"How do people not understand that some laws only make sense at a certain scale? "
Honestly, this is because its something that is basically never discussed or reasoned about. The closest I can think of is "personal use vs commercial use". But I'd love to see more about how to reason about how laws change at scale.
Laws do consider scale and we can see that in everyday law.
4 friends walk together, it's just normal. 400 "friends" walking can and will be treated differently.
Moving around with a couple of bills is treated differently from carrying huge bundles of cash.
Those laws or exceptions were probably added later as a reaction to abuse of existing laws.
The problem with AI/scraping is that we can't afford to be reactionary because it may be too late by the time we realize what has happened and change the law.
It will be too late because governments and judiciary have been largely about maintaining the status quo and minimizing disruption when it comes to big tech related cases even when they have been found guilty of wrongdoings. We already see the too big to fail vibes with AI.
Laws are typically implicitly considerate of scale. Very rarely are they explicitly considerate of scale.
To wit, sharing music digitally, Google scanning books, or Uber/Lyft providing unlicensed taxi services.
It's pretty rare that laws consider what should happen if it were suddenly possible to 10x or 100x preexisting throughput.
And specifically where laws balance multiple, often-opposed, stakeholders' interests, that change can drastically upset the previously negotiated compromise.
Which is why piracy at scale, before it's banned, tends to be a successful foundation for many businesses.
Theft was historically very scale-sensitive. In England you'd face execution for "grand larceny" if the goods in question were worth more than twelve pence. This was on the books from the 13th century until 1832 (!).
Jesus Christ on a pogo stick, execution for stealing 12 pence worth of stuff? That's crazy! Adjusting for inflation[1][2], that would be the same as nowadays being executed for stealing £5!
> this is ABSOLUTELY not how actual mathematicians see their field
While this might be true, I think this is the big pivot that will need to happen. Math, as a human endeavor, will all be applied. We will use LLMs to do the math and discover the math, and humans will apply it to whatever problem they are working on (likely using another LLM to integrate it).
Bitwarden is free and in my experience does a better job than 1 password. Tho he could have vibecoded his own 1-password, I would be a bit careful doing that though
yeah I agree, bitwarden is really good, but since I'm the only one who uses it I didn't need all the features of it and just vibecoded my own, though I made sure it was secure (I'm a software engineer so knew what to secure). definitely wouldn't recommend anyone do that though if they don't know what they're doing
I assume this person heard about keepass [0] and accesses it from multiple devices with a dropbox or icloud style service. Or doesn't access it from multiple devices. I just synchronize my password database on a slow cadence or as needed.
"So the plants crossed over and started moving east along the coast and up into the interior. Beyond that point, there were no merchants. But when a woman married into the next clan over, she took cuttings from her family’s garden with her."
The key phrase is "Beyond that point", where that point is up into the interior where there were no merchants. That's when marriage took over.
If the point of math is understanding then maybe our incentive structure is wrong. Maybe it should be teaching the concepts to as many people as possible rather than just continuing to write papers that 10 people in the world understand, which is the current state of a lot of math.
But one of the things AI also excels in is summarizing and can do so hierarchically. One of my favorite things to do with a concept I'm new at is "ELI5" then "explain like I'm a high school student" then "explain like a bright undergrad in XYZ" then "explain to a working professional in this domain". It's a lot of steps, but I've found it very effective (for me) to learn with -- and I've done something similar with code and math (although not math proofs -- I'm not a mathematician). But my point is that I think we can use AI to also teach us these proofs they're building in a way that I don't understand today about human proofs.
If we use AI well here we could actually understand math much better than we do now.
It does appear there have been some people who have looked at this before but it’s unclear how many(here’s an example of a request from readers in 1927 https://toebes.com/Flynns/Flynns-19270813.htm).
Best is a relative statement of quality. And in this case reflects the lack of alternatives more than anything else. But if there are better please let me know.
Jaguar implemented a fairly radical change to their product line, getting rid of all their existing cars, and announcing, but not actually releasing, a new car. As a result, they do not currently sell cars (which, ah, explains the drop in sales that the person you're replying to is going on about); they'll release a new car next month. This is a fairly extreme tactic, but honestly maybe better than just waiting to die, as they had previously been doing.
They also made an ad which a lot of the likes of Musk got very pissy about, for reasons I'm not entirely clear on. Some right wing internet weirdos have claimed that Jaguar's reduction in sales is due to the ad, as opposed to the fact that, just to reiterate, you cannot buy a new car from Jaguar today, because they no longer manufacture any of the cars that they used to sell. This is obviously an extremely stupid claim, but then "extremely stupid" is kinda the far-right twitterati's _thing_.
I mean, you say "even Jaguar". Jaguar has essentially been a dead brand walking for well over a decade. They're currently trying a fairly radical reorientation, which, well, hard to see it _working_, but probably beats just shutting it down, which is probably where it was otherwise heading.
You mention sales plummeting. This is, ah, unsurprising; Jaguar currently doesn't really sell cars (they stopped making the old ones late last year, and the new one doesn't launch til next month). This is a company with an obsolete product line which nobody wants dispensing with it in favour of a new product which they think people might want.
Yes the Sketcher slip ons have been a game changer. Also their shoe laces seem to be constructed so that the knot doesn’t untie over time. I had a single knot lace that stayed intact over four months of daily wear.
Most comfortable shoes ever? Maybe not. But probably top 5-10 in my lifetime.
Are you implying that OpenAI using someones unpublished research without their permission to solve an career defining math problem with their latest model in order to publish first is a problem with the mathematicians?
My read on this document is that people's work isn't being fairly cited more than what does it mean to be a mathematician in this age.
I didn't know this article was about that issue at all. Yeah, if the issue is properly citing work then yes, OpenAI needs to do that. But the article read like it was tackling a completely different issue.
That's one of several issues, obviously a big one, and they do touch on it:
> Often these solutions are announced in a rush, leaving no time for a proper writeup, the isolation of new methods and ideas, and citing relevant previous work of others. As in all creative professions, this raises severe attribution and plagiarism questions.
Indeed, I wonder how a similar letter by Uber drivers would be received -- "navigation is an intrinsically human domain, personal relationships are critical for passengers and drivers to progress in the world, etc etc." Or doctors, for that matter.
We are all going to have to come to terms with entities more capable than we are, and in many cases, letting the real work be done by the AIs will be the right thing to do. For all the huffing and puffing about the "human touch" in medicine, it will eventually become downright irresponsible to consult only with a human doctor. I am not sure if this is the case in mathematics or not, but if it isn't, that suggests math will be relegated to more of a hobby than a cutting edge scientific discipline.
That's how I read it too, Terry Tao, who has been a "pro-AI math guy" is going through the same emotions and confusion that us SWE folks are going through, "oh, wait... this might mean I'm not going to be special anymore!?"
I don't mean to be a dick, but I've talked about it previously. These folks are grieving. I get it, I've lived through this sort of life changing thing before, it sucks... but yeah.
I think this is ridiculously flippant. If software engineering and the hardest math is solved, that means that eventually a majority of professions and knowledge work is solved. This is hugely problematic because of the way our society currently functions. People need jobs to eat, pay for housing, etc.
Dismissing it as "innovations have happened before" is disingenuous. Yes, innovations have happened, but none of those threatened to automate all human work in existence.
> that means that eventually a majority of professions and knowledge work is solved. This is hugely problematic because of the way our society currently functions.
Our society has functioned very differently in the past, precisely because the technology level made some things viable (or profitable) that aren't so anymore.
One would hope that, rather than abandoning technological progress, we'll rather adjust our society to it.
I mean, seriously, read what you just wrote. You're literally saying that solving scarcity is a problem because of the way our society currently functions - because people "need jobs to eat, pay for housing, etc". And you're correct! But what does it tell you about our society that robots capable of producing everything that humans might need is a problem for it?
Yeah given he had been very pro-AI for years, I expected he made peace with the issue many many years ago (like I did back in 2018), and when this time would come he would explain to other mathematicians how to live with it.
Honestly, this is because its something that is basically never discussed or reasoned about. The closest I can think of is "personal use vs commercial use". But I'd love to see more about how to reason about how laws change at scale.
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