I would think most programmers should be able to vaguely grasp the gist of the article. But unless you’ve studied a non-trivial amount theoretical computer science, a lot of the terminology will be unfamiliar. And if your math skills aren’t sharp, you might struggle to follow the proof sketches.

But if you have a basic understanding of computational complexity and Turing machines, plus a general knowledge of basic programming and CS, you should be able to follow the article well enough to get something out of it, I think.

“ Do we need “economic growth”? For that matter, what does that even mean? Personally, I’m more concerned with meeting real human needs”

As I pointed out, I lived in a country that answered this question exactly like you wanted. It was like living in a country where every institution from the college to the coffee shop was the DMV. It works..just about. But it sucks.

I think you’re conflating a lot of things here - economic growth (or lack thereof), highly developed infrastructure, my idea of a society focused on “meeting real human needs”, and probably more.

Honestly, I don’t know what more to say than my original question: What do you even mean by “economic growth”? Unless you define that, we’re all going to be talking past each other. It’s not obvious (at least to me) that any mainstream definition of “economic growth” has much to do with poor institutions, particularly once those institutions are developed.

>> "What do you even mean by “economic growth”?

Most businesses (and institutions in general) have more customers tomorrow than they do today, thats economic growth to me. If that doesn't happen, they stagnate, stop investing, innovating and moving forward. The internal incentives get weird and lopsided, lots of infighting starts, and generally all processes slow down (see; DMV).

There is simply no way to "meet real human needs" without economic growth.

You can to a certain extent take from one and give to the other to meet some needs, but that's it, you're just cutting tinier and tinier slivers of a pie that as you specifically said has stopped growing.

> Do we need “economic growth”? For that matter, what does that even mean? Personally, I’m more concerned with meeting real human needs, ensuring a fair and equitable world for everyone,

For example, social security relies on economic growth for funding. Meeting real human needs is a lot easier when humans are more productive.

Economic growth doesn't just mean people have more money. It means people are more productive. More productive people produce more goods than they need to survive. Those goods can be redirected to people with needs they can't supply themselves.

Economic growth is what has driven the world to be more fair and equitable over the last thousand years.

I just made a comment about trade offs regarding pollution and land use. This is another good point. Everything is a trade off. If we use a lot of water to get food we need to survive, or even tasty food we enjoy, that’s worth it. But using up a lot of water for a data center, even if it’s less than a farm? That’s still a valid judgment. Lots of people clearly think that’s not worth it as a trade off.

And there it is, folks. That is the key issue here - or at least, one of them. This new data center would pollute the environment, not to mention taking up land. The consideration, then, is whether the need for yet another data center justifies the added pollution and land use. That’s a value judgment, and it seems a lot of people say no, we don’t need more data centers, not even for “AI” - at least not enough to justify the added pollution.

You seem worried about your bills. But what about the effect on the environment? People on HN are supposed to be into engineering, so what about the trade offs? That’s the discussion to have.

Nit: I’ve never heard of Magnus Carlsen, and I can’t imagine most people have, outside of those really into chess. The only chess person I’ve ever heard of is Gary Kasparov, and that’s only because it was a big deal when Deep Blue beat him.

Wow, we really do live in the worst timeline. At least a lot of gamers are rallying against generative “AI” slop assets, and indie devs are largely against generative “AI” in general. But yikes, this is just unfortunate.

I don’t want the games industry to be polluted with slop that has no soul. But also, I want opportunities for people to learn or just exist in game development via smaller projects. There is some market for web games, casual games, and generally small games. These markets can be great for indie devs and beginners. But if we lose that market to the slop machine, real people will lose a lot of these opportunities.

How about real people who want to build a game without first having to learn coding, audio design, visual design, and gameplay design?

What about them? No, really, I’m not trying to be snarky, but what about them? Lots of people want to do lots of things. Plenty of them don’t want to put in the work. So what?

For the record, I was one of those people who wanted to make games. That led me to learn programming and eventually led to a career as a programmer. Lots of others with similar stories. But if you’d given a younger me an LLM, I may never would have developed those skills.

That’s one of my concerns. I have others, like effects on the job market, the general unfairness of all our data being used to train models we’re now expected to pay for, negative effects on the environment, and the way in which LLMs promote inequality and can potentially crush small businesses. How do these concerns weigh against someone who wants to make a video game but doesn’t want to learn how to make video games?

As a technologist, I see my life's work as building technology that helps people do things that they were previously unable to do.

Hopefully you can build something that lets young people buy a house

People already had avenues for that: visual scripting, pre-made assets, plugins that provide pre-built systems like inventory, etc.

But just like people who try to write a book without writing skills or paint a mural without ever having picked up a brush, it’s going to be an uphill battle and will likely fail. So to that end I ask: what’s the point? Why are the AI pilled so passionate about the increase in spam and slop and harbor so much disdain for skill, expertise, and dare I say, discipline?

It already is polluted with soulless slop, and has been for around the last decade. Even Nintendo is nothing but a slop mill. Indie is the last bastion, and I personally am happy that more people will be able to develop games and bring interesting ideas to the forefront, not to mention modding and reverse engineered will make games even more customizable.

Man, if my old DoD contractor job paid $150K, I’d probably still be working there. A lot of DoD contracting firms pay much less than that. Especially in the R&D space where a lot of smart people want to work.

I just turned down a DoD contractor interview. It’s one of my red lines tbh.

I’ll still take a half million dollar Meta job though.

Did you read TFA? They never claimed they’ve formalized all of mathematics. For a couple decades now, mathematicians have been discussing formalizing all of mathematics. Some are now proposing AI can be used for this. But TFA argues that’s not necessarily the best approach. It’s a discussion of how to move forward in formalizing all of math, not a claim about having done so. Not clickbait at all.

I didn't claim that they claimed to have done it. My point is that you cannot do it.

You cannot formalize ALL of mathematics. We have known that for a while. Hence my point about the title being clickbait.

At best that seems like a nitpick based on a specific notion of “all of mathematics”. Care to explain what you mean?

The title is intentionally misleading because the authors know all of mathematics is not possible to formalize, strictly speaking. And strict meaning is what math is all about.

Would you have been happier if we had called it "...all known mathematics"? This is what we are plainly talking about. The question we attempt to address is how best to digitise the corpus of known mathematics.

Would still have been wrong.

Do yourself a favor and search “Agent Orange” on your preferred search engine (Sidenote: I’m trying to avoid using “Google” as a verb). Most people associate that term with the very harmful Vietnam-era herbicide, not the band. The band name may be a reference to the herbicide?

It has to be.

It's not according to the singer, who came up with it.

I can understand taking his word for it, but I don't personally believe that. How could someone in 1979 not have heard of Agent Orange? It would have been all over the news: https://www.nytimes.com/1978/12/19/archives/vietnam-veterans... and the Vietnam war was still fresh in everyone's mind. Maybe he was embarrassed by the edgy name, which is basically a reference to an American war crime, in later years? idk.

He didn't say he hadn't hear of it. He said he didn't choose it for political reasons. I am very familiar with history and the Vietnam War.

No shit sherlock. I'm not a moron.

Did we read the same article? You’re quoting from the end, so it seems like you did at least skim the article. But this article has nothing to do with child porn? Where did you even get that idea? It’s talking about a famous mathematical proof.