These days I wouldn't be surprised if the models are smart enough to get the analysis correct.
However sometimes I think that AI use shows a revealed preference around things. In this case, the actual data just ... maybe never mattered to them at all? People wanted a shiny chart and they got a shiny chart.
I actually remember that in an old interview (that I can't find sorry) Grant Sanderson said he moved in to YouTube because he thought it was a more promising career than being mathematician, it's interesting to see his opinion change.
Hmm, that seems like a pretty cynical point to make. He still deeply is in the field of mathematics, as a math educator. He even makes this exact point in this video, that communicating math is still a hard and respectable part of the profession.
As a math educator doing what you love you requires an audience.
Its kind of in Grant's incentives to push the interest for mathematics, because without an audience he won't be able to keep doing what he loves.
Like, my old uni has a history department, and had an Egyptian history teacher. This was at some point deemed a pointless use of resources because there was no role in society except for teacher of the same subject after that, and the classes shrunk, and she ended up getting offered a role in admin. She was not happy in that role.
I remember a post in... Reddit I think it was? where I commented on an early video discussion that he should teach online full time, because that kind of intuitive education was sorely needed. He actually answered the comment, along the lines of "that would be cool but I already have my hands full in $UNIVERSITY".
I think it was relatively soon after that interaction that he started doing youtube full time. I've always wanted to think I made a teeny tiny contribution to move the needle there :)
Yeah. All due respect to Grant Sanderson, he is both great scientist and great entrepreneur, but getting an entry-career advice from a multi-millionaire is probably not quite the best idea out of all ideas in a popular discourse. Especially if the field in question was famous for producing posts discouraging people from going all-in in it, for many many years even before AI craze.
Even putting aside the ugliness of errno, this is pretty bad. I'm at the point with libc where I try to use as little of it as I can, though I'm not writing a lot of C these days
I would say there are 3 broad classes of libc functions
1) functions that you cannot implement in portable C - syscalls, signals, ABI specific things like longjmp and setcontext
2) functions that you could implement by yourself in portable C, but they are expected to play nice with the rest of the system - a lot of POSIX user stuff, dns management, dlopen, all the nsswitch mess. Can't think of any standard C examples because of the extreme portability requirements of C. Maybe the locale stuff, although it's usefulness is dubious.
3) functions that are there for convenience and sometimes compiler special-casing, like math, str*, stuff that was thankfully removed from glibc
Most of #3 should be ignored. #2 is optional, especially if your software is for end users and not packaged by a distro. Sometimes it's safer to ship your own MDNS implementation for example rather than hope that the distro has sane defaults.
I'd much rather push for a world where we use a reasonable DNS/mDNS implementation on Linux rather than add to the zoo of bespoke variants. I have written code that tries to appease different DNS managers across different versions of them for different distros. We need to stop. Everyone believes that the common way of handling DNS is insane, so they create their own new way of doing it.
How would you write dlopen in portable C? Once you are loading code and calling into that its no longer portable C and on modern platforms you'd need at least something like mmap/mprotect to allow you to do that, which are POSIX but not C.
I think it was meant to be read as functions that should play nicely with dlopen.
So you could write your own atexit, but maybe someone's got a version of atexit that cancels callbacks from unloaded libraries, or one that keeps them loaded if they have callbacks, or one that calls the callbacks immediately during dlclose.
Maybe that wasn't the best example since you cannot even cast to a function pointer within standard C (but you can in POSIX). If you consider POSIX as portable then writing your own dlopen is pretty simple and you don't even need to be aware of calling conventions, though there are some architecture specific things in the ELF format. But either way it will not integrate well with mechanisms that people expect to work like LD_* environment variables, /etc/ld.so.conf and so on. So I still think it matches the "possible but will not integrate with rest of the system"
That may be true, but mathematicians still need to eat, and for the they'll need jobs. 'Will there be more or less demand for mathematicians in the future?' and 'What will the work entail?' I think are valid concerns
the vast majority of people who pursued a maths degree, including myself here, didn't expect to compete with Terrence Tao or solve outstanding research problems.
We studied maths because it is interesting, because it teaches you how to think, you often pair it up with something that's more employable like economics or software development, or you go for a teaching career. Unless you're one of the few people who are heavily invested in cutting edge research I don't even see how new research tools change the profession.
An undergraduate maths education isn't going to change because you have people with computers churn out 400 page proofs. It's like being worried about 30 move Stockfish opening theory if you're a club level chess player.
I actually didn't understand that paragraph. Is it saying that instead of averaging between two screws it instead averaged across 600? Edit: Or that the nut had 600 threads?
However sometimes I think that AI use shows a revealed preference around things. In this case, the actual data just ... maybe never mattered to them at all? People wanted a shiny chart and they got a shiny chart.
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