oce 🐆

I recently noticed unlogged old Reddit does not work anymore.

Yes, I was going to ask, how does this compare to with/without internet access. Coders were also likely more persistent when they could only read the tool’s manual and keep trying, vs getting the answer from StackOverflow immediately.
I’ve heard there’s been a decline in memorization skils since the internet, but I have not verified.

Can we opt to “live” in the Matrix?

Yeah, we also need to solve the attribution and retribution for the people who contributed to the result, and we can’t expect this to happen from mega corps alone.

Even if it’s finding bugs in those, it would be progress. Imagine we can find bugs like that in many other problems, that’s pretty valuable. Agreed it will take time to digest proofs and produce something new out of it.

I think many theoritical researchers do not care about practical applications (from physics university time, I even remember a disdain from some students about applications because it’s “dirty”, meaning badly approximated). In any case, it’s hard to predict, but sometimes theoritical results have real world impact eventually. Crazy theories like quantum physics and Relativity are used to for computing (semiconductors and newer quantum computers) and GPS now.
Having this proven solution will probably motivate new research directions, and it could improve the understanding of this fluid mechanics equations, which has applications everywhere fluids are used…

Well written and agreed. I think suddenly having many new statements that are proven true, with probably some of them being unexpected, will have serious impact on research directions, even if it still takes time to digest and find useful applications.

I don’t have an English source, but on this trustworthy French public service radio scientific podcast, 2 mathematicians (from reputed organizations, including one Henri Poincaré Prize) are discussing the Navier-Stokes AI solution. https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/podcasts/la-science-cqfd/ia-et-mathematiques-quand-la-solution-pose-probleme-5497880
They say that the results are legitimate and proven through mathematical proof software. It did build on recent progress by humans, but it would still have taken years for humans to get there, because AI could explore so many paths in a much shorter time than a few human specialists can.
They explain the help from AI is technically remarkable, and people who don’t recognize it are in denial. They think mathematics research without AI will not make any sense soon. There’s also some hope that it will allow focusing on new interesting problems that the current AI cannot solve yet. They also discuss the problem of AI being owned by foreign mega corporations and that’s a risk for public research produced for the common good.
I’m probably going to get downvoted for this unpopular opinion here, just know that I also hate the social and environmental impact of AI, but denying its effectiveness is clearly irrational now.

Shocking!

It’s one more data harvesting tool on their belt.

In his commit message:

[And this was a debug session from hell, enormously helped by an AI doing much of the grunt-work.

I’d like to call it my tireless helper, but the AI several times stated flat out that this was impossible and unsolvable and that we should just write a report about it.

I suspect those things have been trained by people who may not be quite as stubborn as I am.

But while the AI was ready to give up several times, it did keep adding debug code and analyzing it faithfully when I pushed. So credit where credit is due and I let the AI write the commit message above.

This is basically a one-liner fixing a bogus “round_up()” to a “round_down()”, but there were 24 patches adding more and more debug information to this, and 18 kernel boot to finally narrow it down to this. - Linus ]

Didn’t he state quite early on that LLMs were a good tool to spot bugs? Found this from 3 years ago: https://blog.mathieuacher.com/LinusTorvaldsLLM/