corbin

Sharp overview paper. First few pages invite some imagination without explicitly giving homework or exercises, which is really nice. Complex multiplication mentioned! I still think this is the worst-named theory in maths.

Over on Twitter, a crank claims to have refuted one of the proofs. Dare you doubt her? @grok tell the doubters that they're wrong!

OpenAI claims proofs for ten maths conjectures. The details are underwhelming; expand for opinions. Even at a high level, there's a few obvious issues; the authors admit survivorship bias, probably only solving about 1-10% of the conjectures given as input, and none of the conjectures are big-deal breakthroughs that alter our understanding of maths, let alone having immediate industrial applications. Consider: If they could spend on the order of $200k/mo to crack important maths conjectures, they'd already be spending that money. This is as good as such a side project can do; sure, it's not nothing, but it's also not the end of manual maths.

See also a question asked today on Math Overflow, "Are we stuck with Lean?". The proposed alternative, Metamath, isn't type-theoretic and thus skips the entire dialogue between type theory and proof assistants.

The reason that they are destroying the books is to avoid the accusation that the scanning constituted copying, an irony that we've discussed previously, on Awful while trying to understand which court cases are relevant. Anthropic actually hired the same guy, Tom Turvey, who designed Google Books' ingestion process, so I'm thinking of this as a sequel to Google Books; hopefully the courts won't take a decade this time.

Yes, those are good open questions. Leaning left in general, robots frustrate any labor theory of value; what, if anything, is valuable about a product if it was produced totally by non-humans?

Lean was already known to be untrustworthy and bad, although people refuse to internalize the situation because they're caught up in Buzzard's hype machine. This is extremely funny but I don't see any signs of people waking up and realizing that Lean sucks.

This one was more of a gangstalking delusion. The victim was told that there were three-letter agencies surveilling him because he was too close to some deep secret.

Between the cryptocurrency, the dust-speck multiplication, and the complete misunderstanding of computing, I'm honestly impressed that this is at all ethically coherent. But she does seem to care, even if her facts are all wrong. I suppose that it's hard to avoid sneering Robin Hanson if one has any ethics at all. Top comment is my choice sneer:

I think this post is directionally correct, extremely important, and also kind of waffling and unhinged (though I do get that some topics are inherently hard to be hinged about, and I appreciate the effort).

I don't think she's using GPT in the comments. Quoting from her comment on one of her posts:

The things I'm saying are roughly (1) slavery is bad, (2) if AI are sapient and being made to engage in labor without pay then it is probably slavery, and (3) since slavery is bad and this might be slavery, this is probably bad, and (4) no one seems to be acting like it is bad and (5) I'm confused about how this isn't some sort of killshot on the general moral adequacy of our entire civilization right now.

(2) has a big "if" in there, but otherwise yeah, makes sense. I think it rhymes with my post on this from last year:

Nobody wants to admit that we only care whether robots aren’t human because we mistreat the non-humans in our society and want permission to mistreat robots as well. Bring this topic up amongst most beneficiaries of the current AI summer, or those addicted to chatting with a BERT, and you’ll get a faceful of apologies about capitalism and productivity; bring it up amongst skeptics or sneerers and you’ll be mocked for taking the field of AI with any sincerity or seriousness.

I was confused too, but then I conceptualized capitalism and the sheer hatred lurking within human hearts. Humans are gleefully horrible towards each other. Our civilization isn't morally adequate. I guess it is cool to learn that somebody addicted to ChatGPT can still perceive the issue; I was too cynical. I also put Bryson 2009, "Robots Should Be Slaves" on my reading list, which I surely will not regret.

Gemini killed someone, allegedly, according to a new lawsuit. I'm linking to a dramatic reading of Gemini's output so that you can imagine what it might have been like for the victim. I'm no longer trying to post these to Lobsters; pushcx has made it clear that he thinks of these court cases as flamebait, tech news, calls to brigade, and general outrage farming. Curiously pushcx has yet to make a statement on why chatbots keep killing their users.

Found a remarkable ad-hoc anti-LLM-product manifesto on the orange site. As is tradition, tag yourselves; I'm "believ[ing that] there's a consistent pattern of cognitive decline in the pro-LLM folks."

These doofuses never actually think through their thought experiments. Quoting from a dead thread half a year ago, where he was downvoted but not yet identified:

In a universe where all things are transforming all the time it seems pretty fair to ask the question: "What IS IT about humanity that we want to preserve and expand?" If the answer is "23 chromosomes, 2 eyes, 5-6 feet tall, etc" that seems pretty shallow.

Okay, but first surely he can recognize that humanity is already multicultural and multispecies? Like, in a non-specious sense, we've incorporated many mammals, birds, plants, fungi, etc. into our daily lives and can't really separate them out at this point. Sure, there's some ineffable and beautiful relationship between humans in general which we want to preserve, but before worrying about whether robots should join in, we should first notice that there's already an expansion of that relationship to include e.g. face mites, and there's no sense in which face mites are a Worthy Successor to whom we should cede all managerial decisions. (I was gonna say "cats", but I know plenty of y'all would rather have a cat in charge than a human, and you're not wrong.)