1. Society has (implicitly) invested resources in order get these individuals to a place where they can push and prod at the boundaries of mathematics. This investment is lost.
2. The majority of mathematicians are passionate about what they do, which typically means higher productivity. Forcibly transferring them to a different field means we lose that productivity.
3. Aspiring & passionate mathematicians will see how the field is impacted and will end up doing something else instead. This is not just a loss for the field, but also a loss for humanity because that person could have ended up being the next Terrence Tao.
Taken together, it is hard to foresee what the 2nd and 3rd order effects will be, especially because of how pure mathematics is a “trickle down” field where advancements find practical usecases later on in the sciences and in engineering.
The "forced to use systemd" meme is a weird inversion. No one complained about being "forced" to use sysvinit when their was no choice, but when distros started to use systemd, which still allows to use sysvinit style services, that's suddenly framed as an infringement of free choice.
journalctl is good idea executed terribly. It's builtin data format is massively wasteful and not even good at searching for data you want (often need to go thru all the files anyway)
Journalctl with SQLite or a columnar embedded database would be amazing for sysadmins. Current format is entirely useless
Well, looking at the way NK is demonized, you would think it was on a genocidal rampage, invading neighboring countries, and eliminating heads of sovereign states in pursuit of its Greater NK project.
I would be less snarky if the faux concern didn’t just last as long as the media tells you to. Most recently, there was a period where Myanmar and the Uyghurs were in vogue, but not anymore. NK is more evergreen it seems.
Setting aside the genocide, it is particularly funny at a time when Western governments are oppressing their own by crushing dissent on Israel, but I don’t see the same outrage there.
You don’t see the same outrage around Israel? Have you... looked? It’s all over.
I don’t understand what you mean about faux concern only lasting as long as the media says. North Korea is, as you say, evergreen. And I’m pretty sure it’s based on how awful that government is, not on “the media” telling us to hate them.
I see the outrage, but I don’t see it at the level of NK, at least not in Western media or governments.
I meant the faux concern over NK is evergreen unlike some other causes such as the ones I mentioned.
As soon as (if ever) NK joins the fold of Western-aligned liberal states, the media machine will spin up and it will cease to be maligned, and you will move on to the next bogeyman.
We must be looking at different things, because right now I see about a thousand times more criticism leveled at Israel than at North Korea. (Making no statement here about who deserves it.)
If NK ever were to join the fold of western-aligned liberal states, it will probably be accompanied by no longer behind quite such utter bastards to their people and a cessation of maligning would be entirely justified.
I just don’t get it. Of all the things to complain about propaganda in the world, why North Korea? This is one where they get it right.
> because right now I see about a thousand times more criticism leveled at Israel than at North Korea
Is the criticism of Israel from the people, or from Western govs and media outlets (i.e., the establishment, the centers of actual power)? And isn’t the outrage logical given the nature of the atrocities being committed by Israel right now? And pray tell: which Western countries are sanctioning Israel?
On the other hand, NK is vilified by the Western establishment, i.e. by the holders of power, but on a more background level. It isn’t the topic du jour right now, but NK is ever present as a big bad evil. Propaganda helps maintain this image in the West, even when NK isn’t present in the news cycle. And it is sanctioned to hell and back.
And even if it is “right”, it does not mean that it is completely right, nor does it mean that the propaganda isn’t doing its job effectively even if you don’t realize it.
Anyhow, I think this thread is deep enough, so I will stop here.
Whatever NK does seems relatively tame in today's world. On the global stage it's generally thought of as a larger crime to oppress the peoples of other's countries (either the ukraine or iran conflict should fit your priors).
I’m not sure what’s supposed to be tame about operating one of the most oppressive societies in the world and keeping their people in poverty while building a nuclear arsenal.
It’s definitely true that crimes against other countries are more frowned upon than crimes against one’s own people. Which doesn’t seem right to me at all. People are people and victims are victims whether it’s their own government or someone else’s. Hence why I’m confused about the snark. This seems like an instance where ugly norms are being broken for a good reason and it’s being treated like hypocrisy.
Agree crimes against your own people should probably be the more major consideration. In terms of who is the biggest baddie there are also elements of actively bombing/starving vs the more passive methods of NK control.
TBH I think I (and maybe others) just get triggered when the bogey man is invoked each time there's a crypto story.
It’s like reading an article about a Russian dissident politician dying from falling out of a window and then getting outraged when someone suggests he may have been murdered by someone in power.
This whole thread is complete crazypants. Gosh, how dare you unfairly malign North Korea just because they’re completely awful and have a long track record of doing exactly the kind of thing being discussed.
"Passive method of control" is a remarkable euphemism for being packed off to the gulag for crimes like being related to someone who fled to South Korea.
And the iPhone XR! All part of the twelfth-gen models. Of course the subsequent thirteenth-gen models were just called "iPhone 11" in a return to sanity.
There were church mandated holidays in the Middle Ages. Lots of them.
The current pope chose his name to signal his continuation of Pope Leo XVIII's teachings on worker's rights, particularly the papal encylical Rerum Novarum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rerum_novarum
During the industrial revolution many people treated their workers better because of their religious belief - the Quaker industrialists of Britain are a prominent example.
Only replying to you since everyone else is making the same points.
I follow a religion with similar edicts (not Christian). I also understand the contributions made by Christianity in this area. But the fact of the matter is that religion was ultimately unable to force actual widespread change on the ground, especially not in secularized European states.
At the end of the day, the only true religion that industrialists and capitalists understand is money. Only unions were able to speak their language at a very large scale, and this is the language they ultimately had to listen to :)
Both, actually! Nonconformist Christianity was one of several key influences on the labour movement ideologically speaking. At least in the UK the Labour Party is often said to owe more to Methodism than Marx for its original ideological foundations. There's a long history of this, in the aftermath of the English Civil War a group called the Diggers more or less independently invented agrarian socialism out of the New Testament, and a great deal of calls for humane conditions for workers over the centuries were motivated explicitly by Christian teachings. The New Testament is pretty clear in its condemnation of repressing workers, James 5 for example:
> Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are motheaten. Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days. Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of sabaoth.
This isn't an exclusive or situation, nonconformist religious influence helped create the ideological environment that allowed unions to exist in the first place.
Okay, what about spoonfeeding the records? If they got access to part 1/N, why did that not entail full access to the data? Otherwise they wouldn’t even be able to chunk it in the first place, no?
Just a guess. If the facts explained in those records prescribe after four years, agents must be tempted to release the part N/N in four years and a day. Without knowing the full history any demand could be dismissed.
Not different than nuclear companies adamantly repeating for the first years that no one was killed by a nuclear accident.
because someone has to go through those records and manually redact things they cannot legally disclose. Figure out what is responsive. What should be removed because it's not actually related to the request. ETc.
Also they didn't get access to part 1/n. They got access to part 1/?. And then 2/?. And then 3/?.
Andor is in a league of its own imo. Once in a generation kind of show.
But it is similar to Fallout in that it was able to break out of its universe. Andor is enjoyable even if one hates Star Wars; Fallout is enjoyable even if you dislike gaming.
I have yet to see LLMs do well “autonomously” on anything that doesn’t fall into any of these 3 buckets:
1. well specified
2. well tested (which is a form of spec)
3. represented in the training set (i.e. not built on a corpus of human developed examples)
For example, a lot of the compiler porting efforts fall into all 3 buckets: compilers are well specified (there is a set of valid inputs and an expected behavior), they are typically well tested, and as a bonus, in a way that is implementation agnostic thanks to the clean interface (think: integration vs unit tests), and are very well represented in the training set.
You can "solve" 1 and 2 by N-version programming. Have the same code implemented twice, or more times, you get free error testing by fuzzing or running replicas in shadow mode. In order to make replicas maximally different choose a different language, framework, agent harness and LLM.
There remain some nitty details related to tracking randomness and choosing what interfaces to log. But even having your code testable by replicas would help organize it better and expose different assumptions made by the language or library stack.
When you get different outputs from replicas it can be 1. one of them has a bug, or 2. the spec is unclear -> fix the bug or the spec. So this method catches both sides. It also might be faster than traditional code based testing, you can build replicas in parallel. A replica is an open ended test, unlike coded tests it can be tried on open ended input values.
The core idea is that it is easier to implement twice than to imagine bugs. We already solved implementation, but bug finding means running code in your head, it touches the halting problem issues - can we really imagine behavior from code? I don't think we can do it well. That is why we should just make replicas instead, tokens are getting cheaper and cheaper by the month.
and yet some OSS (projects not really known for 1 and 2) multiplied change velocity the last year, implementing features via what is essentially vibecoding.
If you look at that, this approach is producing a pile of slop, where one LLM implements a feature, two weeks later another LLM spots an edge case and without much human review just crams in the code to fix that. Even at 1-2 months of that, those repos have significant changes and the commit messages get weird. I wonder what happens if the LLM won't spit out a fix anymore?
Will the human maintainers who started this process because noone thanked them and noone wanted to work with them on their bright new ideas just reset to the last commit they understand? Will they drop the project? The sunk cost for them is enormous. The time-effort required to fix the mess is gargantuan already. To me it increasingly seems that after the LLM industry robbed most humans of their collective labour output it will now rob them of labour aka time as well. Some people (like you and me) seem to notice that but most just go on and essentially spend away their life on machines now. I guess the problem is that most of these people have been severely cut off from using their own agency.
2. The majority of mathematicians are passionate about what they do, which typically means higher productivity. Forcibly transferring them to a different field means we lose that productivity.
3. Aspiring & passionate mathematicians will see how the field is impacted and will end up doing something else instead. This is not just a loss for the field, but also a loss for humanity because that person could have ended up being the next Terrence Tao.
Taken together, it is hard to foresee what the 2nd and 3rd order effects will be, especially because of how pure mathematics is a “trickle down” field where advancements find practical usecases later on in the sciences and in engineering.
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