It’s amazing, I saw it once randomly yesterday from some obnoxious bluskyer and I saw it a dozen more times today. It’s nice they all got the press release!

also maths are not a science there i said it

Oh god, are they … translating to english and back again??

It’s really fucking me up the way AI boosters and friends are treating mathematics as a natural science whose goal is to uncover mathematical facts in the number mines. I’m not even staunchly opposed to platonism, but my god. That’s not even how natural science works!

Random idiot on r/singularity

That stance assumes we still need to fully understand the manual mechanics in order to apply the end result.

​Saying we lose out on the “journey” is like an 18th-century laborer complaining that the steam engine will create a society where no one has the endurance to swing a 20-pound hammer for a full 12-hour day.

Do we lose something through abstraction? Absolutely. And I understand why people would mourn that. But do we need to have the endurance to swing the hammer to build a modern skyscraper?

We aren’t losing the ability to do math, we are just moving up a layer of abstraction, transitioning from the laborers to the architects.

Also look out for the new obnoxious metaphor of “what if aliens descended from the sky and handed us their science and proofs, how is this different”. First of all shut up. Secondly we should assume the aliens in this scenario have reason, intent, and the ability to communicate through language. You’re imagining they’re using the scientific method and not divination from wiggling their proboscis in the fourth dimension. Which is quite different from OpenAI’s big dump on scientific practice.

I mean, I don’t know, my confusion comes from also seeing a lot of mathematicians react as if mathematics are over and that it sucks that the future is all about checking AI proofs. And I suppose it’s unpleasant when a sort of maybe authoritative entity comes out of nowhere and tells you the answer to your favourite problem is 42 and doesn’t elaborate. But I feel like I might be missing something as to why this is a big deal. (Apart from OpenAI’s shitty conduct, I mean.)

I suppose what it comes down to is, if OpenAI couldn’t be bothered to try and elucidate their results, or even try to separate nonsensical exploits from genuine proofs, I don’t understand why mathematicians shouldn’t treat all of it as worthless instead of doing unpaid PR work for them.

Yeah, and to be clear I’m unabashedly a humanist myself, but at this point in time I have to treat “Humanist” in org names as a red flag.

Like, in other words, I don’t think most mathematicians are particularly interested in building huge datacenters to brute-force compute quintillions of decimals of pi under current algorithms? Because the point is understanding, not mere knowledge? I dunno!

I’m not at all a mathematician and mostly bad at understanding things, but, is an unwieldy proof that’s barely comprehensible and might be relying on multiple layers of bugs and traps and whatever undefined edges of formal proof systems even a proof at all? Does it actually merit consideration outside of pure spite (understandable)?

poo poo pee pee gang

I mean, fair enough, but can you explain how that impacts your decisions? What does panpsychism imply in matters of ethics or epistemology? Does it matter that the air you breathe can be thought of as in some way conscious?

Is the Pope Catholic? If ever in doubt ask him about abortion and gay marriage.

WAITING FOR HER LIFE TO END SHE DESERVES HER DIVIDEND

Okay I have questions about the logistics of this that are not touched on in the article.

Namely, how do they synchronise cum

me when i get a captcha

Giving young children free access to Ayn Rand books is abuse

He’s racist for an amazing reason

Ah, so he is part of the broader eugenics community, what a surprise.

The irony being that the chatbot does seem to have access to a list of relevant, non-slop websites, or at least some sort of way to rank searches by reliability, which of course they would never implement in the human-usable search engines.

At this point, when I’m looking up something that hits me with pagefuls of links to barely relevant vibecoded scam websites, I’d rather ask a fucking chatbot. At least it’s usually (?) able to give me links to real websites. Very much a choose your flavour of infuriating slop situation.