Simply put, I could compile and build from the source of most of the exciting cutting-edge software for free as a hobbyist once I own the computer.
But I can't do the same for things that excite me in this DL domain, even running pretrained models requires hardware that most hobbyists can't afford.
Cloud solutions exist but unlike traditional dev where we could test almost everything about the application locally, only thing unsolved was deployment and distribution in some cases, which is a sensible spend on infrastructure.
Lot of effort and labor, not payed by commercial companies, went into your ability to compile and build from the source of most of the exciting cutting-edge software for free as a hobbyist. For example GCC:
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In late 1983, in an effort to bootstrap the GNU operating system, Richard Stallman asked Andrew S. Tanenbaum, the author of the Amsterdam Compiler Kit (also known as the Free University Compiler Kit), for permission to use that software for GNU. When Tanenbaum advised him that the compiler itself was not free, but rather only the university, Stallman decided to work on a different compiler.
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Also the whole reason for existence of GNU Project:
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According to Stallman, what prompted him to start the GNU Project was having previously had an experience with Xerox refusing to give him access to the source code of a laser printer used at the MIT Lab, now with the realization that this community of sharing software would end and noticing the advancing spread of proprietary software which had undone the culture of sharing software that had previously existed, Richard Stallman refused to adapt by continuing with proprietary software, and he instead decided that with this skills as an operating systems programmer, he would begin the development of a new free software operating system and to recreate a community of sharing software that was lost, called GNU.
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If you don't have a filtering mechanism moderators will burn out and more interesting projects may never be seen. If you've run a bunch of LLM agent sessions concurrently you run into the human review bottleneck problem. That's all this is on a larger scale.
A while back you had this tweet which often gets cited, or at least _i_ personally think about it a lot.
> If WASM+WASI existed in 2008, we wouldn't have needed to created Docker. That's how important it is. Webassembly on the server is the future of computing. A standardized system interface was the missing link. Let's hope WASI is up to the task!
what's even more funny is most of what they are asking for exist in some form.
As an aside, I remember when sora 2 launched and thinking, "wow I wonder if we'll ever get something close this in open weights?" The prevailing sentiment was "maybe 5 years." Yet, we have Minimax H3 and Flux a year and a half later.
> Claude’s Opus performs best, though it’s not Opus 5.5 but rather Opus 5 which does so. The difference doesn’t appear to be pure chance, Opus 5 is better at interpreting the spec. Some models like Fable 5.1 and Gemini 4 Argon do poorly due to their overly sensitive safety guardrails. The best open-weight model is MiMo-V2.6-Pro.
So the models _can_ use the programming language.
A somewhat flippant reconstruction of this argument is something like,
Can humans code? Or do they just remember the words? I created a programming language called Brainfuck that shows they can't program.
And then reporting results that shows some humans can in fact program in Brainfuck, just kind of poorly.
There’s an overlap, but the observation from the parent comment turns this widely cited phenomenon from a supposed mystery or deep insight into something trivial.
It’s like observing that humans across cultures agree that the word “woof” refers to a dog and the word “miaw” refers to a cat… no shit.
This is why I like to remind myself that the world is much more interesting than I often think, which is why the drive to jump to simple and boring explanations can often be a trap.
As I get older, I consistently find the world to be far less interesting than I used to believe. So many factoids that I once marveled at have turned out to be false or exaggerated, or now seem pretentious and forced to me even if they are true.
It’s been a long, long time that I heard something new and was genuinely, deeply amazed rather than just filling it away into the endless gallery of things I’m supposed to be amazed by according to others.
Dont know how old you are or what age has to do with it. But i find that as I get older simple factoids about the world are even more amazing. There are 4 forces we know of. Strong, weak,electromagnetic and gravitational. Thats magic and that gets more interesting the more you meditate on it.
It means all matter is acting on each other at all times. It means your existence, acting through your will changes the universe, because something as simple as moving tweaks this balance.
Its the same with so many things like the water cycle or other seemingly boring elementary concepts of our reality.
> There are 4 forces we know of. Strong, weak,electromagnetic and gravitational. Thats magic
Is it? I used to think so myself, but nowadays I realize my reaction was just imitating what others had shown me was an “appropriate” response to this.
Whether there are 4 fundamental forces, a single one, or 100, none of these help me understand the world in any sense I actually care about.
I shouldn't use the word magic in a forum like this, last time I did something similar, it also got caught up with the semantics. I mean awe inducing. I've been doing the exercise of writing poetry and one thing that I love about the process is that you can absolutely find inspiration in the banal everyday things.
By the way, this mode of being makes me happier so I invite everyone to take a second and actually consider the question "how is this magical?" for everything. It can be a beautiful experience.
I've met amazing buddhist masters who have meditated for decades that describe the world in these terms. They are also the happiest and the people most oriented towards helping others that I've met.
What exactly about it is “awe-inducing”? There are four fundamental forces. Okay. Not three, not five. Just like there are five Platonic solids, rather than four or six.
Now what? What am I supposed to feel awe about? Are you sure you aren’t just echoing words you’ve read in a popular science book?
To be clear, I have myself parroted such soundbites for decades. But at some point I asked myself what I was actually trying to say when I said them, and came up empty.
You're not the first time that someone in this site tries to argue with me that I should not look for beauty and wonder. I'll do it anyway and am not interested in arguing with strangers about what deserves being open about to wonder and interest.
I do find it interesting the fact that there's some kind of order that happens to make the world the way it is and not some other way. That's enough.
I’m doing my very best not to fall into these deep mental and physical ruts or grooves.
It’s part of why time seems to accelerate when you age too our brains only record novelty and new experiences. Drive the thousandth time to the store, won’t remember even going. Do something new - suddenly the weekend seems long.
Sure, and not every single person agrees with the proposed phonetic shape-matching either, but the broad trend does hold and there is similarly in animal vocalizations even across unrelated languages.
No, actually it doesn’t. You are just wrong here. Amazing that your ‘older’ brain that ‘sees through it all’ won’t let you admit it and is actually just a necrotic defense or superiority mechanism. Genuinely very alarming to me and a huge warning not to let myself get like this.
Most animal sounds do not actually map that well into the range of sounds we use for human language. And even if they did, you would end up with different representations because different languages use different sets of sounds. Not to mention most animals make more than one kind of sound
But all of that doesn't mean that someone who has never heard English wouldn't be able two tell which of "woof" and "miaw" is supposed to be the cat
>across cultures agree that the word “woof” refers to a dog
Mexican / Spanish its Guau-guau or "wow-wow". Russia its tyaf-tyaf. Mandarin Chinese its wāng wāng. Few if any cultures that don't speak English know what 'woof' is.
obviously the idea is not that all cultures have the same word for the sound that a dog makes, but rather if you ask people from cultures which is the sound a dog makes "woof" or "miaow" assuming they have these concepts for the animals they would say "woof".
I am not arguing this is the case, but the original poster obviously feels it is, connecting it to the top level post's idea of common ideas for what words describe over languages.
> How could I be wowed that a Millenium Prize problem has been solved using Lean verification for its proof in 2026, when that was on our minds for our 5-year plan back in 2021? How can I be impressed that OpenAI claims to have solved it in 88 hours when even I, someone barely involved, spent more hours than that working on the tech they're using?
> How much work from how many people did it really take to get that result?
I've watched this creator since, I don't know, 2010. They seem to be a very creative mathematics educator. This the point that is being insinuated here is ludicrous.
It's like saying, "how can I be impressed by copernicus' heliocentric model, when he built it on the 500 years of painstakingly collected data from the babylonians?"
It's either disingenuous, or ignorance.
> This should be embarrassing enough for OpenAI even if they didn’t have access to Buckmaster and Alpöge’s ongoing work.
More repeating of unsubstantiated accusations fanned by the ongoing culture war.
The rest... Gee whiz. It just hits all the notes. "Anyone who disagrees with me is a pedophile and has ai psychosis."
This is a diatribe from a person who makes wonderful art videos geared towards math education, against an organization solving millennium problems.
I agree with this take. The complexity is that math professionals are currently being paid based on the theories they prove. Until they come up with a different goal for being paid, this will be disruptive.
Maybe you are right! I'd like to hear the justifications more though.
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