sourcepluck

2 年前discuss

Am I understanding correctly, and the only thing with a bit of actual data released so far is the ARC-AGI piece from Francois Chollet? And every other claim has no further data released on it?

Serious question. I've browsed around, looked for the official release, but it seems to be just hear-say for now, except for the few little bits in the ARC-AGI article.

So some of the reactions seems quite far-fetched. I was quite amazed at first seeing the benchmarks, but then actually read the ARC-AGI article and a few other things about how it worked, learned a bit more about the different benchmarks, and realised we've no proper idea yet how o3 is working under the hood, the thing isn't even realeased.

It could be doing the same thing that chess-engines do except in several specific domains. Which would be very cool, but not necessarily "intelligent" or "generally intelligent" in any sense whatsoever! Will that kind of model lead to finding novel mathematical proofs, or actually "reasoning" or "thinking" in any way similar to a human, remains entirely uncertain.

sourcepluck

2 年前discuss

At no stage in my argument did I make any point contrary to that, and my argument is in no way about that.

The point is simply that U.S. democracy is visibly in tatters. Clinging on to this notion that still, in spite of all the evidence in front of our eyes, the U.S. is somehow fundamentally and essentially different to the other historical empires, is just your usual bog-standard nationalist delusion.

I think that the founding story of the States is beautiful, and that some of the early writing is really quite something (I'm thinking of Paine in particular here). And I'm very fond of some of the other cultural output. It's not "pleasant" to face the reality of the modern day U.S.A., is what I'm saying, but to hope to improve the state of the world, it has to be done.

There are many statistical datapoints which suggest the country is doing very poorly socially. Then it seems to me that a serious case can be made that the vast network of state, semi-private and private institutions over there involved in the "security" sector (arms, cyber, related fields) has gotten completely out of hand and answers effectively to itself only.

I'm trying to refrain from making specific examples here, because any mention of a specific issue will result in the assumption that some partisan point is being made. Accepting that risk, perhaps we could: look at the president; look at what the alternatives were; look at the previous presidents from the last decades; look at the legal system; look at the prison system; look at povery rates; look at crime rates; look at political prisoners; look at the increase in attacks on the media; look at military spending; look at straightforward, old-fashioned corruption; look at drone strikes; look at studies of how the state's actions tracks with polls of what the populace want; etc etc.

At a certain point, it's hard to believe in the intellectual integrity of observers who cling on to the argument: "ah, but look, that other country is worse!" This is an obvious race to the bottom, and can excuse any level of depravity. Again, it's hard to see how this belief is possible to hold without a solid dose of quasi-religious nationalist fervour.

sourcepluck

2 年前discuss

Even very intelligent people will accept this argument for America, and then reject it for often literally every other country.

Imagine I made the same argument for Russia, or China, or North Korea, or Syria, or Venezuela, or some other country the Western mainstream media says is bad. You'd presumably come up with a reason - immediately, effortlessly, almost without thinking - why it didn't apply in that case, and that that country really was bad, and their imperfections really meant they were not good.

Unlike the U.S., which simply cannot fall out of favour with some people, no matter what they do.

If an organisation doesn't serve its purpose, whether through ignorance, stupidity, or malice, it should be either broken up or restructured. There's no reason not to do this with businesses, states, etc, other than the usual quasi-religious ones, centered around various tired and confused dogmas involving markets, freedom, human nature, and that sort of thing.

Summary: Human beings should be given second chances, and third chances, and so on, as many chances as we can give them. Organisations on the other hand should be given one chance. We owe them nothing.

sourcepluck

2 年前discuss

Yes! We need to have only American propaganda in the heads of the vulnerable youth of America, and we need to have only Chinese propaganda in the heads of the vulnerable youth of China, and we need to have only Zimbabwean propaganda in the heads of the vulnerable youth of Zimbabwe.

And so on and so on, down through all the letters of the alphabet. That'll solve our problems!

sourcepluck

2 年前discuss

> The Germans have aptly called Sitzfleisch the ability to spend endless hours at a desk, doing gruesome work. Sitzfleisch is considered by mathematicians to be a better gauge of success than any of the attractive definitions of talent with which psychologists regale us from time to time. Stan Ulam, however, was able to get by without any Sitzfleisch whatsoever. After his bout with encephalitis, he came to lean on his unimpaired imagination for his ideas, and on the Sitzfleisch of others for technical support. The beauty of his insights and the promise of his proposals kept him amply supplied with young collaborators, willing to lend (and risking to waste) their time.

Taken from Gian-Carlo Rota in The Lost Cafe, a quote I found here http://www.romanpress.com/Rota/Rota.php

sourcepluck

2 年前discuss

Someone correct me if I'm misremembering, but I think Donald Knuth wrote somewhere that when he'd be assigned the odd-numbered problems, he'd always do them, and do the even-numbered problems as well.

sourcepluck

2 年前discuss

Wrote that reply then clicked on your page to see if there were a blog or anything where you elaborate already on these topics - I've already read a couple of articles from your substack! Oops, hah, I did not realise I was writing to the person behind that.

I'd filed it away in my head as something to sink more time into when I've the emotional space to do so, but essentially I find it quite courageous to go against the grain in a world where it's perhaps harder and harder to do so. Everyone has a hot take, of course, but the hot takes are usually very much within the bounds of acceptable discourse.

Anyway, more power to you, in your endeavours.

sourcepluck

2 年前discuss

Any tips or anecdotes for us (well, me) about the fun things you'd do with students to encourage that joy?

I am not a PhD, but have done a fair bit of tutoring young people in maths. I feel similarly to you there, and am always on the lookout for new ways to foster that feeling of mathematics being fun and wonderful.

It can be hard. The feeling a lot of young people pick up - of maths being roughly akin to pointless abject suffering - is so strongly rooted in young people sometimes, and can be strongly connected to feelings of inadequacy and shame and so on.

sourcepluck

2 年前discuss

I have been going through a heavy jungle phase recently thanks to these mixes I found when investigating what's possible on the Commodore A600 (I recently came into possession of one):

  https://inv.nadeko.net/playlist?list=PLF8fxbriplbmwB7zypOxa_oV4fkzTQOEh

It's a channel called "off1k", and a playlist called "Jungle / Drum & Bass", and all the tunes come from people making music on Amigas in the early 90s on software called "protracker".

A600s, A1200s, maybe others, maybe other versions or variants of protracker, I'm not sure. Anyway, if someone can get through 30s of mix 1 without losing their sh*t, I want to hear about it, I'll keel over.

And, to top it all off, about a week in to these mixes on loop, I ask myself: what is that software? Is that still going? And I discover some fellow called "Olav Sørensen" recently wrote an identical-looking protracker clone:

  https://16-bits.org/pt2.php
  EDIT: GH link https://github.com/8bitbubsy/pt2-clone

Which I can confirm runs very smoothly on Arch (btw). It says it's available for Mac and Windows on the site. In the words of the sample from the first track on mix 1: "annihilating the rhythm". Get jungling people!

sourcepluck

2 年前discuss

Hadn't heard of that, having a little investigate now, cheers!

sourcepluck

2 年前discuss

I was going to comment but you saved me the bother of going into the details - yes, across the board.

Knowing "not a single person who pirates music anymore" is no reflection on music(al) pirates - maybe for some reason the piraters tend to end up in different circles than the kind of people who think spotify has "nearly every record ever created".

On top of what you said in your reply above, I also (partially) blame spotify for the fact that when you ask people what music they like now, a lot of people are quite likely to say "oh, everything!".

sourcepluck

2 年前discuss

> I use AucTeX, which is a really great, and gigant package to edit latex (+cdlatex)

This is tangential, but have you any quick tips for someone looking to get started with AucTeX? I'm a comfortable Emacser who has started to occasionally think of some document I'd like to do in LaTeX (some maths questions for a student, or an overview of some topic). I've looked at AucTeX once or twice, and ran away thinking, oh, I'll do that some other time.

What is the order of events? Should I make a few really basic LaTeX documents first with a terminal, and then try AucTeX?

sourcepluck

2 年前discuss

"near-luddite stoner musician" gave me serious flashbacks from my past. Eery.

Speaking of man toys, and Linux being theoretically very capable as a music platform, I'm reminded of this beast that I discovered very recently: https://zynthian.org/

It looks quite amazing, and maybe I will buy it after the tooth fairy drops me a bit of cash under the pillow. But upon seeing it I got that feeling - ok sure, loads of capalities, but would I actually figure that thing out, sure I've plugged in a MIDI device or two, finger-smashed a few beats, but did I actually have a clue what I was doing. This device would confront me these questions, I fear.

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