> If people cared they would [have mentioned it before]. What are YOU on about?
I explained why and how I think this is both wrong (especially in the ridiculously absolute form it was posted in), and a weird point of contention.
This is a tech (startup) forum, with an increasing pull towards more general audiences. Math and sciences have strong ties to tech, but you won't see people discussing specific math conjectures here much, save for the ones that make the popsci or tech mainstream. It is only chance encounters like this where a person from the relevant neck of the woods might engage, provided they happen to be readers here, e.g. because of a passing interest in technology.
Given this, being surprised that you cannot find a mention of this conjecture in the post history of the site is difficult to describe as any kinder than just plain daft.
> If it’s so good at solving hard problems
A problem being hard (in the relevant sense here) doesn't mean they're lucrative to solve, or hold direct and broad societal relevance. Kind of a theme with maths and logic problems, and not by coincidence.
Conversely, a lot of practical hard problems are, well, practical. They're not logically hard, but in some empirical way. You're conflating different avenues of difficulty, and rejecting that there's even a multitude of them.
> Why is there no real world progress on things we do care about?
We?
Well, there's been very real progress on things I - and I'd think most this community - care about. I've been shipping tickets end-to-end with minimal involvement via LLMs agentically for a while now. It's been great, and an honest game changer. I've been delivering faster, more, and better. Exactly what you'd expect from a breakthrough technology: a wholesale improvement across normally competing dimensions. In a number of cases, the difference was outright stepfunction like. That is to say, if it wasn't for these models, they would simply not have happened.
This is its latest iteration and its newest - alleged - tour de force. That's why it's posted here to extensive reception. That it is nice to hear it being a boon in other sectors too. If this somehow escaped you two, I don't know what to tell you.
Thanks for the fun facts? Indeed, this is not a math forum. Good morning.
> I can demonstrate this [that literally nobody cares about the CDCC here]
No, you cannot. Mindreading the readers of this site by sifting through people's comments is a barely passable proxy for this at best, especially when that audience has changed dramatically over even just those 14 years, and continues to do so.
- double check the proof (provided it with the prompt and proof artifacts)
- double check some of the claims made in this comment section (no math involved newer than 30 yo, no human contribution or review, no mathematician affirmations, proof assistants not being developed enough in this area to support machine checking a proof like this)
- check for any mathematician feedbacks
It stalled out (bad first impression much? lol). I then retried with 5.5, expressing the same request and my personal skepticism, and it returned to me with cautious optimism and no obvious issues found.
I think the fact that I provided it with the actual artifacts in question vs. you simply asking it to speculate about them is a really interesting UX difference. Like certainly, a coveted 50 year old math problem having a few pager proof is not going to be very likely. But then skim reading the proof by a frontier model is not going to yield any obvious issues either. Both responses are perfectly defensible given the context (I don't necessarily think these qualify as sycophancy), but we'd walk away with entirely different impressions if we didn't know about each other's requests.
And I'm not even trying to suggest you were wrong to not approach it in the ways I did. It's a perfectly reasonable and human way to prompt it the way you describe. It's just not the way I'd do it, but I have a hard time articulating why. And it's clear that the model was never going to help with this difference either.
Half a century of computing, and we're still trying to make the machine think on the users' behalf :)
Especially with GPT (5.5), I've been having a lot of issues with it just repeatedly stalling out. I had to build a quota monitoring skill so that it'd keep plowing forward until either the task was finished (in some way) or the quota budget was exhausted.
I also had issues with the compaction. Codex seems to compact... weirdly, resulting in the agent becoming a newborn after each compaction event. Telling it to use a notes file is basically essential and self-evident.
Now that I mention, I should probably refine this skill to monitor the context window fill as well, to work around this.
Tried Xiaomi MiMo v2.5 via opencode today. Since Sonnet 5's release week, Sonnet 4.6 has been feeling like a vegetable, with Sonnet 5 itself being only a little better. MiMo on the other hand feels like Sonnet 4.6 did up until very recently. Absolutely impressive.
In some ways, more impressive than GPT 5.5 with high(!) thinking. GPT says quite some nonsense from time to time; didn't see any sign of this in MiMo so far, which is a pretty wild difference.
Indeed as the developers behind Bun, it would be rather difficult for them to not be the originators of the bugs that they have now fixed with this.
Why is your unsupported speculation about the guy (or the people above him) supposedly deciding that "Rust being a better fit for an Anthrophic-owned project" a critical insight exactly? You not being convinced by the rationale presented does not mean he himself wasn't. Do you imagine critical thinking as just coming up with and preferring (to you) plausible-sounding alternative explanations?
Because respectfully, that's very much not how I understand the word, and I'd hope most people do not either. Maybe that's the issue. Post-hoc rationalization being a rather shaky gate with people (and AI) anyways.
Worse still, neither of the options you present are trustworthy summaries necessarily in the first place. From the blogpost:
> What if, instead, I spend a week testing if Anthropic's new model can rewrite Bun in Rust?
That sounds to me like something of an excited but cautious dare, not an arbitrary technological decision, nor some hyper-strictly rationale-supported one. It's the same kind of exploratory excitement anyone who used these things at all would be familiar with: you have an unlikely project idea, with some contentious details that are fair (see their blogpost), and some that would be simply annoying to justify (see your comment). Buuuut you also have heaps of corpo money, a lingering suspicion and interest, and AI tokens to burn. And so "fuck it, we ball". Not much to believe on it when it's a shared experience. And it's not because of just having read so somewhere, despite your assertions otherwise.
I'm similarly distraught by comments like this. They are a staple, and they always fail their own standards. Critical thinking would lead me to believe that your judgement is heavily clouded, and that it is way more likely you're the one who's biased; either to find other people to be generally below you, or to find people being receptive to this effort any positively to be simply wrong. I'm even wondering if this is a stock comment of sorts.
Strong subjective judgements about an inexact but large sounding fraction of people, without any actual details, is a red flag the size of a skyscraper. And to top it all off, your conclusion is extremely convenient too: you're right, people are wrong, despite the blatant facts otherwise. Not exactly the hallmark of a particularly robust position, not for me anyways.
That's not what I meant, nor is "touching grass" necessarily relevant.
I use these tools at work. If I talked to other people instead of a model every time (or even just some of the time) I talk to a model, I'd be tanking everyone's productivity by constantly disrupting them, and would get worse quality responses pretty much guaranteed, if I wouldn't be just ignored outright.
This isn't to say I stopped talking to colleagues either. I reach out to them about the same amount. The time budget I took away from was the one I used to spend manually doing things, reading docs, and so on. So your entire mental model of this is just outright false there.
On a personal level, I traded off entertainment time (though for me, interacting with ChatGPT is also just a form of entertainment). Instead of staring at YouTube, I pitch silly thought experiments, explore topics, ask difficult-to-search-for questions. So once again, I did not trade off social time, meaning what you propose simply does not apply whatsoever. I do not share memes or catch up on life with it, which is what friends are for. It has no sense of actual humor, has no life of its own, and I'm not into roleplay like that. Would be just weird.
There are people who engage pathologically with LLMs, but that is neither the premiere use nor the goal. I'm sure there are also situations where people will actively approach a model over a person, but I do believe people should be able to self-regulate that decision. It gives people leverage to choose the extent and venues of their social engagement. If a topic has a community you do not wish to interact with, you can finally choose not to, while still reaping any prospective benefits (information). This can be a bad thing, but I think it's easy to see that it is also very much good.
For example, there were times where I felt more compelled to interact with ChatGPT than I felt leaving a comment here on HN. And frankly, I'm pretty sure I was way better off, and maybe the people here were too. Or a connected but different example, there were HN comments I took to heart pretty bad. Relitigating them with ChatGPT enabled me to get over them in-depth, and even consider different viewpoints properly, without having to be the resident punching bag of some asshole. It's difficult for me to see these as anything but a net improvement.
There is something to be said about interactions in one's life becoming overly structured. I think a reasonable case could be made that in less structured lives, where things just kind of happen, you get more random interactions, and it is through those random interactions that you gain valuable experiences and relationships, even if there's a lot of cruft in addition [0]. That in our effort at optimization, we're making our lives inhuman to live, for the same reason people are crapping on LLMs being statistical (unreliable, imperfect) rather than hardwired (reliable, perfect). But that implies there is an optimal life, which I'm not sure exists: specifically because of this local vs global optimality tension. In complex stateful systems, you're guaranteed to hit scenarios where locally correct and globally correct behaviors are irreconcilable [1], unless you meticulously construct them such that this cannot happen, after all.
So do you find the selfish justification of heroin addicts in your example partially compelling, or are you betraying your own rhetorical standards?
Just because things do not exist in a vacuum doesn't mean they should be blurred and conflated until unrecognizability. There's value in explicitly anchoring the salient aspects, and getting the cause and effect right, to the extent these can be done.
Both intelligence amplification and pathological parasocialness are very real effects of this technology, and a blanket ban, a blanket halt, and similar broad and dull policies are absolutely going to be unfair and unreasonable. And even such policies would not "happen in a vacuum", there's a consequence to prohibiting something not prohibited elsewhere.
Whether we can do better is where the jury is still out. I don't think an example like your dirty needles one particularly helps with this. It's asinine and inflammatory, quite the opposite to nuance-inviting, which I believe was more towards your actual intent.
Playing the devil's advocate a little, you say "can't also do", but that implies prohibition, not hindering. Hindering is not total like that.
It's like trying to have meaningful conversations on Twitter. You don't go to Twitter to do things like that. Can you? Sure. It's just not what the format and the conventions (and the people) lend themselves to.
I don't think there's much merit in pretending that human activities are only shaped by hard limits.
Market conditions are not a moral standard either, nor do they represent any cohesive one in particular. Not sure why you're contrasting their opinion with this, it's literally no better.
This is super fun. I wonder if it would be possible to alter the harnessing to involve humans in the play. Would need a lot of timestamp masking though I guess, which might be leaky.
There is no such myth that I'd be aware of, and I seriously doubt the author behind this would be operating under such a misunderstanding either. Maybe you used to at some point, but then that's a separate issue.
Propagation is just an incremental spread across a topology. Doesn't need to be a physical topology whatsoever.
It may seem like this program suggests a physical propagation as far as its elevator pitch goes, but one glance at the readme clears it up pretty quickly that that's not actually the case.
Changes do propagate, and seeing funny blinking lights on a world map is cool. Doesn't mean there'd be an intent to convey the process as a geographical spread.
> without having the majority of comments being from environmental-jihadists
Not to break your wishful thinking filled bubble, but those are very clearly not "will somebody please think about the environment" type comments. Plenty of people simply fucking despise the ever living shit out of this class of vehicle, just in general.
You really don't need to give two hot shits about the environment to find scooters obnoxiously loud smoke factories, to have a problem with that, and to be absolutely fucking over them as a result. Delivery drivers made sure of that in the past years. I'm sure it's much more convenient for you to just file it under your favorite political grift, but I assure you with confidence, the hate on these is entirely self-interested and genuine.
I explained why and how I think this is both wrong (especially in the ridiculously absolute form it was posted in), and a weird point of contention.
This is a tech (startup) forum, with an increasing pull towards more general audiences. Math and sciences have strong ties to tech, but you won't see people discussing specific math conjectures here much, save for the ones that make the popsci or tech mainstream. It is only chance encounters like this where a person from the relevant neck of the woods might engage, provided they happen to be readers here, e.g. because of a passing interest in technology.
Given this, being surprised that you cannot find a mention of this conjecture in the post history of the site is difficult to describe as any kinder than just plain daft.
> If it’s so good at solving hard problems
A problem being hard (in the relevant sense here) doesn't mean they're lucrative to solve, or hold direct and broad societal relevance. Kind of a theme with maths and logic problems, and not by coincidence.
Conversely, a lot of practical hard problems are, well, practical. They're not logically hard, but in some empirical way. You're conflating different avenues of difficulty, and rejecting that there's even a multitude of them.
> Why is there no real world progress on things we do care about?
We?
Well, there's been very real progress on things I - and I'd think most this community - care about. I've been shipping tickets end-to-end with minimal involvement via LLMs agentically for a while now. It's been great, and an honest game changer. I've been delivering faster, more, and better. Exactly what you'd expect from a breakthrough technology: a wholesale improvement across normally competing dimensions. In a number of cases, the difference was outright stepfunction like. That is to say, if it wasn't for these models, they would simply not have happened.
This is its latest iteration and its newest - alleged - tour de force. That's why it's posted here to extensive reception. That it is nice to hear it being a boon in other sectors too. If this somehow escaped you two, I don't know what to tell you.