Mastodon Feed: Posts

dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

trivials per suit @weirdunits

Boosted by pixxl:
antoinechambertloir@mathstodon.xyz ("⏚ Antoine Chambert-Loir") wrote:

Learning that decade old mathematical conjectures have been solved by AI, or that more and more colleagues use AI as an every day tool, this brings me a deep professional sadness.

Is humankind's knowledge worth the depletion of the planet's natural resources — up to making it uninhabitable — due to their total predation by a gang of companies with hegemonic views?

What does it mean to do mathematics in such an age? How is it possible to do it towards human flourishing ?

Boosted by pixxl:
Vierkantor@mastodon.vierkantor.com (":anne_triangle: Anne C.A. Baanen") wrote:

Hereby announcing that it is common knowledge in the formalization community that Math Inc are a bunch of thieving scumbags and somehow manage to be even worse than all the other fucking assholes who pretend to build artificial intelligence. They will steal your work to try and pass it off as their own, ruining your career and then tweet about how the Economist thinks "their AI" revolutionizes mathematics. All the while erasing your own contributions that actually got everyone most of the way there in a collaborative fashion, in favour of some obscurantist nonsense that is worthless at advancing the state of science, and for all we know involves no actual large language model and might just be a bunch of people forced to do all the work themselves while pretending it was machine generated and just "polished up a little".

Do not work with Math Inc, do not listen to Math Inc, do not trust them to do anything but advance their own interest in the most short-sighted all-destructive fashion, and do not make the mistake of anthropomorphizing Jesse Han.

Boosted by cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber"):
tristanbuckmaster wrote:

"Since August 28 we have been training a new internal model that has exhibited unprecedented performance in our benchmarks, including mathematics. This model’s training is ongoing and its performance continues to improve."

Note that they are openly admitting they used training data from a period after we found our result. Is it ethical to use customer's data to try to scoop their customer?

dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

bear drops

dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

hull on earth

dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

Karen Klingon

now that's a name

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
mhoye@cosocial.ca wrote:

We will not keep our democracy, if we cannot protect our privacy.

https://exple.tive.org/blarg/2026/09/08/preemption/

dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

hull's kitchen

Boosted by cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber"):
thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io ("Thomas Fuchs 🫯") wrote:

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@thomasfuchs/117236445086373612

fwiw

Statistics is a field of mathematics concerned with the analysis of data.

Logic is field of philosophy concerned with reasoning correctly.

Boosted by cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber"):
thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io ("Thomas Fuchs 🫯") wrote:

still recuperating from the CTO of Bluesky saying that statistics and logic are the same thing

*https://bsky.app/profile/amyhoy.bsky.social/post/3muzbdnwckc2h

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
Matt_Noyes@social.coop ("Matt Noyes") wrote:

Folks in the New York City region. My old org, the Association for Union Democracy is holding a fundraising social. Great place to meet grassroots union activists and learn about current struggles.

https://uniondemocracy.org/bringing-the-power-of-democracy-to-the-labor-movement/

#uniondemocracy #workers

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
technomancy@hey.hagelb.org wrote:

just opened the Autumn Lisp Game Jam:

https://itch.io/jam/autumn-lisp-game-jam-2026

we'll be kicking it off the last week of October; come join and get your parens humming!

#lispGameJam #gameDev

baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason") wrote:

YouTube keeps pushing Kae Tempest’s “Europe is Lost” in my recs

You don’t need to rub it in, YouTube. We both can see what’s going on

andrewnez ("Andrew Nesbitt") wrote:

What's new in git-pkgs

https://nesbitt.io/2026/09/08/whats-new-in-git-pkgs.html

cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber") wrote:

The post that caused the greatest fedidrama and defederation across the whole fediverse history:

"I'm eating my favorite berry! (a banana)"

neatnik@social.lol ("Neatnik :prami:") wrote:

Those guys all struggle with accountability. Receiving criticism for a bad take is healthy and good. Listening to people and learning from them is healthy and good. Understanding how your views can propagate harm and then making appropriate changes is healthy and good.

But grabbing your toys and going home? Weak-ass sauce, as ever.

neatnik@social.lol ("Neatnik :prami:") wrote:

Another privileged white developer posted a terrible take, received appropriate criticism for it, and then left the Fediverse.

Be on the lookout for the other privileged white developers who will inevitably point to this as an example of how "social media is toxic", or "Mastodon isn't welcoming". Those guys are only interested in protecting their friends and pushing their weird agendas.

jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein") wrote:

this is s really interesting and thought-provoking episode

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ezra-klein-show/id1548604447?i=1000788429329

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
lrhodes@merveilles.town ("⁂ L. Rhodes") wrote:

Emily Gorcenski takes on the hammer analogy here: https://emilygorcenski.com/post/our-age-of-silicon-is-collapsing/ but I think you can go farther by comparing a toolbox hammer to a medieval war hammer. If you want to drive a nail, there are hammer designs that optimize for that use. Likewise, if you want to kill someone, there are hammer designs that optimize for that, too. And the more you design for one use, the less suitable the hammer becomes for the other. They're not designed to be ethically neutral.

Boosted by cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber"):
ericgoldman@techpolicy.social ("Eric Goldman") wrote:

Techdirt: "You cannot do age or identity verification safely. It always creates some sort of record and that set of records will always become a target."

http://www.techdirt.com/2026/09/03/hackers-had-a-live-feed-of-every-id-this-verification-company-scanned-for-over-a-year/

cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber") wrote:

I think *local* LLM model usage for certain problem domains and work can be justified (but much less often than the LLM-maximizing hype is pushing for), but using hosted LLM models is *never* justified. The power asymmetry is too great. This is a great example of why.

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

RE: https://mastodon.social/@bagder/117236076403978219

if only someone could have predicted this

Boosted by cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber"):
tao@mathstodon.xyz ("Terence Tao") wrote:

A concrete example of how AI advances in solving key open problems could inihibit the future development of a mathematical field can be found in the global regularity problem for the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations (as well as its counterpart for the Euler equations). Until recently, this problem was on track to be one of the most promising examples of an AI-assisted success story, in which AI tools could be used both to solve the problem and to set the stage for the next round of progress in the field. While the problems remain open for now, there is now an increasingly realistic scenario in which a primarily AI-generated solution to the problem appears, but in a fashion that contaminates the problem as a source of further advances.

While the equations do come from a very natural physical motivation - the study of incompressible fluids - the regularity problem is not important for its direct physical application. Computational fluid dynamics is already a mature subject, deployed extensively in the atmospheric sciences, for instance, and its empirical capabilities and limitations are already well understood. A theoretical guarantee of regularity, or conversely a pathological instance of blowup, for these equations would be intellectually interesting for such applications, but would not radically transform the way we would, for instance, model weather prediction or climate change. (1/6)

cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber") wrote:

This comes on the heels of @tao's observations that AI corporations throwing compute at developing proofs (and largely in private) for the sake of viral social media is removing the most valuable part of exploring said problems: the insights and next-problems that develop from trying to solve those problems. https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/117207856734787448

cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber") wrote:

It appears that Tristan Buckmaster raising alarms that AI corporations may have snooped on their research so the companies could throw compute at developing proofs for, and gain credit for, advancements in the Navier-Stokes equations. OpenAI then threw a massive amount of compute at the problem, and seemed to try to coerce Tristan into getting credit for it: https://cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/statement.pdf

> I said that if OpenAI released its result in the way proposed I would go public with what happened. The reply was, “Why would you ruin your career?” I replied that I am an academic, and asked why he thought going public would ruin my career. The reply was, “If you don’t want me to be nice, then I don’t have to be nice.”

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
hynek ("Hynek Schlawack") wrote:

@glyph @chronohart @mitsuhiko @pfmoore @zzzeek When I said I like Blade Runner I didn’t mean I wanted to become one

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
gabrielesvelto@mas.to ("Gabriele Svelto") wrote:

I hate with a passion any kind of reporting that describes problems among teenagers as caused by "screen time". It depicts it as some kind of flaw among young people who deliberately spend too much time on their phones.

Call it for what it is: abusive practices by a handful of tech corporations. They profit from products deliberately designed to create addiction, and particularly so among children and teenagers.

Stop blaming victims and start blaming the perpetrators.

Boosted by cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber"):
cwebber@social.coop ("Christine Lemmer-Webber") wrote:

@adelie @ParadeGrotesque Oh I don't think FOSS missed its moment, I think we had some organizational failures to meet a moment, but FOSS' relevance and moment are more necessary and alive than ever!

baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason") wrote:

“On artificial intelligence • Buttondown”

https://buttondown.com/practicaltips/archive/on-artificial-intelligence/

> Why would they give us compute money, but not salary money? It turns out to be pretty straightforward. It’s messy, employing us meat bags.