Posts by jonmsterling@mathstodon.xyz
(DIR) Post #B2gpuZcmrHA10d5GHQ by jonmsterling@mathstodon.xyz
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One thing I love about being involved in my College is I get a direct line on what young people are thinking.In my circle of 30-50-somethings, it's taken for granted that "AI" is changing everything. Some of my colleagues express caution that we shouldn't even take any position on software engineering education because it will be out of date within a week.Meanwhile, my students are telling me that in their cohort, everyone is tired of AI and wants to learn proper software engineering.One lesson here is: do you remember how clueless your boss was about everything? Recognise when you are in the "boss" demographic, and that your breathless enthusiasm and concern may be equally clueless.
(DIR) Post #B45Yxvr9rY3qMOKq6S by jonmsterling@mathstodon.xyz
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RE: https://mas.to/@SmudgeTheInsultCat/116180303224845767i'm still thinking about academics I know who tried to defend the idea of pivoting to *research* NFTs to me...i was like "oh wow, ok sure"RT: https://mas.to/users/SmudgeTheInsultCat/statuses/116180303224845767
(DIR) Post #B45Yxw3D8jhaxlyStE by jonmsterling@mathstodon.xyz
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my advice to students is usually something like: the trend is short, your life is long. research what you are interested in, and make sure you can explain why you are doing it to other researchers (and to beancounters when necessary).this is especially important for phd students: if you do a "trend project" for your phd, it will be both out of date and "cringe" by the time you hit the job market.
(DIR) Post #B45YxwQxiQhW9R5QuW by jonmsterling@mathstodon.xyz
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i often think about how there was a whole generation of "PL for blockchain" phds and i can only guess this was the result of poor advising...some of those students did go on to be very successful, actually, to be fair. but five years is a long time to spend thinking about the blockchain, and I mourn for what they might have done in that time with better advice.
(DIR) Post #B4wmEfty20tIaAq55s by jonmsterling@mathstodon.xyz
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@elduvelle @albertcardona Moreoever, why is it that there are direct flights between cities in the UK that I need eight changes on the train and a dozen little bus trips for?With each change likely to fail at a rate of 10% that gives me a less than 50% change of reaching my destination… Airplane it is.
(DIR) Post #B4wmQv5vN2RLB3Gqbg by jonmsterling@mathstodon.xyz
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@albertcardona @elduvelle Yeah, it is so crazy. To even contemplate it for a second is hellish and laughable.
(DIR) Post #B5DL9lnxGJzqMpmYro by jonmsterling@mathstodon.xyz
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The issue with AI-writing is not related to disclosure, or lack thereof. It's about values, and understanding what the social function of writing is. That's why university policies requiring "disclosure" of AI assistance in writing are bullshit: if you used it to help you think, you shouldn't have to disclose it, and if you used it to help you write, you shouldn't ever show that writing to another human being. Ever.
(DIR) Post #B5Yb8K9IHN3dtIFp8y by jonmsterling@mathstodon.xyz
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But one thing I am really concerned about is that there are not many constituencies involved in this discussion who are actually aware that "autoformalisation" of theorem statements / specifications can easily produce vacuous specifications, and that as AI capabilities increase, it will be more and more difficult for humans (and AIs) to tell whether the autoformalised specification has anything to do with the mathematical problem at hand. In this hypothetical world, refereeing goes from a straightforward "spot-check the math, assuming good faith on the part of the author/mechaniser" process to a true needle-in-haystack scenario. Mechanisation, far from increasing confidence in the results, will decrease the level of confidence that we may justifiably have in mathematical results.I am really concerned when I see professional mathematicians telling me that they are excited that the system will be able to translate their precise English specification into a formalised theorem statement, so that they don't have to understand the code. That is the one part that LLMs will never EVER be able to do with the reliability required by mathematics. The LLM can certainly in many cases fill in the proof, which is cool. But professional mathematicians are always shocked when I tell them that no version of the current AI technology will EVER be able to translate their specification from English into Lean in a way that would not require them to be a Lean expert.
(DIR) Post #B5Yb8L1X1iRWbVd8gS by jonmsterling@mathstodon.xyz
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Mathematics has never ever been adversarial until now. The fact that mathematicians may freely assume good faith of all their fellows is what has made the review of both non-mechanised and mechanised mathematics tractable."Autoformalisation" is a buzzword for a new kind of mathematics that is inherently adversarial. Whether a result is a theorem or an "exploit" (hahaha) will take immense amounts of energy to determine.I don't think that people are really understanding how absolutely crucial the non-adversarial nature of mathematics has been, and how the loss of the good-faith assumption could actually lead to mathematics being set back hundreds or even thousands of years. It's existential.
(DIR) Post #B5Yb8LPzYm0bpN4foG by jonmsterling@mathstodon.xyz
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By the way, if you don’t believe me, consider that that grifters have raised tens of millions USD in venture capital off of a faked solution to an Erdos problem (I say faked because what it solved was trivial and not an actual Erdos problem). That is what I would call an “exploit”.
(DIR) Post #B5y7gCgoZd225S89EO by jonmsterling@mathstodon.xyz
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I find it such a weird meme that RSS/Atom is dead. Literally every blogging platform has RSS/Atom support. Not just the "indie" ones, even the big corporate ones, like Substack and Medium. Every mastodon account has a built-in RSS feed. Every Bluesky account has a built-in RSS feed. Almost every major news site has an RSS or Atom feed. WordPress automatically produces RSS feeds (and WordPress powers almost half the Web).RSS and Atom are almost certainly even more ubiquitous than they were in the 2000s, if only because the web has gotten so much bigger than it was back then.There are more podcasts now than there ever have been, and each of these has an RSS feed. Every fucking YouTube channel has an RSS feed. In 2005 there were probably fewer than 20 million blogs. Right now there are more than a hundred million YouTube channels.RSS/Atom is bigger than ever.
(DIR) Post #B5y7gDWZTCQqfyLTu4 by jonmsterling@mathstodon.xyz
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The only thing that died was Google Reader, and that didn't come close to "taking down RSS". Today there are more options for reading and authoring RSS/Atom feeds than there ever were in the past. We've never had this many good apps and services in the RSS/Atom ecosystem.I think there were some really interesting aspects of Google Reader that I do regret losing. But it's just so weird to hear people say things like "Ahh yes, RSS, that was a very elegant thing, I'm nostalgic for the days when we had that..." It's like being nostalgic for the good old days when the sun used to go up in the morning and come down in the evening. It's still doing that!
(DIR) Post #B5y7gEogfKW8gRpSmO by jonmsterling@mathstodon.xyz
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The other thing that died, I guess, was the enthusiasm in the Big Web industry to jam RSS everywhere. There was a lot of weird hype back in those days, and for some reason people thought they could make money from it. Of course, the reality was the opposite: RSS empowers the *operators* of Internet-capable devices, rather than the parasites who try to extract money from the Web. That is why the weird hype died and megacorporations stopped making weird announcements about how they are transforming everything with RSS. But that stuff was never the soul of it, and it didn't matter at all.
(DIR) Post #B6JY8neFQxJ9wqNuCm by jonmsterling@mathstodon.xyz
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I get so tired of the liberal “Studies show X with 100% certainty, so we must do <policy>, and if you don’t agree, you are <genocidal, whatever>” shtick. Every time, it ignores important factors and frequently misrepresents the scope of the studies in play. I think UBI may be an example of this but I am not certain. Another common one these days is “All housing problems are solved by building more” — there is a kernel of a valid point here, and it is still a good thing to build more housing, but as a cure-all doctrine it completely ignores many important and subtle aspects of the housing market’s dynamics.A good example from the recent past is “harm reduction”, which (regardless of its merits) has been an abject failure as a policy, destroyed the social and economic fabric of multiple cities, and invigorated the techno-fascists. It did this not only by misapprehending the nature of harm to the individual subject (read some philosophy!), but also by completely negating the consideration of harm to the society as a whole. What is needed in all these cases is a bit of common sense. Studies have limited scope. They can very rarely establish as “fact” the applicability of a large scale policy intervention using experimental methods that necessarily apply to a tiny sample and therefore cannot become involved in the dynamics of the market or social system as a whole. The same kind of experiment would show that the moon does not affect the tides, because a basketball cannot exert tidal forces on a bathtub.
(DIR) Post #B9y0jINL2XPpdhNqFs by jonmsterling@mathstodon.xyz
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@bugaevc @bodil Thanks for the heads up!