41–50 of 108 posts
> resulting in the production of an abundance of PDFs. The contents of some of those PDFs may even have important applications. I hope, from the depths of my soul, that the static typeset report format for transmitting knowledge and understanding will finally die and be laid to rest.
As someone who has a degree in math, I still can't help but think mathematicians are getting a little bit of a comeuppance. In a lot of areas of mathematics there had been little effort to make the work understandable and leaves numerous folks who could benefit from the knowledge on the outside looking in. Now AI comes along and do the same to mathematicians. Makes me chuckle a little bit.
Lowering the bar for the masses isn't always a good thing
1. It will take much longer to understand the output of the machine that it takes to prompt and create it. 2. The only? best? one? way to /verify/ that you /in fact/ understand the output of the machine is to explain it to someone else.
So there will be a machine generating koans which need to be meditated upon and discussed with human social back-pressure validating understanding. I think this could be much more cooperative and at a minimum this will be a way different math social construct.
The author argues for evaluating Ph.D. candidates based more on the oral thesis defense than on the actual thesis. By essentially the same reasoning, I’ve been arguing for prioritizing in-person design/code reviews over code-only async PR comments. The important thing is to verify that the human has a coherent design in mind and can demonstrate that it got implemented, regardless of who or what was at the keyboard. “…
AI writing is aggressively, aggressively mediocre. It is only good for how cheap it is. If you're indifferent to how much better good human writing is than AI writing, you should not be the one to evaluate human writing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Examples, preferably academic?
We have seen the thing in programming. I'm not a gatekeeper, I love seeing more people to code. On the other hand, along the way, we lost the joy of the journey and only fixated at the destination. Result is more software at lower quality. The reason is statistics. When you increase the population, you increase the population of every kind of programmer, and people who want the result are favored in most competitive…
> we lost the joy of the journey and only fixated at the destination.
that's because you can make money with code and so it went the same way as everything else that's capitalized/commodified.
here a better comparison would be art which is generally still pursued on its own merits/pleasures.
The author argues for evaluating Ph.D. candidates based more on the oral thesis defense than on the actual thesis. By essentially the same reasoning, I’ve been arguing for prioritizing in-person design/code reviews over code-only async PR comments. The important thing is to verify that the human has a coherent design in mind and can demonstrate that it got implemented, regardless of who or what was at the keyboard. “…
Manager: “Why isn’t feature X available?”
Person B: “key pieces are delayed due to the developer not understanding all of the LLM doesn’t and implementation.”
Manager: “does it work? What are the risks?”
Person B: “well yes it works for now but we’re accumulating tech debt due to a lack of understanding and potential flaws that haven’t been thought out yet”
Manager: “they want feature X, ship it, we can deal with it later, I don’t care if it’s not coherent as long as it works.”
How many decades at this point has these been a push for functionality over everything at all costs? And you have a mechanical snow plow now. Most businesses don’t care about later risk or any future planning beyond the quarter horizon, they’re not concerned about how it will effect their performance in 3 quarters or lead to instability or issues, those are future problems for a future person and we’re here for money now.
> resulting in the production of an abundance of PDFs. The contents of some of those PDFs may even have important applications. I hope, from the depths of my soul, that the static typeset report format for transmitting knowledge and understanding will finally die and be laid to rest.
What would you prefer instead of "static typeset report"?
https://ciechanow.ski/archives/
...for starters?
The more I see these posts about mathematics institutions reforms and challenges from AI advancements the more it looks like they may need to go through a death. Or to put it another way they may need to start again from first principles. If math is truly about spreading intuition and understanding then our institutions have dropped the ball decades ago and have not been able to grab hold of it since (if they ever ha…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have seen the thing in programming. I'm not a gatekeeper, I love seeing more people to code. On the other hand, along the way, we lost the joy of the journey and only fixated at the destination. Result is more software at lower quality. The reason is statistics. When you increase the population, you increase the population of every kind of programmer, and people who want the result are favored in most competitive…
this comparison makes little sense. > we lost the joy of the journey and only fixated at the destination. that's because you can make money with code and so it went the same way as everything else that's capitalized/commodified. here a better comparison would be art which is generally still pursued on its own merits/pleasures.
When you look at older software, most of it was higher quality than the things we have today. A web site contained more information in a more readable way, more features in a smaller footprint. Same for native applications.
Now we slap what we found online together and calling it done. Everything is sparse, takes ages to load, centuries to submit and everything is so disconnected and async that some simple features are straight out impossible.
This is what fixating on the destination brought us. I dare you to download something you purchased 3 months ago via a 4096 character S3 link they have sent you, and double dare you to ask customer support for a new link. I'll bet that with a 80% chance they have no way to verify your serial number, even.
With AI, it might be the case that we don't know, we won't know, but the machine does.
The central question, namely whether humans should be in the loop, will be repeated again and again in the years to come for all industries, starting with mathematics.