Posts by jonmsterling@mathstodon.xyz
(DIR) Post #AbTHkt4EgcO0m2a1vk by jonmsterling@mathstodon.xyz
2023-11-04T13:39:54Z
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@JonathanAldrich @andrejbauer @pigworker @ACM You are certainly confusing “remaining useful/adequate” with “remaining competitive in a commercial ecosystem”. Only for the latter is constant enhancement required...
(DIR) Post #Acnr4g3sKWv1p1zgie by jonmsterling@mathstodon.xyz
2023-12-14T14:38:03Z
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@djoerd @JonathanAldrich @tedted @wilbowma @mdekstrand This sounds amazing... makes me want to switch fields.I think, aside from those who have made it their mission to justify spending other people's money, most of our expectations are relatively low (e.g. lipics, arxiv are satisfactory), but if you can do what ACL is doing so cheaply, that's amazing and awesome and we should learn from that rather than burying our heads in the sand. To me it sounds like all the value-added provided by ACM, but with none of the incompetence and much lower costs.
(DIR) Post #AddgG7DtbjaFBvbGCG by jonmsterling@mathstodon.xyz
2024-01-08T10:38:22Z
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@gallais ACM is a democracy!! We can fix this! 🤡
(DIR) Post #AhtauokIVb8vme5eBU by jonmsterling@mathstodon.xyz
2024-05-06T09:14:58Z
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Bit of a rough start today... Made my coffee but forgot to boil the water 🤦🏻♂️
(DIR) Post #AhuN7Mwdyj5v7ouq80 by jonmsterling@mathstodon.xyz
2024-05-03T15:35:25Z
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I've reached the age all academics (or their students) dread — my emacs installation is broken and I cannot figure out how to get it back to how it was.
(DIR) Post #AoTvUnEXmnJbXTwz5s by jonmsterling@mathstodon.xyz
2024-11-27T16:41:46Z
2 likes, 4 repeats
The era of ChatGPT is kind of horrifying for me as an instructor of mathematics... Not because I am worried students will use it to cheat (I don't care! All the worse for them!), but rather because many students may try to use it to *learn*.For example, imagine that I give a proof in lecture and it is just a bit too breezy for a student (or, similarly, they find such a proof in a textbook). They don't understand it, so they ask ChatGPT to reproduce it for them, and they ask followup questions to the LLM as they go. I experimented with this today, on a basic result in elementary number theory, and the results were disastrous... ChatGPT sent me on five different wild goose-chases with subtle and plausible-sounding intermediate claims that were just false. Every time I responded with "Hmm, but I don't think it is true that [XXX]", the LLM responded with something like "You are right to point out this error, thank you. It is indeed not true that [XXX], but nonetheless the overall proof strategy remains valid, because we can [...further gish-gallop containing subtle and plausible-sounding claims that happen to be false]."I know enough to be able to pinpoint these false claims relatively quickly, but my students will probably not. They'll instead see them as valid steps that they can perform in their own proofs.
(DIR) Post #AoTvUqG4XZJuv5gkOO by jonmsterling@mathstodon.xyz
2024-11-27T17:10:53Z
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I see so many adults and professionals talking about how they are using LLMs to deepen their understanding of things, but I think this ultimately dives headlong into the “Gell-Mann amnesia” effect — these people think they are learning, but it only feels that way because there are ignorant enough about the topic they're interested in to not detect that they are being fed utter bullshit.How shall we answer this? I think it speaks most urgently for people who actually know things, those with "intellectual power", to democratise our knowledge, throw aside the totems that make our fields inaccessible and obscure, and open the gates to the multitudes who wish to learn. At first it seems like it would be easy to compete with LLMs (because they say only bullshit), but to actually compete with LLMs we need to produce educational materials that actually explain things properly. Any 'proof by intimidation' will immediately send our student to the LLM. The moment you rely on something that you haven't explained, same deal. So it may be that this era has a silver lining: we must finally teach mathematics properly.
(DIR) Post #ArFYmKZLkjVLk9Enbc by jonmsterling@mathstodon.xyz
2025-02-18T06:57:39Z
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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/18/opinion/china-xi-jinping-trade-manufacturing-tariffs.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShareI am obviously the last person to be a fan of Xi Jinping, but this article is hilarious… They are mad that (checks notes) China has spent its money building critical distribution and manufacturing infrastructure instead of just letting it rot like the “advanced” US and UK economies do?Yeah, it turns out that building bridges and roads and factories is a great idea, both for resilience at home and abroad. Who would have thought? Certainly not me, who rides over approximately 400 potholes every day on my way to work…
(DIR) Post #ArFYmT5C6DjM9ECLLs by jonmsterling@mathstodon.xyz
2025-02-18T07:06:13Z
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The Chinese real estate bubble and subsequent meltdown were obviously predictable, given the capitalist nature of China’s economy. That is what they bought into when they turned away from the socialist road many years ago…But it is also very funny to hear people talking about the real estate bubble as revealing the bankruptcy of China’s economic model. Like, you are so close… You almost got it…
(DIR) Post #AvZEPwiduXNYUzj5Lk by jonmsterling@mathstodon.xyz
2025-06-07T19:19:08Z
1 likes, 0 repeats
@rzeta0 You started off right. Your goal was an implication, so you applied the introduction rule.Then your goal was (A => B) |- ((B => C) => (A => C)).That's another implication, so you might as well apply the introduction rule again.Now you would have:(A => B), (B => C) |- A => CHere you have another implication, so you might as well apply the intro rule once more. Then you'd have:(A => B), (B => C), A |- CNow you can start working your way downward with elim rules.
(DIR) Post #AvZEPy50qqroifCSrA by jonmsterling@mathstodon.xyz
2025-06-07T19:21:39Z
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@rzeta0 I'll let you in on a little secret of structural proof theory that is not taught in enough sources:Call a rule "invertible" if you can derive the premises from the conclusion. For example, in natural deduction, implication has an invertible intro rule but the elim rule is not invertible. On the other hand, disjunction has an invertible elimination rule but its introduction rules are not invertible.Anyway, if you are faced with a goal to which any invertible rule applies, you might as well apply it right away as you'll never go wrong by doing so (where "going wrong" means ending up at a dead-end); it doesn't matter in what order you apply the invertible rules. The only thing you have to use your brain for is to decide when to apply *non-invertible* rules.
(DIR) Post #AxP9a5zJuOWu5rG7yi by jonmsterling@mathstodon.xyz
2025-08-21T07:28:55Z
1 likes, 1 repeats
Yes, Anubis is bad: https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/anubis.html. AI scrapers are also bad.It is literally cutting off your nose to spite your face. The AI scrapers are adapting quickly anyway. I don't have a good answer, but I promise you this: we are not going to win an arms race with these people. We will literally make the web unusable for *ourselves*, and they will always have the resources to get past these things.
(DIR) Post #AxP9aD5FWkQq6H5Sgy by jonmsterling@mathstodon.xyz
2025-08-21T07:36:41Z
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(I hope I don't have to explain that killing the Web for people who don't run JavaScript is a bad thing and a non-starter.)
(DIR) Post #Aym0ZiMCKlotIVmIW8 by jonmsterling@mathstodon.xyz
2025-10-01T17:07:26Z
1 likes, 1 repeats
Please teach your students not to do this.I understand there is a continuum between spellcheck/grammar check and LLMs, and there could be ways to use LLMs to improve wording or grammar, etc.But please teach your students not to use LLMs to “draft content”. I don't care if they disclose it (tbh, I prefer they don't!). I don't care if they "take responsibility for the content".The thing about writing is that it has a social function. The social function is *not* to cause text to exist. The social function is to communicate from your mind to my mind. Text is the means, not the end. If you must use an LLM, skip it and just send me the prompt.(No, I'm not going to link to the paper. The point is not to dunk on people who end up on the wrong side of a social question. The point is to do better.)
(DIR) Post #AznbyRXk1BpOmbSflA by jonmsterling@mathstodon.xyz
2025-10-30T15:13:14Z
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There's something that didn't really crystallise for me for a long time, which I think I might have learned from Bob Harper implicitly, not sure.If you like someone's research and want to emulate it, it is more important to read the things that they had *read* than to read the things that they had *written*.Obviously you should read it all, but I often run into people who are banging their heads against something I wrote when I was just a beginner in a topic trying to understand it myself, and they would be a lot better off reading whatever I had been reading at the time. (A good way to figure out what someone had been reading is to look at the bibliography in their paper or note!)
(DIR) Post #AznbyZuitcxskCH8gy by jonmsterling@mathstodon.xyz
2025-10-30T15:16:12Z
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For example, I often find people who want to "become" Jon Sterling reading my old note on Artin glueing that I wrote with Bas Spitters.If you want to become me, you should not read what I wrote when I was trying to figure it out. You should read what *I* was reading! As can be seen in that note, I was reading Marcelo Fiore's paper on NbE from 2002. Read it, and write your own note.
(DIR) Post #Aznbya9c0GsHUNF1to by jonmsterling@mathstodon.xyz
2025-10-30T15:14:49Z
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The other thing to remember is that everything is written at a particular point in time in the midst of a particular community discourse & conversation. When you find two apparently incompatible viewpoints represented in two "canonical" papers (even by the same person), this is not a contradiction. Time passes, people learn, the questions they are trying to answer change. Context matters.
(DIR) Post #AznbyiTl3Fk7JAjEPY by jonmsterling@mathstodon.xyz
2025-10-30T15:18:49Z
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Or, I wrote a kind of combative note about (essentially) algebraic descriptions of universe hierarchies. What's the big deal? Seems so weird to be belabouring this point...But at that point in time, the community discourse was overwhelmingly favouring a pseudo-scientific point of view on type theory that has almost died out today. We won! But now the entire discussion is unrecognisable. Reading a piece of "battle propaganda" and trying to map it to today's discourse isn't that useful...
(DIR) Post #B3AIUREXlu1hN9rkOm by jonmsterling@mathstodon.xyz
2026-02-06T08:19:38Z
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It is so hard to retain good students… they all go to work for companies that can pay them in one year a decade of junior academic income. I won’t actually claim that industrial employment is more stable than junior academic employment (it used to be, but I think it isn’t anymore) — but when you can make 10X salary, it kind of doesn’t matter.Each year I have a great Masters-level student who then goes to work at Jane Street, Meta, or similar. I don’t blame them, that’s almost certainly the correct life decision. I also don’t blame those companies for paying so much. I just wish we could compete in the academy. We are experiencing a serious brain drain…
(DIR) Post #B3AIUZGbu6QuHstVjM by jonmsterling@mathstodon.xyz
2026-02-06T09:14:44Z
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And the Labour government's bizarre immigration policies are going to cause another brain drain...It's so strange. People asked Labour to “stop the boats” (migrants breaking the law), and Labour responds by making ILR almost impossible for skilled workers immigrating legally. That is literally what nobody asked for...(Don't take my comment as an endorsement of illegal immigration crackdowns. I am just saying that Labour's response to popular concerns about illegal immigration is really weird and is to make Britain even more impoverished relative to the developed world than it already is.)