> QGIS is trusted by organisations because they know they can contribute back, they can hire contributors for support, training and feature. As a community project, this is something we really want to protect
Ok, so there’s a financial motive here, where they’re worried that allowing more open contributions will diminish the value of their expertise and reduce their employability. To be fair to them, that’s probably true.
If there is money to be made, and if frontier models already know the domain I do not understand what this position can possibly buy other than a bit of time before it happens anyway.
In TFA I read (scroll up from the link anchor) this was explained: OpenAI are not giving talks - because they can't answer any questions about the model's work. There is little follow-up activity - the actual elaboration of human understanding of the new ideas is stifled since the problem is solved.
But you are right, this is not OpenAI's "fault". The problem is - as others have said recently - that many people in mathematics want recognition for solving open questions more than they want the answers to the open questions. Everything about the economics and social environment of Mathematics will have to change.
I think that this is exactly the same split we see in software: there are those who mainly enjoy the craft aspect of building software, and are uninterested in the product or business they are supporting. Others are primarily interested in the production of useful software or building a platform or company.
I've always been in both camps myself. When it became obvious that AI was going to destroy the craft aspect - at least two years before it actually could do so - I became very discouraged, even depressed. But once it was actually good at building software, I became very excited about all the stuff I could now build. Sadly, I think a lot of people in our field have never had something they really wanted to build.
I'm in the same boat, I guess I had this naive idea that unsolved math problems would mean something if they were solved. But it seems like a lot of them at least were more thought experiments than anything else.
Kids on HN have built their whole personalities around math, and now, they are discovering that "problem solving ability" has nothing to do with solving problems.
Perhaps mathematics was never about proving things? I know it sounds like moving the goal post, and it certainly was what motivated mathematicians on a day-to-day basis, but bear with me for a moment. I think that beyond being a creative activity that humans enjoy, math was about building new tools and systems of thought. Axiomizing things we take for granted, logic, linear algebra and calculus (on which modern LLMs rely so heavily) are such examples. People chose to participate in this field because they found it enjoyable and satisfying in some way. As a side effect, society reaped the benefits every couple of centuries. Will harvesting open problems with AI ever give us these things, or will we just be left laundry pile of Lean formalizations?
Mathematics is less about the end product and having a healthy community of people to actually understand the proofs and eventually apply them.
That community won't exist as many people simply won't even enter the field because it's reprehensible and contemptible, not to mention boring, just to read machine-generated proofs and verify them.
Collaborating on, or at least working on unsolved problems is what motivates most people.
AI is like a cheat code in a video game. You get to the end faster but fewer people want to play if the cheat code is always on. You can't turn it off either because the very challenge is to do something unique.
Its pure cope from the math community. One year ago if god came down and asked any of these math guys if they would want to see the proof of the Riemann Hypothesis they would all say yes. Now that the AI math god is here and handing out proofs they are all like 'not like that'!
What does it mean to “genuinely” contribute to mathematics? Because the definition you use is load-bearing ;) and it might be different from that of others.
Because they published a ton of slop papers with terrible English, impossible for humans (even experts) to understand, full of non-standard terms, invented jargon etc.
So effectively, stuff got proved, but people don't really understand how, so it's mostly fucking useless and done for OpenAI's marketing team, while also pissing off the maths world at large.
So if god himself comes down from the heavens and hands you the answers to major unsolved problems, but doesn’t walk you through them and you’ll have to still put in effort to understand them, then that’s “not contributing”?
I’m not familiar with A/I, but this sounds pretty damning – the ideological vetting of users in particular seems to discount any sort of neutral utility defense.
The use of the word “ideological” in text with a US Gov-anything byline is tantamount to a fart. Its whining “I dont like this thing but I cant cry like a child about it.”
It really doesn’t, unless they are screening for terrorism. For instance, a company that provides some free tech for low income Catholics, which ends up used in some crime, maybe bombed family planning clinic, can be charged for the terrorism they didn’t do. In fact, this can be leveraged by anti-Catholic terrorists to take out the Catholic tech service.
Sure, sounding damning is kind of the point of this kind of statement. But its also cheap and easy since there is no requirement that any of the claims are justified by any facts.
HN only (lazily) filters content. It doesn't engage in ideological vetting, and doesn't need to either.
A good amount of the commenters on this story probably would encourage violence, or at least agree with the sentiment on a different platform, yet here they are. I'm not even sure if they're real people or bots.
We are having a discussion right now that would not be allowed if there was vetting.
HN's filtering is anything but lazy. Do you have showdead enabled in the settings? If not, enable it and refresh this comments page.
A bunch of my comments were mysteriously deadened and I have no idea why - they aren't flagged. This was among them. Maybe it was a retaliation for talking about HN's filtering?
From my reading of their policy they do not claim to be neutral:
> To be hosted on our servers you have to share our principles of anti-fascism, anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-homophobia, anti-transphobia, and anti-militarism
I'm not familiar with A/I, but I'm familiar with americans, and they look completely ridiculous talking smack about others doing allegedly "bad things". And they have no defense about supporting war criminals or genocidaires.
Intentionally creating circumstances that can lead to a destruction of a group as a whole or in part.
Circumstances were created. The destruction of a group also happened in a significant part, and it's only not more horrendous than it already is just because of massive international support to Palestinians, on whose destruction americans participated in very significant part. Almost all of it was done by american supplied bombs, inluding the mass killings of entire families that are still being brought out of rubble to this day, burried by 100s suffocated or burned alive at the time, with their children, women and men, in covardly night attacks from high above.
Or surprise daylight rushhour mass bombings during ceasefires that killed hundreds of children alone in one go in a day.
This is what I get in mind when I hear "americans" now. This is what americans enabled on purpose. Blergh. Unprovoked aggressions against other countries, like Iran in the last instance that led to permanently increased fuel prices and making everyone poorer around the world, also adds to feeling of disgust when hearing "americans" these days. Americans will learn in time that some things are hard to repair. And their apparent ignorance of what they do in the world and how they are perceived due to that will hit a wall soon enough.
It's defined in the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Long title but the document is like two pages, easy reading for even the intellectually laziest persons.
That definition is less than ideal from several perspectives. It serves neither side.
The worst reason to hate it is that it relies on proving intent (dolus specialis), which essentially makes it unenforceable unless the perpetrator is a group of simpletons.
It really hit me when I realized that there are only two ways to prove intent: The criminal admits it, or the prosecution proves that there are literally zero other possible explanations that could possibly fit the actions.
So - Back to the point. Did the USA assist people guilty of genocide by your own chosen definition? Not if there could be literally any other intention.
Keep in mind that Hamas's own convention (1988) clearly declares that they partly exist as a group for the purpose of wiping Israel out, and they did actually perpetrate October 7th. It would be very difficult for even the best lawyer in the world to argue that self-defense couldn't be at least one possible intention, and given that the nation of Israel probably has one or two decent lawyers, they'd likely be able to come up with a few other possible intentions as well, but they only need one to completely avoid prosecution.
A second reason to hate it is that it doesn't carve out exceptions for mutual combat situations, even the ones that that have been dragging on for thousands of years. When two religious groups or ethnicities from neighboring regions fight each other in open combat few reasonable people would refer to that as a genocide, but it might be considered genocide against both sides if we interpret the UN Convention as it was actually ratified.
> even the intellectually laziest persons
Yo mama.
To be more serious, this wasn't necessary and was rude. What was your goal? To convince me? To convince others? Neither are best accomplished with this sort of behavior.
> It really hit me when I realized that there are only two ways to prove intent: The criminal admits it, or the prosecution proves that there are literally zero other possible explanations that could possibly fit the actions.
I doubt we'll have absolute certainty about genocide until Nuremberg-style trials take place. The problem is such trials won't happen unless the international community intervenes, and they don't seem willing to intervene without 100% certainty. Chicken-egg problem.
> To be more serious, this wasn't necessary and was rude. What was your goal? To convince me?
My goal wasn't to convince you. My goal was to answer your question even though you were, in my opinion, intellectually lazy when you asked it. Now you pretend you've done your homework and suddenly are an expert on definitions of genocide, of course. That's great! At least you've read the convention now.
Seriously, though, it seems striking to me that you asked in bad faith, and I'm not interested in discussing this matter any further. Ask non-rhetorical questions only if you don't believe to know the answer yet!
This actually fits quite nicely with the idea that the graph network of humanity has meaningful emergent properties/challenges/phenomena at various densities or subnetwork connectedness thresholds.
It's the same fundamental network problem: the infrastructure that allows unprecedented levels of commerce and ideas and travel will also allow disinformation, plagues, and homogeneity. The double-edged sword of graph density.
uv removes all the pain from python packaging. and if you ever used it for anything more than one off scripts you know it used to be a lot of pain.
manually activating venv, inconsistent python and dep versions, duplicate files taking up space, slow and broken tools, fragmented configs, global state, all of that is gone now. if you never experienced it you have no idea how bad it was.
not all of it was uv specifically (pyproject.toml was a proposal for some time before) but they cleaned it up. its the only reason i even think about python as an option for new projects.
As a monist who holds the view that you’re claiming monists can’t legitimately hold, I don’t see any difficulty at all in squaring these ideas:
- there is no separate “stuff” that minds are made out of, no privileged plane of existence specific to minds; minds are just patterns like everything else
- destroying an instantiation of a pattern != destroying the pattern
And speaking of squaring ideas – if I draw a square on a piece of paper, and then light that paper on fire, I haven’t destroyed the concept of a square. I can always draw an identical square on another sheet of paper. If the square had consciousness, it’d be none the wiser.
> If the square had consciousness, it’d be none the wiser.
This is exactly what don't know, and is interesting to explore.
> there is no separate “stuff” that minds are made out of, no privileged plane of existence specific to minds; minds are just patterns like everything else
So if your brain was somehow cloned, you'd exist in two places at the same time? It seems possible for two separate consciousness to have the same memories and be identical in all respects, and yet still not be the same.
To illustrate, two instances of a programs can share the exact same binary code (the "pattern") and yet they are separate instances.
> So if your brain was somehow cloned, you'd exist in two places at the same time?
There’d be two Mes – two instantiations of the Me pattern co-occurring. And that would likely be confusing for both of us!
> To illustrate, two instances of a programs can share the exact same binary code (the "pattern") and yet they are separate instances.
Exactly! If we suspend a Docker image, transfer it to a new compatible host machine, and fire it up, we consider it a resumption of the same process (pattern) in a different instance.
Likewise, say we found a mathematical function that would compute the entire state of that Docker image at that moment, and then wiped the image – such that there was no current physical instantiation of it anywhere, on any machine – and subsequently used the function to regenerate it bit for bit.
A dualist would say there’s something fundamentally different about the human analogue of that; that the Mind has a separate existence Elsewhere – and not just in the mathematical sense of patterns not requiring instantiation to still be patterns, since that would apply to all patterns, Minds or not.
You're making a fundimental mistake here on understanding substrates.
If I take a hard drive an copy it, is it the same hard drive? Well, no, we'd both agree they are two different hard drives, that's pretty easy to see.
But what if we are executing data off the hard drive. Initially it would operate as if it were the same, the data on the hard drive would have zero ability or knowledge that it was copied. As the execution continued in two different places in physical reality the state of the hard drives would change.
Coming back to people, you are never the same unless you can start taking snapshots at the plank scale. You are always changing at the chemical level. Cells die, new ones are created, organs spurt out chemicals in varying amounts that alter your mental state, you 'remember' memories and by doing so rewrite them, new information enters from your senses and changes the physical makeup of the structure of our brain via re-enforcement/de-enforcement. Simply put this idea of you is an ethereal moving target. Copying that doesn't change it, each one of them will still think they are the you that has lived up till this point. When looking at both, you'll see their lives diverge, but unless they learn about each other, each you will never know that's the case.
> you are never the same unless you can start taking snapshots at the plank scale. You are always changing at the chemical level.
And yet there is a sense of continuity. Are you saying the if your are killed and replaced by an immortal being with your same memories, thought patterns, and body, that'd be an acceptable continuation of you? You'd be ok with that as a form of attaining immortality?
> if I draw a square on a piece of paper, and then light that paper on fire, I haven’t destroyed the concept of a square. I can always draw an identical square on another sheet of paper. If the square had consciousness, it’d be none the wiser.
If you have a son and you kill him, you haven't destroyed the concept of a son. You can always make a new son. If the son had consciousness, it’d be none the wiser.
Is that the same son? Do you not go to prison for murder?
If your ticket description is large enough to put a dent in your context window, or otherwise end up as a meaningful share of total token expenditure, then something is very, very wrong with your ticket workflow. Nobody needs a 50-page ticket.
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