kzz102

5 ms·

1.
by kzz102 5d ago
AI tends to take nearly finished research directions and push it to the conclusion in one step. If deployed massively, it will pluck all the low hanging fruits causing a drought of near term promising research project. Because people who st
2.
by kzz102 5d ago
The difference is the scale. A few incomprehensible long papers per year, sure, we will study it. A flood of AI results closing research directions left and right, that will be a problem.
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by kzz102 6d ago
On your second point: there is a more plausible explanation which David Bessis calls the "overhang". The short version is that there is a large amount of relatively low hanging fruits in mathematics, because no human has broad eno
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by kzz102 7d ago
I think both the competitiveness and and lack of problems will mean fewer people will do mathematics. I think collaboration will always be there, but the community as a whole will be smaller and weaker.
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by kzz102 8d ago
The mathematical community was very competitive in its early years, but in the last 70 to 100 years, it has been generally less competitive and very collegial. The community was in a good place, and progress has been very good. In a few cas
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by kzz102 25d ago
It was copied from a pdf, maybe LaTeX generated. All the ligatures are wrong -- not sure where the problem lies, the pdf itself, pdf reader, or the clipboard on Linux.
7.
by kzz102 26d ago
Education is a complex topic. I don't claim to understand it, nor do I think we can sort this out in a hacker news thread. What I reject is the simplistic claims like "exams don't mean anything". There are certainly exam
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by kzz102 26d ago
My apologies for coming off as over-enthusiastic, I am currently obsessed with this study. Here is another quote: "The negative learning effects are larger for students with higher initial achievement. The differences in the estimated
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by kzz102 26d ago
The fact that exam scores are correlated with how much you study is not the same as exams only reflect how much you study. Two students who study the same amount could have very different exam scores. The reason that there still is a strong
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by kzz102 26d ago
It's not so clear that AI is an amplifier.. The paper has some fascinating analysis on this topic: "At the other end of the distribution, AI students who spend more than 65 minutes on their homework receive homework and exam score
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by kzz102 26d ago
Even if we grant that education is to prepare for employment, which a lot of people disagree with, it does not follow education should do the same thing as what's done in employment.
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by kzz102 3mo ago
Since Godot got mentioned, I thought this recent talk by Juan Linietsky provides a reasonable alternative to heavily restricting contribution. https://youtu.be/LDSwP37y_W4?si=fMIsdQ2yjoiGChb6
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by kzz102 4mo ago
Tenured professors do often fail large swathes of the class, and it's not hard to stand their ground because academic freedom is still very important in universities. This is not generally true for non-tenured and adjunct professors, b
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by kzz102 10mo ago
I am criticizing how AI progress is reported and discussed -- given how important this development is, accurate communication is even more important for the discussion. I think you inferring my motivation for the rant and creating a strawma
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by kzz102 10mo ago
It's really tiring that LLM fans will claim every progress as breakthrough and go into fantasy mode on what they can do afterwards. This is a really good example of how to use the current capabilities of LLM to help research. The gist
16.
by kzz102 1y ago
I was applying a unfair standard to them of course. Every field has a few classics that last a long time, but most old books are not read. But I think Bourbaki maybe had grand ambitions that were eventually unrealized. My theory is that the
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by kzz102 1y ago
It's interesting that while Bourbaki had a large influence on modern mathematics, very few people read their books (at least among the people I know). In a sense, their project of producing a definitive exposition for a large part of m
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by kzz102 1y ago
This is one of the things that everyone gets the reference, but it won't be good to admit it publicly. This quote is known to almost everyone born in that area, and it's the first thing that come to mind when you hear the name.
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by kzz102 1y ago
Xiaomi can also mean millet. I think it's a reference to this Mao quote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millet_plus_rifles?wprov=sfla1
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by kzz102 1y ago
I use to read about the power border agents have over foreigners and was amazed at how easily they can destroy me. The only reason this hasn't happened seems to be that they're mostly decent, professional people. And now that&#x27
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by kzz102 2y ago
In academic publishing, there is an implicit agreement between the authors and the journal to roughly match the importance of the paper to the prestige of the journal. Since there is no universal standard on either the prestige of the journ
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by kzz102 2y ago
Even if we pretend nepotism doesn't exists, academia is still not a strict meritocracy. In addition to merit, at least two factors play an important role in success, which having a good mentor helps a lot. 1) Tacit knowledge. In many f
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by kzz102 2y ago
One of the biggest problem of maths education is that they are taught by people who dislike it. They think of maths as eating bitter medicine or training of a complex, rigid skill. The way maths is taught by them is clumsy and authoritari
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by kzz102 2y ago
I am wondering how much of the hate of LaTeX document is due to the default font. Computer Modern seems to be disliked by many users of LaTeX as well. I personally am very conflicted, as I have come to identify it as the "vanilla"
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by kzz102 2y ago
> That's not right. The primary task of management is alignment. Fair enough.. at least they think they can add value by improving efficiency.
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by kzz102 2y ago
I think of efficiency as one example where naive economic thinking has poisoned common sense. Economists view inefficiency as a problem. Because a healthy economy is efficient, therefore inefficiency is unhealthy. Any inefficient market is
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by kzz102 2y ago
In my view, prosecuting the bad actors alone will not fix science. Science is by its own nature a community because only a small number of people have the expertise (and university positions) to participate. A healthy scientific discipline
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by kzz102 2y ago
I want to distinguish two sources of "feeling of stupidity". One come from the challenge of grasping a difficult concept. The other is the smack on the head when you fail to see a simple but brilliant insight. In my view, you shou
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by kzz102 2y ago
It's interesting that humans would also benefit from the "chain of thought" type reasoning. In fact, I would argue all students studying math will greatly increase their competence if they are required to recall all relevant
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by kzz102 2y ago
I kept thinking that Anandtech could have survived if they had not been part of a corporate ownership. Because they were owned by a media conglomerate, the pressure is on to behave more like other media business under the same ownership. Th

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