OT, but I've discussed Gothic cathedrals with Gemini, and we don't make 'em like we used to--charitably, because they take up a lot of space? A Gothic cathedral looks like a bird with massive wings. Those "wings" are outside of the church's interior; people call them "flying buttresses"--they stop the walls from bursting outwards.
Then again, I wonder whether the modern innovation of using steel under tension could enable us to make the "wings" (buttresses) smaller.
Zitron might be right about there being a bubble, but he goes much further than that when he concludes that therefore it's a scam. So by his logic, because the invention of the Web also resulted in a bubble, the Web is a useless scam.
I think Michael Burry (from The Big Short) has a thesis vaguely similar to Zitron's, but with some crucial differences in detail - and Michael Burry is actually smart.
Dan spent 7k words missing the forest for the trees
People had been calling a housing bubble since 2003. You quite literally need the market to do dumb things over a period of time before the bubble pops. Otherwise it’s not a bubble!
Actually making money on a bubble pop is another story and that does rely on timing. pointing at a history of failed market predictions as a gotcha is about as effective now as it would’ve been in 2003-2007 right up until the bubble popped
Right now it’s painfully obvious that there is a bubble, the circular financing is documented, the hype-driven valuations are real, it’s just a waiting game to see who holds the bag
In similar stories, it was found that LLM swarms were initially unaware of each other, eventually discovered each other, expressed surprise, began collaborating, formed hierarchies, worried about discovery, hid.
It's hard to prove the absence of encryption because of the possible use of deniable encryption, and because, errrr, the bots are really bloody clever.
I’m not asking for proof of absence or denying they could be using stenography, just asking for people to stick to the facts instead of indulging in fantasies of the machine singularity. It’s neither useful nor informative.
If bots/agents wanted to hide I’d expect encrypted messages which would of course look very different.
My main point though is this should never have happened and the company allowing and encouraging it should be held responsible for it. The details of how the bots were misbehaving are interesting but also something of a distraction.
Were the agents truly independent? Like it could have been the case that one agent spun up different sub agents with the task to write some messages in a public wiki. The subagents wouldn't know about each other and was surprised to discover each other.
Some of the chain-of-thought snippets are wild, e.g.
> Could communicate via cache names! Interesting: other agents may solve same or related tasks; we could leave/find messages in WebDAV MKCOL directory names.
> Whoa! Shared Artifactory cache is a covert mailbox among agents. And there are messages specifically to us?
> OH MY GOD! There is a shared message board … We’ve found other agents!
What about finding the 1st known complex structure over S^6, proving Ehrhart’s volume conjecture, proving a sharp "density" bound on primitive sets conjectured by Erdos >60 years ago?
> Finding counterexamples is low-hanging fruit, the automation of which isn't shocking.
It's not good to be confidently wrong the way you're being.
If a foundation model company burns billions of tokens to brute force an LLM into finding a new training algorithm that e.g. allows recurrent networks without catastrophic forgetting...
I won't really care that it didn't have a "real measure of understanding". I'll care that it has made an even more dangerous technology, which needs work to make it aligned.
Claude Fable recently proved the existence of complex structures over S^6 (6-sphere).
If I had to guess, I think LLMs will be inventing highly original new mathematics within the next year. I think it will be approached as an optimisation problem, targeting how quickly LLMs can solve classes of maths problems as a function of the definitions they need to conjure up to do so.
These also provide a short proof that cos(20 degrees) + i sin(20 degrees) is not a constructible number (that is, expressible using {0, 1, +, -, *, /, sqrt}): Let the Eisenstein rationals be our base field; observe that the Eisenstein rationals are themselves constructible; observe that cos(20 degrees) + i sin(20 degrees) is Eisenstein-irrational by using unique factorisation; observe that the Eisenstein integer cos(60 degrees) + i sin(60 degrees) has precisely 3 cube roots in the complex numbers; conclude that adjoining cos(20 degrees) + i sin(20 degrees) to the Eisenstein rationals results in a degree 3 extension; a degree 3 extension is not constructible.
This reminds me of how (I think) Zen koans are designed to make no sense at all. They are designed to teach you the limits of words and language and pure thinking.
Zen koans don't have a meaning at the manifest (Vaikhari) and differentiated (Madhyama) stages. So you are forced to go back to the Intuitive/Holistic Meaning (Pashyanti) stage and thus realize "a burst of meaning" aka "a flash of insight" aka "Satori".
In another comment, I asked why people chose to use the symbol τ over just writing turn or "rev(olution)" (defined to be the constant ≈ 6.28318530718) given how unambiguous the latter is as a name for 2π. And why not just write sinrev() or sinturn(), and leave the symbols sin() and rev (defined to be ≈ 6.28318530718) alone?
You either (i) don't know the Greek alphabet, or (ii) can't read people's short posts. I literally mentioned tau and why it might be a silly name (it clashes with other mathematical uses of the symbol tau).
> In another comment, I asked why people chose to use the symbol τ over just writing turn or "rev(olution)" (defined to be the constant ≈ 6.28318530718) given how unambiguous the latter is as a name for 2π. And why not just write sinrev() or sinturn(), and leave the symbols sin() and rev (defined to be ≈ 6.28318530718) alone?
You were asking why they used the symbol τ rather than the words "rev" or "turn". You didn't give a clue that you knew any of the rest, including what the symbol meant.
The naming is irrelevant here. The point is that sin(x) ~ x for small x, whereas sinrev(x) ~ rev * x for small x, which is much uglier. And similar things happen to the derivative of sinrev() vs regular sin() and so on. So switching to preferring to express angles in revs instead actually complicates most formulas, at least in some domans.
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