When you mechanise, you take the "meaning" out of the effort and that, in of itself, is death of human pursuit of the venture.
The industrial revolution did that to battles and wars and it inspired Tolkein's lores to a considerable degree. He loathed what mechanisation had done.
I feel something similar is happening to Mathematics. I shudder to think what would come of other human pursuit this mechanisation targets next.
No, you're right. I clearly missed reading the room :D
But I'm glad how Terence Tao sees it. I was relying him to do that for the NS results as well.
I didn't follow through to the PhD, but I spent few years building up to understanding of Fluid Dynamics and Functional Analysis to come close to NS. It's intriguing that it's "solved", but what interests me is then "what do we learn from it" and what lies beyond in non-linearity.
In the 10 years I've spent away from academia, I still cherish what Math taught me best: looking at equivalences and I still feel the kick that I surely wouldn't want an Agent to do on my behalf. NS was never the point. And who can't see that I can only feel that they missed out.
Maybe, actually, it will rehumanize math by formulating its ideas in a manner that allow their comprehension without 10-15 years of mechanized practice. The average human might understand quantum mechanics and Maxwell’s equations with the right conceptual interface.
Maybe they should, you know.
Maybe OpenAI is exactly working towards so that we need to do that :)
It's fascinating how people like to push any statement to its limits, because it circles around to absurdity and they believe they've made a point. Moderation seems to be chasing you, but you clearly are faster!
Taking a statement to its limits is useful for that reason. This is why it's so common to do in physics & math, in fact!
If your mental model breaks at the limits, it maybe means there's some truth in what you say, but there's a nuance that's clearly missing.
And that's the case here: nobody argues when automation comes for many types of other tasks, so why is mathematics special? Or even art? We should either find that line or accept that maybe they aren't as special as we assumed.
I'm really curious how you're dealing with lazy loading. Is the MCP then more like a tool-helper instead of the tools themselves?
I was trying to find out if the MCP has some sort of lazy loading feature/primitive in the works, but there seem to be a lot of disagreements about it.
Intuitively, lazy loading seems to be somewhere between a CLI and vanilla MCP. In the end, it sounds very similar to tiered/ progressive loading similar to images on low bandwidth connections.
I went through the whole article, agreeing to most of it and I was baffled by how skeptical people were in the comments here, with remarks of "follow the money". I didn't read all of it in one shot, but in breaks over the course of 2 days and when I finally got to the last paragraph I understood what people in the comments were on about.
I grew up in a culture where hustle and work was the way out of a terrible life. I've spent several years unlearning that work is not everything while living in Europe. But then, work is not everything and not all that important because some AI agents can do all* of it...
Nice try, but work is still a lot of what I derive meaning from and taking meaning from a person might not have a positive outcome: for the person and for the society.
It's interesting how quickly any discussion about immigrant/expat life in Germany becomes about language. That has to account for something.
After my tenure of 11 years in the country, my impression is that there is a deeper sense of "us" v/s "them"; the language is the most PC way to express it.
If you're in the category of "us" you don't complain about the taxes or things being closed on Sundays, because you're supposed to "understand" that there's a welfare state (which has been a myth for a while now and cracks are showing up since covid). If you're in the "us", you don't claim bureaucracy is treacherous, because the language should have equipped you to fight it. You might be in the "us", if you believe with every bit of your being that rules and regulations is the best way to ensure everyone behaves properly and everything works efficiently.
If you dare challenge (m)any of these and you don't speak German good enough, it's the language. If you speak the language, then you're not "integrated". Maybe that's immigration everywhere, but I feel in Germany, there is a rather narrow band you get to be in "acceptably".
1. Defensiveness; one could describe it as "Stockholm syndrome"
2. What outsiders don't understand about the language thing is that it's not about how much German you need to get along in daily life. That's a similar challenge everywhere in the world.
The crux is that in Germany, correct use of the language is a social status thing, more so than in other places.
Any person, whether German or foreigner, who appears to have difficulty with the language, is easily looked down upon.
The point about correct use being a status thing is such a good point, that you almost never see mentioned, but definitely feel it.
Recently I saw a discussion on Reddit where the author made a minor mistake in the title, that sounds perfectly fine and understandable to me, as a non-native speaker. They used "Mit was" instead of "womit". And more than half the comments were people pointing out the mistake and making fun of the person due to it, rather than engage in the topic that was raised in the first place.
Yes. I don’t want to invalidate people’s bad experiences, but I think it’s a more general problem and not specifically xenophobia. What you describe can happen to anybody!
The same is true for speaking English, which is considered very high status in Germany. If someone has a strong German accent, they’ll be made fun of. I always find this ironic because the people laughing usually don’t speak much better. (Not that I would care; I love people’s accents.)
I have like a dozen different german friends, and it's nothing like you say: everyone in the country curses the bureaucracy, every sunday is like "oh let's quickly get something from the shops oh no wait it's sunday uuuugh"
The taxes seem largely fine relative to the cost of living there, with people living in poorer regions at an advantage even due to the Freibetrag.
Complaining about the bureaucracy is sure everyone's favourite trauma bonding exercise, but I never hear about the solution to it. It's in the political agenda, but the solution is almost always, let's form a committee to decide the agenda of the report about it that would be 1500 pages long and be done in 72 weeks from the day of conclusion of committee's proposal. I feel the issue is the mentality towards problem solving.
Taxes are fine till Herr Merz isn't busy proposing a rug-pull on half of the things you learnt were supported here. Many of our "expat" friends faced this first hand when they lost their Kindergeld unplanned. There was a sudden hue and cry about dependents' insurance being scrapped, not sure of what's latest on it. And the English speaking, tech and finance working expats are not in poorer regions.
I don't know all Germans and maybe it is my circle, but in general I felt if I didn't mirror their hobbies, opinions, and preferences, I wasn't going to have a chance to be on the same table as them or have a heart to heart conversation with them. It's almost like it's too inefficient use of their social time and I'm pretty sure I ain't alone.
One of my professors in undergrad said: the most dangerous mathematicians are the ones that begin the proof with "Consider a case ...". He said that these mathematicians are the ones who don't share anything about how they got the case and they end up projecting this sort of "magician aura". I don't know how accurate that assessment it, but I think it captures something that never sat well with me.
In my life, I've never liked people who deliberately polish up their articulation to the level that it obfuscates how they arrived at that understanding (whether it's academics or engineers). They might not do it for attention and they might not be doing it knowingly. IMO, they are taking away the opportunity of learning from the people they are talking to. For me the conversation is one sided. I'm there to listen, but rarely can I ask questions, give feedback or grow from where they have possibly reached.
Ugh, let's take a step back and make a distinction:
I don't need your fluff. No one cares how you arrived writing another crud line to save an object to database or sent yet another AJAX call.
If you wrote some genuine great compression algorithm that's a different take on compression, I would like to see step by step reasoning and eventual dead ends.
I shared my thoughts in the context of someone saying that one should be able to share your line of thinking when asked to. Whether "when one asked to" applies to keystroke by keystroke blockhained versioning isn't my point of discussion.
I get it, that the overall discussion is about DeltaDB. I'd say interesting concept to toy with. I'd pay more attention to "micro commits" as the idea more than the keylogger.
I think a good argument ad absurdum for this is to look at how some recipe sites give the entire genealogical history of the author and an anecdote about how their gammy met Theodore Roosevelt and he stole her pen. Three pages later I discover I need to go to the grocery store because the recipe requires sour cream. And the store is closed so I need a different recipe.
Don't fucking do that. Do something way less than halfway to that line.
OTOH polishing up the presentation can really improve the experience of a first-time reader of the work (e.g. your code reviewers). If the polishing is done with good intent and proficiency you can make something that was very convoluted and difficult to arrive at digestible with far less effort. It also aids your own understanding: "If we can reduce it to the freshman level that means we really understand it" (or similar I didn't look up the exact quote, attributed to Feynman). If you're polishing something up to make it understandable that's totally different than polishing it up to make yourself seem smart, right?
Oh, I *love* those kind of people who take the time to _simplify_ and draw meaningful insights from their first draft. They take the time to ensure that they are not just putting out thoughts for the heck of it. They have gone through a learning journey and they are letting you step on it. They might even make the effort to actually articulate their intuition: "it seemed like a good idea to toy with this, because such and such usually have some connection".
Maybe this is the mathematician's lament rejigged. And I have held it for probably 20 years of my life. I try to do things differently when I write, but I have to say there are enough people who find it sub-standard. It's too imprecise or ambiguous or not clear enough for their taste. They aren't wrong. But I'm not done learning and I start building my thoughts as I go along.
"So I was thinking about #####'s Law this morning, and I realized that #######'s Theorem might apply if we do this and ignore that. Then I went up a blind alley and stopped for coffee and realized I was overcomplicating it, we don't care about negative or imaginary solutions."
They don't need to know I was brushing my teeth and thinking of bacon and an argument I had with my spouse right before I thought that though. Or how rude the customer in front of me was to the new barista who was just trying her best.
I personally stumble upon many topics where I only care about the what.
In that case all the theory is just a distraction I'm just wading through to get to the point.
If it's optional, then looking into the how and why is certainly nice, but it should be part of an appendix or a commentary and not interspersed within the proof unless an uncommented version exists.
I like this article already because it took me to the goals of Rust for 2026. We use the language in our team, but we haven't needed to go very deep to do the stuff we need. Yet, I really enjoy witnessing the development of a language from ground up with so much community feedback.
I somehow miss noticing that in C++ and I have no idea how it is working in other domains.
My only gripe is that a lot of it is feeling a bit kick-starter-y, with each of the goals needing specific funding. Is that the best model we've found so far?
> My only gripe is that a lot of it is feeling a bit kick-starter-y
IMO the term "project goals" is quite misleading for what this actually is. A project goal is a system for one person (or a small group of people) to express that they'd like to work on something and ask for Rust project volunteers to commit ongoing time and effort to supporting them through code review, answering questions, etc. It doesn't mean that the Rust project itself has set the goal, or even necessarily endorsed it.
So it's not quite right to treat it as a formal roadmap for Rust, just a "there are some contributors interested in working on these areas".
> I somehow miss noticing that in C++ and I have no idea how it is working in other domains.
There seems to be some consensus even within the C++ ISO committee that the evolution process of that language is somewhat broken, mostly due to its size and the way it is organized.
> My only gripe is that a lot of it is feeling a bit kick-starter-y, with each of the goals needing specific funding. Is that the best model we've found so far?
Sadly, this seems to be the way things go once a technology catches on, commercially. Can't blame large donors for sponsoring only the parts they are interested in. Fortunately, considerable funding of TweedeGolf comes from (Dutch) government, I think.
In open source I guess there's two types of work:
1. features
2. maintenance
You can 'sell' new features. They cost money to create, but they solve real problems. Those problems also cost money and if that's more than the cost of creating the feature, companies are willing to put in money (generally).
Maintenance is harder. But there are now some maintainer funds! Like the one from RustNL: https://rustnl.org/maintainers/
These are broader ongoing work and backed by many orgs chipping in a little bit.
Idk if it's the best model, but at least it seems to kinda work
Which is really my issue with this type of legislation. If they had it clearly estimated it would be incredible because you can measure the impact but as it stands it could go either way.
In case you missed, Mathematics isn't about numbers and equations.
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