Want to wade into the sandy, spooky surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. The spooks are well underway.)
I think the problem, from a laymanās perspective, is that it wasnāt until the mathematicians started digging through it that it became apparent how bad the situation was. My only frame of reference for whether the proofs are nonsense or not is you kind folks bitching about it, and OpenAI was happy to do the marketing part with or without anyone signing on.
This was exactly the point - flood the zone with shit to show how āsmartā the stuff underlying your IP is
I mean, I donāt 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 itās unpleasant when a sort of maybe authoritative entity comes out of nowhere and tells you the answer to your favourite problem is 42 and doesnāt elaborate. But I feel like I might be missing something as to why this is a big deal. (Apart from OpenAIās shitty conduct, I mean.)
I imagine that itās the same thing that programmers have been dealing with. Basically everyone Iāve talked to has acknowledged that code reviews are important parts of the software development process, but nobody has ever said they like them. Now here comes the glorious LLM future where in order to maximize productivity you get to do nothing but code reviews forever, only worse because the answer to āwhat were they thinking when they wrote thisā is always ālmao fuk uā. Even ignoring what kind of consequence that kind of change would have on the actual progress of the field of mathematics, it also just makes being a mathematician into a different kind of day-to-day job, and one that most people who are currently in the field would likely find far less satisfying. And unlike the programmers theyāre not even paid some absurd amount of money for it [citation needed].