hliyan

In my view, it's theoretically possible for a combination of the author's iterative prompts + evaluation with Wolfram Alpha to activate the weights that encode the language that describes the constraints on these polynomials (from the faulty proofs) in such a way that the author eventually arrives at this:

((1+xy)^3 z + y^2 (1+xy) (4+3xy), y + 3 x (1+xy)^2 z + 3 x y^2 (4+3xy), 2 x - 3 x^2 y - x^3 z): \C^3\to \C^3

I suspect the LLM was able to synthesize a counterexample because of the availability of a lot of prior work:

The Jacobian conjecture is notorious for the large number of published and unpublished proofs that turned out to contain subtle errors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobian_conjecture#cite_note-...

Thankfully it's not happening in my organization because we happen to have a sane, incremental strategy. But it's telling that you perceive any criticism of AI code reviewer burnout as "sticking your fingers in your ears". Perhaps you might benefit from a closer read of the article.

This part toward the end of the article resonated with me:

If you’re being asked to review huge volumes of terrible AI code, just assume that the organisation is going to burn you out and fire you. You will not convince the person drowning you in 2000 line PRs to stop. Start looking for a new job as if you have already been fired. I have seen this happen many times now

I suspect we will see this phenomenon more and more as organizations more widely adopt agentic development.

I remember an Apple ad from a while back where a hydraulic press crushes a bunch of musical instruments. Your "grey goo of the average" analogy resonates for me because these videos feel like what would ooze out if we take all relevant videos that were produced by humans and then crush them under a generative press.

Helium is a noble gas. It forms no bonds and is unable to produce even a simple molecule, let along the complex ones needed for life.

Will repeat what I wrote elsewhere:

The default visual circuits in our brains may have evolved to optimally handle fractal patterns and textures. Straight lines, geometrical figures and featureless surfaces may require activation of less optimal circuits. Anecdotally, I find being in environments made of featureless geometrical figures uncomfortable to be in.

The default visual circuits in our brains may have evolved to optimally handle fractal patterns and textures. Straight lines, geometrical figures and featureless surfaces may require activation of less optimal circuits. Anecdotally, I find being in environments made of featureless geometrical figures uncomfortable to be in.

Isn't this what we used to do with Geocities a quarter century ago? And with most other websites that offered FTP upload? You didn't have to be very technical -- there were windows FTP clients where you could just type in the IP, username, password and see an explorer-like view, onto which you could just drag and drop your HTML and image files.

This is a very charitable reading of why The Economist does not have bylines.

The Economist Group is largely owned by the Agnelli family ("Italy's Kennedys"), Canadian billionaire Stephen Smith, the Rothschilds and others, which is likely a significant factor in those biases.

It's one of the main ideas -- I'm still only about a 3rd of the way through.

If my understanding of Kant is correct, then all analysis (i.e. taking things apart) is synthesis (i.e. putting things together) in reverse, and therefore the latter is a necessary prerequisite of the former. According to him, our minds very first brush with the real world (whatever that might be) is in the form of the "manifold" of raw sensory signals sans any form whatsoever (not even spatial or temporal arrangement), and the only way we can make sense of that manifold of signals or data is to reduce them through a process of combination by commonalities and separation by lack thereof. All objects, categories and concepts ultimately spring from this process of synthesis, some of it involuntary (e.g. the arrangement of certain inputs into three dimensional space) and some of it volitional (e.g. the positing of concepts and categories). Analysis is taking these constructs apart, much like one takes apart a mechanical watch. Except that the exercise tells us more about how our brain puts things together than what the thing actually is.

We had these in Sri Lanka, some of it translated to the local language and published by local publishers. I can't remember whether it was specifically a Mir publication, but I have fond memories of Y. Perelman's Mathematics can be Fun -- beautifully printed and hardbound, with meticulously drawn line art illustrations covering various applications of mathematics.

If the choice is between micro-transactions and ad-driven content (ads -> engagement maximization -> sensationalization + enshittification -> social and industrial decay), I'll take the former.

Remember: from a business's perspective, advertising has positive ROI. Which means you as the consumer pay for it anyway. No ad supported service is free.

Considering the number of thick volumes of regulations the world's governments are accumulating in trying to combat harmful behaviour by businesses (or, in economic parlance, negative externalities), and still failing to keep them in check, I wonder whether we should consider bringing back more flexible, socially imposed injunctions instead of legislation/regulation. Something not quite as strict as judge-made law / common law, but also not quite as mob-rule-esque as mass cancellation online. Boycotting is obviously one form. Ostracism was another, but no longer practical. Perhaps there are other methods. Perhaps any business that cannot be effectively boycotted by a majority of its customers, should be considered too big to exist.

I was about to post the same thing when I noticed this comment.

For those who might not want to go through the article:

...designed to combat the extraordinary batting skill of Australia's leading batsman, Don Bradman... aimed at the body of the batsman in the expectation that when he defended himself with his bat, a resulting deflection could be caught by one of several fielders deliberately placed nearby on the leg side. At the time, no helmets or other upper-body protective gear was worn, and critics of the tactic considered it intimidating, and physically threatening in a game traditionally supposed to uphold conventions of sportsmanship.

Just goes to show that no one with power can be relied on to self-regulate the use of that power. Power being any ability to nudge another human being toward actions that are not purely in their own self interest.

I recently finished rewatching The Three Body Problem in which (spoilers follow) the world panics and goes into overdrive because an alien invasion is due in... 400 years. If the current climate trends continue, vast areas of the Earth may not be suitable for habitation within half that time, and we still can't seem to convince some people this is real. Granted I was a climate change skeptic myself until about 10 years ago, but right now the data seems indisputable. Even if we can't find a direct causal relationship between CO2 emissions and warming, we know the following very accurately (disclaimer: not a climate scientist): (1) amount of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere per year (2) concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (3) amount of extra energy that would be theoretically retained in the atmosphere via the green house effect, due to a given increment in CO2 concentration, (4) global temperatures within the past, say 30 years. Don't we know for a fact that (1) + (2) + (3) is very well correlated with (4), and that no other potential causes correlate as well with (4), and don't current computational models demonstrate an ability to predict (4) given (3). So, exactly what is the source of skepticism?

Potential exploit: one large donor who donates through a large number of proxy supporters.

yet another ego-driven tirade

I tried to recall the last time I saw what I felt was an ego-driven tirade on HN comments, and I'm currently drawing a blank. There's a lot of what's called "performative erudition", and there is the occasional lengthy diatribe, but I would call neither one of those ego-driven tirades.

Use value or exchange value?

Agreed. I had some vague hope that this article made it to the HN hope page because someone was saying what needs to be said: that the future of email should be protocols over platforms, as it was in the past. Mail servers and mail clients.

Domain knowledge can be learnt much quicker than how to apply good engineering principles.

There was an entire thread a week ago about how domain expertise has always been the real moat: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48340411

I've been told the following (obviously negative) narrative. Can someone verify/refute some of these? I've put (?) next to questionable claims.

1. Twitter is purchased with debt

2. Debt is transferred to xAI via acquisition of X/Twitter

3. Debt is further transferred to SpaceX via acquisition of xAI

4. SpaceX IPO offered at extreme valuation

5. Index fund inclusion rules waived for SpaceX IPO: profitability requirement, inclusion period cut from 90 to 5 days

6. Index funds are largely held by passive investors such as pension funds.

7. Index fund managers are not incentivized to exclude a SpaceX from their indexes. (?)

8. Holders of original X/Twitter debt (banks) incentivized to support the rule waiver since post IPO, SpaceX will have liquidity to service/pay the debt.

9. Passive investors are unable to rapidly respond to these types of changes because liquidating portfolios will incur capital gains taxes. (?)

10. SpaceX is in Texas jurisdiction, where shareholder lawsuits are not possible and must instead go for arbitration. (?)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but 0.1% of S&P 500 seems exceedingly huge when you consider how much of the economy is represented in the S&P 500.

I remember once a colleague receiving a call about a non-functional test environment during his commute, and he wanted to tell the ops person to restart all the processes. I think fellow passengers in his bus were not comforted to hear someone say over the phone "yeah, kill them all".

I can provide a data point for what the article calls pseudo productivity: I extensively use LLMs as semantic search engines or expert systems (but not as agents). Recently I asked one how to consume a Google Pub/Sub topic using Python (context: I come from an C++/Java/JS background with some Python knowledge). The LLM gave me a good intro and some code. As it usually happens, I had a few follow up questions/clarifications, and then had to clarify the intent behind the code I requested. After a few relatively effortless rounds of back and forth, I got what I needed. It felt productive. But looking at the clock, about 20 minutes had passed without me even realizing it. Then I went and looked at the official overview page for the Google Pub/Sub Python client. It had everything I needed (including the code), in a more condensed, well-structured form. I could probably have arrived at the same outcome in 5-10 minutes. The only difference was that the latter method required some focus/discipline.

I'm wondering whether this is what they call pseudo-productivity: a lot of low-friction back and forth that feels productive, and perhaps even enjoyable, but in objective terms, takes longer?

I think the answer is in the second sentence of the article. The most valuable person in this new world (using the author's own phrasing from the penultimate paragraph) is the one who is good at "building a working model of the domain in [their] head".

Depending on the domain, this may either be the domain expert themselves, or someone else trained in formal logic, data structures and organizing information into coherent hierarchies. If this is neither the domain expert nor the programmer, then it must be someone in between. In the old world, this role was called "business analyst".

Agreed. I would define a market as a mutual social contract that favours voluntary estimation of resource value, and exchange thereof, over violent competition for resources. Such a contact must necessarily be enforced, since voluntary compliance among humans is never 100%. So yes, some form of regulation is built into the very definition of a free market. I'm fond of saying that, as rules approach zero, competition approaches war.