So much of HN is half-baked anecdotes about and by LLMs or philosophizing from VCs who talked to an LLM about Rene Girard for twenty minutes or pop sci articles that appear to be posted so that some bored developer can read the abstract and one experiment and dunk on it. Tao is uniquely positioned as a mathematician who has made enormous contributions to many areas and is old enough to contextualize it all against the past and young enough to be open to its possible futures. More Tao spam sounds good to me!
Another great book of his is House, which chronicles the building of a house for a young couple somewhere in New England, complete with character sketches of the architects, workers, and customers involved. His ability to portray people in a way that is both sympathetic and clear-minded feels sadly rare to me. Nobody in that book is the hero, and some of their flaws are right there on the pages, but they all seem like people that it would be nice to get to know.
Is "land value" the right term here? The NYC example uses assessed property value, which I think is a function of both the land under a property and the building itself. In that case, these "taller means more valuable" graphics are at least partially reflecting the fact that a tall building is probably more valuable than the short one next to it?
I've been an AC (the person who manages the reviewing process and translates reviews into accept/reject decisions) at ICML and similar conferences a few times. In my experience, grad students tend to be pretty good reviewers. They have more time, they are less jaded, and they are keener to do a good job. Senior people are more likely to have the deep and broad field knowledge to accurately place a paper's value, but they are also more likely to write a short shallow review and move on. I think the worst reviews I've seen have been from senior people.
> In fact if we're being honest, there is some weird unprompted bitterness in your response
Politely, I suggest that prefacing a claim about a stranger's emotions by saying that the claim is "fact" and "honest" is presumptuous.
But I do think you're right about the "friction [being] part of the joy". I think a better version of my comment is that enjoying those frictions isn't completely straightforward, and the temptations of a frictionless (and maybe subpar) alternative make those frictions less enjoyable still, as simonbw's comment observed.
The "cannon" one is maybe the funniest thing I've seen on the internet in months. It almost makes me want to add autoplaying music to my own website, just to add that too.
> Basically, one reason I’ve lost a lot of will to do anything is because of AI’s existence, and I don’t want to use it. Because I have zero personal time, zero time whatsoever to do anything, so sometimes I’m thinking, “Oh, I could do this task or that task so much faster if I used AI,” but I don’t want to use AI, so then I don’t want to do the task at all. So I don’t have the time to sit down and model something because I know there is a faster way, but I don’t want to use the faster way, so the thing doesn’t get done.
I'm not completely sure, but I think her reasoning is that AI made it a lot easier for random people to just have the idea and translate it into an image in a minute or two, and this cheapens the whole experience for her, to the point that it no longer seems worth doing.
It's sort of a funny point. I think most painters are happy that they don't have to go out and grind up snails to make their own purple pigment, but are perhaps less happy if somebody can produce a painting indistinguishable from their own effort with no manual handwork skill at all. It's like there's a minimum threshold of human skill and investment for an object to be interesting beyond its pure functionality, and functionality has little to do with art (but a lot to do with, say, software).
This is an interesting profile of Terence Tao as an ~8 year old: https://gwern.net/doc/iq/high/smpy/1984-clements.pdf, written by somebody who seems to have been well-versed in working with mathematically precocious children. It's interesting less for how good at math Tao already is but a peek into how he went about learning and doing math at a time when the subject matter was still accessible to, say, most users here. Among other things, what might be called his "openness to math experience" and independence are both remarkable.
I did a theoretical computer science PhD a few years ago and write one or two papers a year in industry. I have not had much success getting models to come up with novel ideas or even prove theorems, but I have had some success asking them to prove smaller and narrower results and using them as an assistant to read papers (why are they proving this result, what is this notation they're using, expand this step of their proof, etc). Asking it to find any bugs in a draft before Arxiving also usually turns up some minor things to clarify.
Overall: useful, but not yet particularly "accelerating" for me.
Yeah, on the spectrum of ways to make money, running a sports betting site is pretty bad. It's zero-sum (unlike, say, founding a company and getting rich from shares that were initially worthless), doesn't really incentivize discovery of any truly valuable info (if you find out a player is injured an hour before everyone else ... ok?), and seems to disproportionately hit people who are already not doing very well.
Seeing the statistics about young American men's betting habits makes me feel old.
My understanding is that it's not subject to the same tax it would have been as income, since the federal estate tax only applies to value above ~14 million per individual. So, my understanding is that a married couple can pass 25 million in stocks to their heirs and pay nearly no taxes on it because it's under the estate tax threshold and the capital gains cost basis got reset on their death. But not everyone can do this because you need enough assets or other business the bank wants to handle for them to be happy lending you money for years, and only people with a lot of assets have either of those things.
(I'm happy to be wrong about this, since it seems unfair, but AFAIK this is how it works?)
I'm not sure if "options" is the relevant word in your post, but it does seem like capital gains tax is significantly reduced in inheritances? Here's an example source that says the cost basis gets reset to its value at approximately the deceased's death [1], and gains relative to that cost basis are likely much smaller (and thus a much smaller tax burden) than those relative to their initial acquisition price possibly decades earlier, no?
I think the claimed issue is that these people do receive income from those assets indirectly. My understanding is that if your assets are worth much more than the amount you're borrowing then a bank is happy to keep giving you loans, which you use like income, that incur compound interest until you die, your estate must settle up the loans, and the estate gets to pay capital gains against the basis when you died, not the basis when the shares were first created and worth $1 each.
> And that's also pretty simply explained by this classic quote: it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
I've come to strongly dislike this quote, because it's so often used on HN to decide that whoever's disagreeing with you is doing it for simple, stupid and greedy reasons, thus absolving you of the duty to think a bit about whether there might be nuance you're missing.