Christian

Oh man, I had wanted a big drive for more storage for forever but could never justify shelling out. When I saw AI was balooning ram and gpu prices I finally bit the bullet in january and got a 14tb desktop drive from microcenter for about $280 usd. I had no idea disk drive prices were going to jump too, I actually figured if that were true speculators would already be on top of it. It was more like an excuse to myself to make the purchase, like better to do this sooner just in case.

I checked just now and the 14tb desktop drive is currently $675.

Misantropical Painforest

Flint Ironstag

Bolt Vanderhuge

Stump Junkman

Bob Johnson

Gristle McThornbody

Right, but my point is that’s still what mathematicians do. That has never changed. Grothendieck was a great mathematician, but the difference is not that other mathematicians don’t approach problems with sufficient curiosity. I would go as far as to say Grothendieck’s strength was a heavier time commitment very early in his career to just publish less “deep” results, because that time investment allowed him a very deep understanding of the objects he was working with, which is the key to making real insights. Directing mathematicians away from investing time on more boring proofs to only work on fun theory is misguided.

Saying mathematicians don’t focus enough on curiosity and novel discoveries is completely at odds with all of my experience in math research. That’s the fun part of math! For everyone! It’s throwing aside that the amount of time and effort Grothendieck put into producing “ordinary” results beforehand was completely necessary in developing schemes. Dismissing the kind of results Grothendieck had published earlier on as not theory-crafting destroys theory-crafting, because deep insights don’t pop out of thin air and thinking outside the box, they come from years of familiarity with the objects you’re working with. It’s also throwing aside that he himself saw toposes as much deeper than schemes, but those did not catch on to the same degree, and that most mathematicians who have been in it for a few decades have their own body of work like that that could be easily dismissed from the outside as not “theory crafting” because the audience is niche in the same way it is for toposes. There’s no “need to reinvent” towards “theory crafting”, and saying that there is is misunderstanding the crisis by misunderstanding how math research has worked in reality.

Mathematicians need to reinvent what they do: mountain climbing (proof creation) might be dead but theory crafting and increasing understanding (novel proofs) will never be.

This is a pretty easy mistake to make when you don’t have firsthand experience, but the problem is that’s not a reinvention of what mathematicians do at all, it’s only a reinvention of the presentation. Big mathematical advances are almost invariably driven by curiosity, but the university writing your paycheck wants their name attached to yours in publications of breakthrough results. Proofs are just the way a mathematician justifies that they’re working on math. No proofs means a risk admin will triple their teaching load and say “you’re only getting paid to teach now” with lip service about encouraging them to continue math on their own time.

If you have an oracle that gives a true/false answer to a conjecture, it won’t destroy a mathematician’s curiosity to ask why, but it will absolutely affect his ability to convince the admin that can’t even read the abstract that this pursuit is worth funding. That’s the crisis. Math papers are unreadable without years of study training your brain to think that way. A headline of “AI proves big theorem” is likely to win over a public that’s grown up disliking math because of its use as an educational gatekeeper, even when it’s unrealistic for human mathematicians to verify the AI’s claim. There is a very realistic risk of administrators who can’t define what a topology is declaring that mathematicians are obsolete.

The final answers to whether conjectures are true/false have never been the fruit of mathematics research. Think about Grothendieck’s work towards solving the Weil conjectures - the machinery he developed to solve them is modern algebraic geometry, world-changing stuff that’s become the backbone of cryptography among other things. Learning the conjectures are true is a footnote. If everyone had already known they were true in advance though, no one would have paid him to start working on them in the first place.

It would be like someone telling you we can finally stop playing your favorite sport now that the games can be simulated, but you try convincing them otherwise when they’ve never understood one rule and never put a game on because they’ll just be confused and bored.

This is a banger.

I totally overthink the way I style my text messages with capitalization and punctuation. I don’t think I could ever articulate why a specific message ends up where it does beyond “tone somehow feels better than the other choices”. I definitely don’t have hard rules like this comic, like a period usually does read like the bottom one here but there are still occasions where it will just feel more relaxed/down-to-earth to me.

Probably no one I text with gives a shit.

When you collect enough absurdly unrealistic stories you start wondering if your life has been hallucinated. I’ll give my Looney Tunes example.

I fell into an open manhole once. I’m not exactly sure how it happened or why I only fell partway in. I didn’t fall deeper than my waist. My ex-wife gave me a hand out but we were in a rush and didn’t have time to stop and examine or process. It was during a blizzard and I have no idea if it should have been obvious not to walk there and I just wasn’t looking or what, my suspicion is that there was a mat or something over it that got covered in snow. We went by that area again like a week later and there was a manhole cover there.

It was the first instance.

I joined lemmy because I was a big proponent of federated networks. I had had accounts on other federated networks before this one, some of which died out entirely. (I think the first “reddit-like” network I was on was called prismo? Diaspora is more facebook-like and still exists.) I had no clue it was going to get anywhere near as big as it has, and I definitely did not forsee how fucking stupid the instance tribalism would become where new users don’t know so just pick one and then seem to be judged for their decision when other members of their community are jackasses in one way or another.

I think overall I’m happy lemmy caught on, but it definitely felt more like a community before the redditors came over. On the other hand, I do think part of the reason it was able to catch on in a way the others weren’t was how much it felt like a friendly community here. There was already something with a good culture to migrate to.

Well then fix it! Why does this have to concern me?

If magic wands earn the same warning label as depictions of Mohammed the warning label is useless.

I haven’t really even experienced this sort of betrayal myself but this comic always makes me feel so sad for the oyster.

I actually do think that someone who already has multiple decades of experience in programming without using AI is probably not producing shoddier code after incorporating it into their workflow. Important modern software projects, whose backbones are programmers fitting that description, aren’t going to be worse in the present because of Claude usage. I remain strongly against it though, because normalizing its usage guarantees the future won’t have programmers that fit that description running the shows.

I think this can be framed as a statement about generative AI in general: If you think AI has been making everything shittier today, just wait until you see what it’s been doing to everything tomorrow.

Ha ha, tricked you Toby! You were actually prescribed this medicine by your doctor, to prevent a long and painful death from a non-poison cause!

It’s true for music too apart from the chart-topping names. Music and games are both art forms, and the general principle is pretty simple: if you don’t already have a dedicated fanbase, obscurity is a much greater threat to your finances than piracy.

I started FTL for the first time a few days ago and it’s hard to put down. You look at screenshots and it doesn’t look too interesting, but it’s well-designed and clearly very polished.

Even though the gameplay mechanics are quite different, Loop Hero feels spiritually very similar to me.

I have not, but I have too many other things in my backlog to add that one.

I played through Portal for the first time and I found it kind of underwhelming. I can see why it was a big thing two decades ago, but as a new player today the experience doesn’t really feel special.

I just played through that for the first time a couple weeks ago! I thought it was great.

DSP is notorious for being kind of a miserable person who, in the nearly 20 years he’s been making gaming content, has never learned how to play a video game.

I’ve never heard of him either but this is clearly false since he’s displaying full mastery of a game in the video we’re commenting on.