I'm conflicted in feeling there's now a lot more to do with AI, but also if it ain't me doing most of it, where's the fun in that? Days feel meaningless, and don't know who will pay for what I want to do, after all these years of heavy training.
Disagree. In many professions, people were paid to endure the boring parts to be able to finally do fun parts. See academia; a professor writes grants, attends committee meetings, teaches (sometimes undesirably) and such, to finally go do research which is fun. If the fun parts are predominantly done by AI, and are removing people from getting paid, what fills one's stomach?
True, but many of us have grown identifying ourselves with the kind of work we do, the discoveries that follow from our hard work. Even in the case of rockets, we designed the rockets! Here, I've to let the oracle take care of things while I'm robbed of that delight of discovery.
As an academic, I concur with the findings. However, some points for discussion:
1. I don’t believe iPad doesn’t offer the same benefits of writing with pen on paper. I mean iPad writing can be made to be almost as realistic as pen on paper with good accessories. It can be slow, doesn’t waste papers, you can edit, color code it, annotate in a way that’s backed up. I definitely like writing on paper, but I don’t see too much of a difference with iPad.
2. I absolutely love using Pilot V5 RT pens, and haven’t found something that is as smooth and satisfying when put on paper. What are your favorite pens? Are they available on JetPens for trying? Thanks!
Yes, of course mathematics is a tool to model nature as accurately as we could. That still doesn't mean mathematics is as trivial or frivolous as manipulating symbols.
That view is incredibly reductionist. It really is an efficient encoding of how nature behaves. It might be a human construct, but given how best it allows to understand nature (through principles of physics), it is uncanny to be any different from the language of nature.
Reminds me of Wigner's Unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in natural sciences [0].
As a scientific adventure, SpaceX is a worthy company full of awesome people. But the management and VCs is another story, as usual. To price it at a market cap of $1.8T, somewhere double that of Walmart is insane.
I'm tired of these types of articles making it to the HN frontpage. None of these articles can say anything definitive; all they could do is speculate. We are trading away the old HN which was full of really interesting links that used to send me on rewarding rabbit holes for hours.
I liked the idea, but this literally could have been a list. The AI-generated pages with filler text create a stark contrast in utility compared to the influential nature of the listed papers.
It is insane to me that Apple couldn't build its own source of RAM given its 250B war chest. Could have bought some RAM company at an opportune moment.
That makes a lot more sense when you put it that way. Nevertheless, it is ever more harder to prove something is legitimately one's own work. That is worrisome when it comes to science where credits matter more than for glory; job markets only value publication outputs which may have been cheaper to obtain with LLMs now and harder to distinguish what's yours and what's not.
Given the advent of LLMs, I don't know if plagiarism is ever a thing anymore. Nobody is stupid enough to include verbatim unless citing those works. Feed into an LLM to get a paraphrased version conveying the same meaning.
It is worrisome that the scientific machinery as it stands needs an overhaul in LLM era.
Often this is the conundrum in research as well. What should one spend their life working on? Especially if you want to make an impact. Choosing the right problem is often harder than coming up with a relevant solution.