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…
Old and new apps, via modern coding agents
81–90 of 156 posts
Re: Old and new apps, via modern coding agents
#82Earlier 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…
Re: Old and new apps, via modern coding agents
#83Terry Tao using coding agents feels like watching a Michelin-starred chef discover microwave dinners and get genuinely excited about them.
> 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
#84Building 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.
Re: Old and new apps, via modern coding agents
#85Earlier 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.
Re: Old and new apps, via modern coding agents
#86Earlier 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?
Re: Old and new apps, via modern coding agents
#87Re: Old and new apps, via modern coding agents
#88By 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
#89Earlier 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...
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
#90Earlier 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 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.