty work.
I've experienced it in industry, too. I recently got out of data science in part because I got tired of working with people who, emboldened by their PhDs in some completely other field, liked to patiently but condescendingly mansplain common, basic misconceptions about my area of expertise to me.
(And it got so much worse once they started using LLMs to aid them in their efforts. Glazing as a service is a hell of a drug.)
So much easier, now that I am a lowly software engineer and can't be held responsible for a certain class of decisions, to just step back and let them be wrong.
Not the parent, but it's half joke half truth. Anyone who's done a lot of "first principles" work falls into this trap a bit, it's an issue across stem fields. Most grow out of it, or at least learn to qualify their statements for the audience.
I suspect the person you replied to only happened to see that from physics grads. I have seen it in all sorts of people and I sometimes did it myself when I was young (I am not a physics grad).
Its snark/stereotype, but there is some truth. But my take, is physics sort of took over a lot of chemistry, biology.. and to them its the answer to all questions, because in the end it just molecules. There is some truth to that but..
I hypothesize that with more people on a daily basis encountering information and claims that require those skills, there will be a time in the future when those skills are much more enhanced.
I sadly share this as a physicist. To be fair, sometimes this arrogance can be useful. I worked at the boundary between domains my entire career where there aren't "experts" per se. But yeah, barging into an established domain without some humility generally leads to embarrassment - especially Nobel winners (e.g. https://www.newsweek.com/nobel-prize-winner-who-doesnt-belie...)
Currently, the leader of USA national AI policy (Trump admin and OpenAI) is a history Bachelors with no technical training or advanced training of any kind, Dean Ball.
I find Dex to be decent enough. Its biggest limitation is that it runs Android apps, but for doing stuff in a browser on a big screen and multitasking with some other apps that are tolerable to use that way it's pretty good.
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