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Old and new apps, via modern coding agents

terrytao.wordpress.com

81–90 of 156 posts

Re: Old and new apps, via modern coding agents

#81
post #21

I am far from a mathematician but I am excited by the possibilities of using AI for generating more math. Math in my mind exists purely in the world of forms, and cannot be appropriated for profit, but is downstream to everything else. I am keen to see what this enables.

It may be a question of perspective, but in my mind mathematics is upstream to everything else, including physics, biology, etc. And it doesn't just exist in the human mind or the "world of forms", as in Platon's realm of ideas. It's more fundamental than that, closer to the foundation from which all existence emerges. Our reality is like a shadow of a shadow, a fleeting illusion, compared to the eternal reality that…

Interesting point, I think you are right about it being upstream!

Re: Old and new apps, via modern coding agents

#82
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very humbling thought, thank you.

The humbling thought should be all the blue collar workers on r/vibecoding demoing their apps and games. And then realizing they put together something that would have taken you a few days to do. The supply of software is about to go way up, and that's going to massively impact demand unless every firm on earth is clamoring for more. We're going to see if Jevons paradox holds true, or if wages get impacted drasticall…

Only if you're working on a client consulting model perhaps, and not even then necessarily. There are lots of reports of vibe coded apps not holding up in production so they should be treated as prototypes. It's similar to the outsourcing trend where people reverted back to using in house talent once they realized how terrible most of the produced software was. The only difference is AI models get better but it remains to be seen if they can get to such an end to end stage that they can autonomously deploy to prod and diagnose any issues without human intervention. There have been some paths to that but I haven't seen it end to end yet.

Re: Old and new apps, via modern coding agents

#83

Terry Tao using coding agents feels like watching a Michelin-starred chef discover microwave dinners and get genuinely excited about them.

here you go, Michelin-starred chef:

> Marco Pierre White passionately defends chefs using microwaves. White dubbed microwaves “sensational things” and revealed he thinks they’re far better at preparing kippers than any other technique, like boiling or grilling

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/marco-pierre-white-...

And another one:

> José Andrés, a renowned Michelin-starred chef, New York Times bestselling author and internationally recognized humanitarian. He listed the microwave omelet as his number one foolproof dish and called it the “best fluffy omelet in the history of mankind!”

https://www.tasteofhome.com/article/jose-andres-microwave-om...

Re: Old and new apps, via modern coding agents

#84

Building visualizations with LLMs has been a major boost for my CS classes: https://htmx.org/essays/universities-and-ai/#demos-visualiza... Many visualizations that I have always wanted but just didn't have the time to build, I now have. To give an example, I wanted a simplified 8-bit computer to complement the 16-bit teaching computer I use and designed this in a few days with the help of claude: https://bdp.cs.mont…

Using LLMs to build out the nice-to-haves that I’ve always wanted but never had time for is one of their great use cases. Visualizations are a perfect use case for this because they don’t have to be perfectly architected, maintainable code. Getting to the correct visual output is good enough, and LLMs excel at iterating something until it looks right.

I agree that visualization does not need to be perfect. One issue is that "correct visual output" depends on your expertise level. A visualization that is good to teach undergrads may be frustratingly bad to experts and researchers. Standards like "looking right" depend on the audience's ability to spot nuances and how focused they are on the fine details. If you want a visualization to work for the range of people from beginners to experts, you do need to focus a bit more on what it means for something to "look right" for multiple audiences, since the errors in the fine details may hinder a visualization's usefulness for more advanced audiences.

Re: Old and new apps, via modern coding agents

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and generally not to be trusted There are many AI bulls who adamantly disagree and cite Tao’s statements about LLMs for mathematical proofs as an example of how advanced and autonomous these systems already are

Statistical gradient descent token vomiter. We can all say it together. Nothing about this is advanced or autonomous.

[dead]

Re: Old and new apps, via modern coding agents

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Statistical gradient descent token vomiter. We can all say it together. Nothing about this is advanced or autonomous.

The same AIs are doing math research now, you know. At what point do you stop explaining it all away?

They never will, because it seems to be a psychological effect among humans via the AI effect (see my sibling comment).

Re: Old and new apps, via modern coding agents

#87
It's probably a matter of short time until it's possible to disassemble any sophisticated software, rewrite it entirely with better features and usability, generate all needed artifacts, port to any platform. The only moat left is probably remote massive data storage. So if you want to replicate YouTube or TikTok, it's not impossible, but requires a lot more hardware assets than say anything that runs entirely locally (like operating systems or most video games).

Re: Old and new apps, via modern coding agents

#88
I wonder if LLMs modify their output when they realize they are interacting with a famous person.

By famous I mean someone whose biography is in the training data. All models know a lot more about Terrance Tao than they know about me, when he's working on his projects do the models know they don't need to explain "Besicovitch sets".

Since the system prompt likely includes something about not insulting the user, does the LLM modify it's responses if it realizes it's talking to famous politician, like "dont mention the time $politician was cancelled".

Re: Old and new apps, via modern coding agents

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are so confident that this just-a-tool will hit its limits any day now...

People are so confident that this not-just-a-tool will show signs of ASI/AGI any day now...

Yep, I'm fairly certain that general learning algorithms acting upon an ANN (which is fairly general too, see the universal approximation theorem) can reach and surpass performance of the human brain. As we have approximately zero evidence that the human brain contains "magic," that is something that can't be modeled by an ANN of a practically feasible size. (I know about chaotic processes that can't be modeled precisely. The "magic" here would be the brain using such a process to make useful decisions. "Useful" not in a sense of a mixed strategiy. You can roll dice to do that.)

But, no, it's not "any day now." The required size and structure of the ANN is to be determined.

Re: Old and new apps, via modern coding agents

#90
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very humbling thought, thank you.

The humbling thought should be all the blue collar workers on r/vibecoding demoing their apps and games. And then realizing they put together something that would have taken you a few days to do. The supply of software is about to go way up, and that's going to massively impact demand unless every firm on earth is clamoring for more. We're going to see if Jevons paradox holds true, or if wages get impacted drasticall…

Every time I wrote software that I was personally motivated to have and kept at it until it reached a comfortable equilibrium of utility, scope, and quality and then stopped? No one paid me.

Every time someone paid me to write software it was some combination of 1. not that interesting of a problem 2. no real utility i could see or touch, useful in some abstract way of making a number go up 3. involved a constant, painful maintenance burden 4. involved incident management of one kind or another 5. involved a long tail of details with no unifying principle other than a lot of implicit legacy constraints and stakeholders whose involvement waxed and waned with no seeming rhythm..

I'm a big fan of the new capability, it opens up new regimes of performance and correctness and capability for what I can achieve, that in turn grinds me up against math and theory that I had thus far been able to avoid, it's pushing me up the ambition ladder hard and that's a good thing.

But the change is a change in degree not in kind at least in the vibecode regime: it was always relatively fun and relatively easy to do one small program with modest requirements around defect rigor that had a big legible "oh cool!" surface that I didn't have to maintain. Fable doesn't seem any better than Opus at grinding detail work in the bowels of a compiler, but it sure can make an iPhone-scoped platform game with a bunch of bugs in it in a single shot?

If there's a job where you get paid for doing fun, high defect, "oh wow!" factor one-off software that you can immediately disavow any responsibility for? Fuck man, I should have had that job before Fable got that job.

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