Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid - welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
One of the things that’s never clear from the reporting on ai successes is exactly how much actual paid human time went in to achieving those successes. This was especially notable in the fable-based security work… a huge amount of person-hours went into turning fable-detections into actual meaningful vuln reports.
A lot of demonstrably clever and capable people are involved with the llms-for-maths work, and a lot of money was spent on their time and supporting their work. Replicating it without your own stable of mathematicians and computer scientists and all the tokens they can eat is probably impractical.
Fwiw, lean is a general purpose programming language, though despite microsoft’s efforts no-one uses it for that. I think its popularity with mathematicians came as a bit of a surprise.
Anyway, the other important thing that didn’t get reported on is that building the formal definition of the problem is not trivial! Obviously I don’t need to tell you that, but from the reporting you’d think that an llm solved all these problems, when in fact it was an llm in the hands of some very capable people who absolutely did not just prompt the thing in plain english.
Anyone hoping for self-marking homework here is going to be disappointed… lean slop confirming to formal spec slop is just expensive slop. Reviewing regular genai code is awful, even the thought of reviewing genai dependently-typed code makes me want a new career.