[HN Gopher] Wolfram Notebook Assistant
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       Wolfram Notebook Assistant
        
       Author : nsoonhui
       Score  : 76 points
       Date   : 2024-12-10 04:37 UTC (18 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (writings.stephenwolfram.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (writings.stephenwolfram.com)
        
       | yupis wrote:
       | Awesome work
        
       | qubex wrote:
       | Wow... incredibly expensive... at minimum another 26EUR a month.
       | Wolfram really enjoy milking their customers dry (and I'm a
       | customer). I think this is highway robbery.
        
         | nextos wrote:
         | With a bit of creativity you can run something similar for
         | free. It's worth noting Raspberry Pi comes with a free Wolfram
         | license. The assistant part can come from something like
         | Perplexity, which in my experience is decent at writing
         | Mathematica code.
         | 
         | I also have a Mathematica license which I think is worth paying
         | for. One of the few closed software that has no good equivalent
         | in the libre world. Nonetheless, I wish Wolfram had come up
         | with a different business model that made Mathematica more
         | mainstream, as I feel it has not realized its potential in
         | certain areas.
        
         | xhkkffbf wrote:
         | I wouldn't call that "incredibly expensive". Certainly for what
         | it does, there are many other software packages that cost more.
        
           | qubex wrote:
           | For somebody who uses Wolfram Home, it's incredibly
           | expensive.
        
         | Melodramatico wrote:
         | Because of what logic actually?
         | 
         | Are they forcing you to use it?
         | 
         | Or do you expect them to run expensive GOUs for you for free?
         | 
         | Are you actually using wa? Because if it's helpful as an
         | assistant and it only costs 26 Dollar, shouldn't you be happy
         | about this?
        
           | qubex wrote:
           | Yes I do use Mathematica. 26EUR a month is pricing like a
           | freakin' luxury.
        
         | Retric wrote:
         | It's only expensive if you're getting less than 50$/month of
         | value from it, at which point don't subscribe. This isn't
         | something I'd pay for right now, but when I was doing this kind
         | of work regularly it would have been an easy purchase.
         | 
         | Subscription models don't mesh well with casual users. However,
         | if it's going to save you hours of work every month then it's a
         | perfectly reasonable price point.
        
         | jjtheblunt wrote:
         | That's like two Starbucks visits.
         | 
         | (Wolfram customer since 1988 too, so I think it's helpful to
         | change units, in this cost evaluation!)
        
       | lrmabyc wrote:
       | That looks nice. For the user, however: If notebooks or anything
       | connect to Wolfram servers, is your own IP mined to power the
       | training? Has past IP been mined?
        
       | adsharma wrote:
       | There's another way to do this:
       | 
       | English -- (LLM) --> python
       | 
       | Human fine tunes python
       | 
       | Python -- (py2many) --> smt2 --> z3 --> result
       | 
       | Perhaps some steps can be eliminated in the future.
        
         | adsharma wrote:
         | With an example:
         | https://gist.github.com/adsharma/45fbb065a8fe793030e8360daeb...
         | 
         | You could have a puzzle that's described in plain English. I
         | think the current day tech is sufficient to translate the
         | puzzle to a python constraint like in this gist.
         | 
         | The argument is that the SMT solvers are a better match for
         | solving these problems than expensive matrix multiplication
         | paid for by someone else.
         | 
         | Of course, SMT is not a solution for every situation that
         | Wolfram language is used for today. But a lot of the reasoning
         | benchmarks fall in this category.
        
         | adsharma wrote:
         | There is a wolfram blog post comparing python vs wolfram from
         | 2021:
         | 
         | https://blog.wolfram.com/2021/11/04/lessons-learned-migratin...
         | 
         | The linked tweet (https://x.com/WolframResearch/status/13259358
         | 91651698690?s=2...) is inaccessible. Does anyone have an
         | archive?
         | 
         | I'd love to see pandas/df compared instead of the iterative
         | style.
        
           | Qem wrote:
           | > There is a wolfram blog post comparing python vs wolfram
           | from 2021
           | 
           | Now the view from someone who quit Mathematica walled garden
           | to embrace the Python ecosystem (2018):
           | https://paulromer.net/jupyter-mathematica-and-the-future-
           | of-...
        
       | geor9e wrote:
       | I loved mathematica during university. Gorgeous math notation
       | written with quick hotkeys, so I never needed Latex. And it
       | computed in that form, so I never needed to code in ASCII. I'd do
       | most of my math/engineering/physics homeworks in it. I would have
       | paid for this back then for sure. Sadly, I rarely need to open
       | mathematica anymore, in the world of real life employment.
        
         | ata_aman wrote:
         | Same here, truly the most intuitive analytics program. The
         | notation made me want to use it every day. I loved the
         | animations/charts you can produce.
        
       | martinky24 wrote:
       | "Useful to the Point of Being Revolutionary" is an insane title
       | for a blog post like this.
        
         | hugs wrote:
         | Agreed. However, it's also the baseline expectation for
         | anything from Wolfram, though. Hyperbole is the brand.
        
         | jebarker wrote:
         | Why? It seems really useful, so there must be a bar where that
         | becomes revolutionary.
        
         | ssivark wrote:
         | But it's also a valid descriptor for Mathematica :-)
         | 
         | ... for a significant slice of professional and hobbyist use
         | cases, and there are no alternatives AFAICT!
        
       | vouaobrasil wrote:
       | My feeling as a mathematician is that adding gen AI to study
       | science takes the beauty away from scientific discovery. It is an
       | overt signal to what was alreadly happening covertly: the
       | transformation of science into a mechanized procedure for the
       | sake of production instead of human good. I condemn technology
       | like this especially.
        
         | jebarker wrote:
         | I disagree. AI used thoughtfully as a tool can potentially
         | allow a mathematician or scientist to progress further and see
         | more beauty. I'm also a mathematician by training and I've
         | realized that a large part of my love for math was/is the
         | process of solving a problem by my own wits. AI does take that
         | away somewhat, but that's not really the important part of
         | maths for society as a whole.
        
       | smusamashah wrote:
       | I really appreciate the depth and detail of Wolfram's blog posts
       | like these. Any other blog would have ended around 1/5th of the
       | way. I kept expecting it to end, but it kept on giving and
       | throwing in more examples. It's amazing and I can't help but
       | compare that most people don't do that.
        
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