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> partial evaluation (comptime) as a single coherent mechanism that replaces a myriad of other partial-evaluation mechanisms (macros, templates/generics, constexprs).

So sad dlang never gets the credit it deserves. None of these ideas in zig are novel.


It is entirely novel. As I wrote, what makes the design revolutionary isn't the partial evaluation mechanism itself, but how the language is organised around it. It's like what made the iPhone's design revolutionary wasn't that it had a touchscreen, but that it didn't have a keypad. Partial evaluation mechanisms aren't very interesting in themselves; what's interesting is building a language around a unified partial evaluation mechanism and little else. But yes, D gets credit for adding more partial evaluation features.

> None of these ideas in zig are novel.

Few ideas are new under the Sun. But the inventor and the popularizer are rarely the same. We should be happy that the ideas got more exposure instead of litigating novelty.


Yes. I don't really understand why Zig gets more attention than dlang. It seems that it is more to do with the personality of the authors, rather than the technicalities. I get the impression that Walter is more laissez-faire, while Andrew is more single-minded. I'm grateful to the contributions both have made.

Pardon any corruption in my memory. But I think D in it`s early days had non-optional garbage collection. Which seemed like a bad choice at a time when I think many of us wanted a better C, not a more inconvenient C#. Then they made garbage collection optional, which split the ecosystem into garbage collected and manual libraries. Not a great choice either. Then there was a drama and split because of two competing standard libs. And also the compiler was closed source which turned some people of in a time where open source compilers had become an expectation. So all in all, some wrong turns made it lose momentum and I don`t think it can recover in todays climate.

Zig, for better or worse, have a strong messaging and isn’t afraid of making big claims. That they don’t always pan out (”faster than C”, ”colorless async” etc), doesn’t matter. Zig was the first C alternative to spring from the interest Jon Blow ignited with his language dev and that marketing lead has been superbly well maintained by Andrew.

Odin and C3 has at least a magnitude fewer people knowing about them. More modest claims, less marketing potential.

So for D, it was to my memory never sold as a silver bullet either. A better C++ certainly, but with enough humility to not market itself as some game changer.

Compare Zig, V and Rust marketing with D’s and you’ll see what I mean.


For me it's because Zig presents a novel and even revolutionary new coherent design for low-level programming, whereas D is mostly a collection of many ideas, many of them are good, but they don't coalesce into a simple design philosophy. I think somebody once said that good (or coherent) design is what happens not when there's nothing left to add but when there's nothing left to remove. That product X has all the components of product Y and possibly more doesn't mean that it contains within it Y's design. The novelty of the iPhone wasn't that it had a touchscreen, but that it had little else. Such a coherent design grabs, and deserves, attention.

For example, another language that immediately grabbed my attention (aspirationally; I haven't looked at it closely yet) is https://github.com/aardappel/goose/. That's not because it has arenas, but because it doesn't have anything else.


maybe filter out any non-OpenAI/x.ai/Google/Anthropic IP addresses?

I don't know why the author could claim this is "their" proof, and they kept saying "they" did this, "they" built that. but in reality everything is done by the LLM and the author is merely asking it to do things. i guess they did contribute money at least...

> Me: btw how’s your mood overall?

LOL. mood??


Author here! My impression is that it's customary in the mathematical community to take responsibility for the result with your name, regardless of whether it came from LLM etc (as long as you disclose LLM usage). I am perfectly fine calling it "LLM's proof" or somehow else, but it's "my" in the sense that "if there is a mistake in it, it is my mistake".

Dude you’re so far removed from understanding anything about what the math community thinks. Just stop this nonsense. This is not “your” result.

I apologize to Dan Abramov for venting my frustrations about things outside of either of our control and unfairly using him as a punching bag. He seems to be an intelligent person and I hope he continues learning mathematics using whatever tools he sees fit, including AI. It was wrong of me to do this and I will take a break from this website for one week.

What do you want me to call it? I'm fine calling it your result if you want.

It’s nobody’s result what is wrong with you?

Someone had to choose the problem, steer the model, and check the output - it's clearly taken a lot of time. That's authorship with a powerful tool, same as it's always been.

I don't understand your comment. At first it seems like you think the LLM should get credit for the work. But then you mock the author for asking about the LLM's mood, which makes me think you believe the LLM is just a tool and not capable of receiving credit (FWIW I would agree.)

You’re conflating two ways of understanding “credit”. One version is what the tool gets, an honest description that the tool solved it. The other is a concept used in the math community to divvy up job opportunities.

Jobs will come and go. I'ts their nature. What makes you treat job over pursuit of knowledge. It is lowly and unbecoming.

There’s not going to be anyone to understand the pursued knowledge when this job gets killed off, which means you’re supporting the reduction of knowledge. That is what’s “unbecoming”.

This job based pursuite of knowledge is impure. Drop it.

Do you understand anything about how the career works, or are you just cheering on the death of things you don’t understand?

I cheer for a path that opens up the future wider for knowledge.

That knowledge won’t be accesible to people who haven’t trained in understanding mathematics. This is just a fact about the human mind. By killing off this profession you will be making it almost impossible for a large number of people to attain that.

I don't think I am.

Probably because you don’t actually know how the culture of mathematics maintains the capacity for humans to learn mathematics.

not mutually exclusive.

author provided nearly no intellectual input into solving the problem, so they IMO don't deserve credit. and it doesn't make sense to anthropomorphize LLMs and talking about their "mood". these are two unrelated statements.

as to if you want to give the credit to the LLM, or if you believe nobody gets the credit, is another separate question.


If there is consensus on how to attribute credit for LLM-solved human-steered (with no mathematical human input) proofs, I am happy to follow that consensus. Do you have a concrete alternative recommendation? What should I change?

Just saying (as an author) I don't believe that LLMs have conscious experiences, but the word "mood" was a good languagespace anchor for the kind of information I wanted to get out of the LLM at the time.

When you use a drill to put a hole in the wall, do you take credit for it, or do you credit the drill? Without intent, a tool, whether it be a drill or an LLM, is just an inert object.

They still needed to invest time and other resources into this. It's listed clearly in the 2nd paragraph. Mathematicians, or anyone for that matter, don't figure out everything from scratch. They lean on the work that others have done before them to save time. How is this any different?

LLMs need a lot of help to get to any kind of complicated proof, really. And yes, they get in moods. I spent 3 weeks trying to prove something and frequently had to try and convince Claude that it wasn't impossible and that it could really do it.

> Wireless headsets also _suck_ for simulators and productivity - where a battery only adds weights and a wire is not noticable.

you could... just plug it in? unless the frame cannot be used while charging, but i haven't seen anyone claim that.


At least with the Quest, the video quality over cable was only slightly better than wireless. The heat and weight of the extra hardware also becomes noticeable when sitting for a while.

For example, there's no way I could do an 8 hour work day inside a Quest - but I imagine a cool lightweight bigscreen beyond would be fine.

I used to love shooting games in my G2, I got the Quest and, despite having a similar resolution, I could hardly make out distant targets whether wired or not. It entirely killed VR for me and I haven't used it in over 6 months.


That doesn't fix anything. The battery is still heavy whether it's plugged in or not.

For anyone interested, in the Tested video he states that you can use it plugged in but you will only be able to use it this way uninterrupted while streaming, because using the Frame itself will use up the battery faster than the rate at which it charges

The USB-C port for charging is on the battery itself; their store diagram doesn't show if the battery itself can be disconnected for power passthrough.

there is no accountability for companies, it's not a new thing.

3M polluted groundwater in Minnesota for 50 years[1]; Nestlé misled mothers in order to make them stop breastfeeding and switch to their formula which killed babies [2]; Both copmanies are still doing business today.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3M_contamination_of_Minnesota_... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Nestl%C3%A9_boycott


Here’s an unpopular opinion: COVID vaccine injuries are something no one seems willing to talk about. There have been documented cases here in Canada.

You’re worried about companies. I’m far more concerned when governments are involved.


Don't worry, plenty of people are willing to talk about vaccine safety, even if they have no idea what they're talking about and don't understand rates or per-capita figures (lots of crossover there!)

Most problems that aren't reduced to poverty can be reduced to people who can't read graphs and only understand linear functions. Alternative wording "it's normies that are the problem"

I'd argue that normies understand rates and per-capita figures. The people that don't are a noisy minority (and are disproportionately powerful).

How is it that the entire rest of the world has managed to move on, yet North America is still going on with vaccine conspiracies 6 years later? And we got the same vaccines as you guys.

This isn’t about conspiracy theories. People who experienced serious adverse events after vaccination exist, including documented cases in Canada. Kayla Pollock’s case is one worth looking into, among others.

The issue is still being debated today, particularly around Canada’s VISP and the time some claimants have spent waiting for compensation. Some people like Pollock who became paralyzed were offered MAID (medical assitance in dying). That's some audacity.

This thread is about accountability. So who should be accountable for this?


He is neither right or wrong. The reality is that this is a lose-lose situation from the ordinary person's perspective. Regulation -> regulatory capture and things get worse faster, no regulation -> things simply get worse faster.

I mean I don't know what we do at this point. Ideally AI researchers need to be treated like nuclear scientists working for an adversary. But we all know that's not going to happen.


Maybe organize politically? The labs are still staffed by people, and nonviolent demonstrations outside their offices can still reach them.

Does Geoffrey Hinton work on AI research?

Yes I trust sama/dario/elon with that power

/even more extreme sarcasm than you


I don't trust them, which is why I inherently question the validity of their RSI/bioweapon/extinction claims.

You trust trump more than any of those three? Really?

You can have an arbitrarily low opinion of Trump and still trust in democracy as a form of government over autocracy or oligarchy, which is what the AI labs have.

You can have abstract trust in democracy over autocracy, but this is not an abstract question - these are the actual choices. Does it really matter if the person who will use AI to fuck us has a "democratic mandate" to do so? We're fucked either way.

It's less the mandate that matters, but the fact that they can be removed from power.

You don't speak for anybody outside of your borders, so please stop trying to.

The majority of the world will refuse to be subject to American AI laws under the control of the US gov't, whether it pretends to be democratic or not. Or should.


> You don't speak for anybody outside of your borders, so please stop trying to.

FWIW, I'm not American and refuse to step foot within American borders while Trump is in power.


Exactly. No matter how bad Trump is, millions of American people at least voted / vouched for him. Nobody voted for Elon Musk, Sam Altman, or any other CEO to have as much power as they have. Maybe a handful of shareholders. Totally unelected and unapproved by the public, but run companies that affect most of the public's lives.

> If it works it isn't low quality.

then the same applies to AI written code?


This is the problem Yu Deng got this year's Fields Medal for I think?


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