When the newfangled electronic calculators came along, many eminent engineers, and teachers of engineering, objected to them displacing the slide rule.
For those of you who haver never slid a slide rule, here's the part that makes this anecdote make sense: they're a mechanical logarithm, this allows one to do multiplication as addition, but there's a catch: you have to know the "characteristic", that is, the order of magnitude of the result. The slide rule won't tell you that.
They argued that this requirement leads to an intuitive grasp of magnitudes, which is of real benefit to the discipline.
And they were correct. However, engineering is, by all appearances, doing just fine.
Where they erred, and it was a natural mistake to make, is in assuming that pedagogy must recapitulate phylogeny. That engineers should start with the slide rule, just like the profession did, and then graduate to the calculator, just like their professors did.
But this is wrong. It makes the slide rule an impediment: a known-to-be-obsolete object, standing between the student and graduating to the device he or she knows, full well, is what will be used for the rest of his or her career.
Instead, teach the concepts and the foundation with the modern tools. Then, senior year, in addition to the thesis project, teach "OG" engineering: slide rules, graph paper, mechanical pencils. Along with the thesis, which should stretch all the skills already mastered to their limit, require a feat of engineering which is within the student's capability, but: no CAD, no calculators.
This would actually work. This gives them an opportunity to find out what they're missing, build some of that order-of-magnitude intuition, really solidify what a "sketch" in CAD is all about, all of it: and understand that any force multiplier can be a crutch, if you let it.
I've been just delighted with what I can accomplish in "centaur mode" with LLM agent assistance. I've made real progress on longstanding research topics. But to do so, it's essential to never let them be a substitute for one's own understanding. They turn out to be really good at explaining difficult passages in research papers!
My gloss on what's happened with LLMs in mathematics (understand, I am not a mathematician), is that we're discovering that solving conjectures is just not that important. Not the first time this has happened: simplifying and manipulating algebraic equations was very important, and then, it wasn't.
Making conjectures, that's where the action is. Always has been. No one thinks that solving an Erdős conjecture puts one in the same rank as Erdős Pal, because it doesn't.
When the first mainframe computers came along, there was a brief flurry of conjectures, some of them longstanding, which were either proven or disproven by brute exhaustive search. What's happening now is different in magnitude, and even in kind: but more in magnitude than in kind.
It wouldn't be fitting to be glib about the disruptive effect this is having, and perhaps (although I don't think so) we'll cross some threshold at which it doesn't even make sense to contemplate humans doing authentic intellectual labor. That would be bad. If you think that's on the horizon, you're right to be upset about it; I don't, but I won't try and persuade you otherwise, because the point is far from obvious, and both of us are predicting the future, which is known to be a risky business.
The "publish or perish problem" which this new development surfaces is not new to this development. The entire concept is well past its sell-by date, and while mathematics is perhaps the intellectual pursuit least corrupted by the dog-and-pony show, it is and has been undignified, inhumane, and always to some degree dishonest. Time to come up with something better.
From professional wrestling / carny language: a "work" is something staged for the crowd, whereas a "shoot" (straight shooting) is something that actually happened.
> This is easy to do with the proper support for monomorphized generics, see C++'s std::list. It is awkward in C, where the implementation has to be macro-generated.
Fairly pleasant in Zig, through abuse of @fieldParentPointer and a pinch of comptime.
It was a little nicer in the `usingnamespace` days. So it goes.
> The elements can be allocated on the heap, on the stack, in a global array (like "initholes" in the article), in a special arena, etc.
An "etc" worth mentioning specifically is a memory pool: they're useful for any same-sized struct which gets recycled a lot, but for linked lists there are further advantages. You don't have to cast the object to bytes and declare a link pointer, since it already has one: not really an advantage, casting is free, but: if you can arrange to give both sides of the list back, then recycling can be done on a per-list level by prepending the whole thing to the freelist.
Nothing at all. They're not designed to, so they don't. Change that, and they would.
The question is the wrong one. The right question: why aren't frontier models designed to work that way? The answer: it's slow and expensive.
The other answer: that's basically what you're selecting with "Medium", "High" and so on, how many tokens they'll blow on muttering to themselves before they get back to you with an answer. There's more to it, but not that much more.
Keeping in mind that I'm going strictly off the commit[0], a bit-packing layout is very much the kind of thing which is not subject to copyright in the first place. Neither are algorithms. Ideas, in general, are not subject to copyright: expression is.
So "lifting ideas from other engines", as you yourself put it, is entirely licit, no matter how you do it. _Should_ you credit others when so doing? I err on the side of yes, on that question. _Must_ you? No, there is no such requirement, this is not academic publishing. Does it constitute violation of license? Absolutely not. Straightforwardly, no. Furthermore, it _should not_, we would not like the result of that.
Think: SCO suing Linus Torvalds over his use of a.out: and winning. It would be bad. Even though I understand the reasons for it, it's still eerie to me to see hackers coming down hard on a side of an issue we spend decades passionately defending the other side of.
As I lead this post with: maybe there's something in the repo which is infringing, it's quite possible that commit doesn't tell the whole story. If so, keep in mind that I don't know that, and am able to change my opinion in the face of new evidence.
Based on what I _have_ seen, no: you do not get to lock down a bit-packing pattern just because you're the first to come up with it. Nor should you have that right.
You'll notice I didn't mention copyright, and that's because I don't think it's relevant. I think your analysis is correct. Keep in mind too that Stockfish – the engine I work on, although I wasn't at the time – was the subject of a high-profile defense of the GPL in Germany: https://stockfishchess.org/blog/2021/our-lawsuit-against-che.... That case was different as it involved wholesale copying of the source code, rather than porting ideas. Ideas shouldn't be copyrightable.
But copyright and plagiarism are orthogonal, and questions of morality are much more tied to the latter. It would be illegal (in the United States) for me to publish a copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four, but not immoral. It was not immoral, in my view, for Aaron Swartz to try to liberate JSTor articles.
That doesn't make plagiarism acceptable, either. And therefore, I'm willing to call it out when I see it.
Anyway, I don't see how this relates to the original discussion. Nor do I think the irony is particularly deep: As far as I'm aware, Deep Blue didn't plagiarize Kasparov, and indeed alpha-beta search is quite different than how humans calculate. But yes, I'd have been very demoralized if I were Kasparov, although he seems to be doing well now.
Edit: Regarding being mean-spirited, sorry to say, but I don't particularly care for the feelings of someone who has been repeatedly dishonest and used LLMs to respond to people engaging in good faith. That latter path has been exhausted now.
To co-opt your conflation of legality and morality: free speech, mf!
No idea why you're getting downvoted. You're right.
> it's still eerie to me to see hackers coming down hard on a side of an issue we spend decades passionately defending the other side of
Yeah, it's surreal. It's not just intellectual property either, Hackers have already started complaining about automation now too.
Computers must have replaced tens of millions of jobs. It's the ultimate job destroyer, since it allows capital to do more with less. Automating me, a doctor, out of his job is essentially the holy grail of Hacker News.
But when hackers are automated away, then suddenly it's a crime against humanity.
I think that's true, but I'm not sure if this would characterize itself as "lifting ideas". I mean, it's one thing to personally take the idea and re-implement it yourself elsewhere. But I have to believe there could be an argument, that having an inference algorithm take the original source and re-implement it in the context of your engine might count as derivative work.
A particular work is deliberately supplied at inference time so the system can recreate or adapt it for another environment. It resembles commissioning a translation, port, or derivative adaptation through an automated tool, even where the output is not verbatim, so it seems it could hold a candle in court.
You have a few scenarios now up for legal debate:
1. Is training a model using copyrighted material fair use?
2. A model outputting chunks of identical coryrighted code from it's training material
3. A model being given in it's prompt copyrighted source code, and asked to implement the same in a new source code.
I think #1 and #2 have open legal battles on it, but #3, which seems to be this scenario, is new to me, and I feel it could have legal ground for being considered infringing on the copyright.
Sidenote: how is your account "samatman" and created "April 24, 2010", that's a really funny coincidence
Whatever the legal outcome, whether it's ultimately decided that people can or can't "get away" with using LLMs to license-launder code, it's undoubtedly a dick move.
Without acknowledgment and credit, I totally agree. Also, I think it might be patentable, just not copyrightable, though it can be pretty tricky to get a patent in software approved.
True story: I have a moisture issue in my furnace, such that it needs vacuuming out. This involved detaching a length of tubing, but that puts stress on said tubing, sometimes knocks other things out of alignment, and involves completing the seal between the wetvac and the tubing with my hand.
I also have a 3D printer. I also have a ChatGPT subscription, and some OpenSCAD chops. I came up with a part which would go into the top of the down tube to the drainage pump, and mostly-seal the down tube itself, with an opening on the side to vacuum out the moisture. This was purely prooompted, I took some measurements, printed bits of the part, refined the shape, and you know what?
It works! I can stick it down there, turn on the (very loud) wet vac, and go upstairs. On a 1.5Ah battery it sucks for a bit less than ten minutes, which turns out to be plenty of time.
So: who made that?
Don't care. I'm waking up warm at night.
Also: me, obviously. ChatGPT doesn't have a fucking furnace.
Not really. They're an AI company: they develop AI and sell it. There's some room for pulling off flashy marketing stunts, but not all that much.
This is division of labor, and it's a good thing. I'm sure OpenAI employees, who are very well paid, donate some money from their salaries to others working on the areas you're citing: probably more than you think, I say that from having attended some EA parties back in the day.
But that isn't my point: my point is that a company which makes brushless motors should put most of its time and money into solving the "make and sell brushless motors" problem, and if they or their investors feel like they need to do more for the world, give money to the people who have the time and ability to do things about that. There are a lot of quality-of-life improvements which need brushless motors.
Next question is how useful their product (OpenAI, I mean) is to more focused do-good-in-the-world professionals. I'm sure that varies quite a bit. For getting the homeless off the street? I conjecture, not very useful. For 'complete the transition off fossil fuels'? Extremely useful, no one in that field knows how to do their job without AI in summer 2026. I'm certain of this.
If the Judeo-Bolshevist theses were true, then Operation Barbarossa was the logical thing to do, and everything which came with it.
Powerful word, `if`. "You're not only wrong you're a fulminating psychopath" is a perfectly valid response to getting it wrong like a fulminating psychopath.
You may want to read this comment again and really evaluate it as if you didn't write it. Maybe shop it around. Ask your wife, or better some random people with the names scrubbed so they don't know it's you, to tell you who is the asshole and exactly why.
For those of you who haver never slid a slide rule, here's the part that makes this anecdote make sense: they're a mechanical logarithm, this allows one to do multiplication as addition, but there's a catch: you have to know the "characteristic", that is, the order of magnitude of the result. The slide rule won't tell you that.
They argued that this requirement leads to an intuitive grasp of magnitudes, which is of real benefit to the discipline.
And they were correct. However, engineering is, by all appearances, doing just fine.
Where they erred, and it was a natural mistake to make, is in assuming that pedagogy must recapitulate phylogeny. That engineers should start with the slide rule, just like the profession did, and then graduate to the calculator, just like their professors did.
But this is wrong. It makes the slide rule an impediment: a known-to-be-obsolete object, standing between the student and graduating to the device he or she knows, full well, is what will be used for the rest of his or her career.
Instead, teach the concepts and the foundation with the modern tools. Then, senior year, in addition to the thesis project, teach "OG" engineering: slide rules, graph paper, mechanical pencils. Along with the thesis, which should stretch all the skills already mastered to their limit, require a feat of engineering which is within the student's capability, but: no CAD, no calculators.
This would actually work. This gives them an opportunity to find out what they're missing, build some of that order-of-magnitude intuition, really solidify what a "sketch" in CAD is all about, all of it: and understand that any force multiplier can be a crutch, if you let it.
I've been just delighted with what I can accomplish in "centaur mode" with LLM agent assistance. I've made real progress on longstanding research topics. But to do so, it's essential to never let them be a substitute for one's own understanding. They turn out to be really good at explaining difficult passages in research papers!
My gloss on what's happened with LLMs in mathematics (understand, I am not a mathematician), is that we're discovering that solving conjectures is just not that important. Not the first time this has happened: simplifying and manipulating algebraic equations was very important, and then, it wasn't.
Making conjectures, that's where the action is. Always has been. No one thinks that solving an Erdős conjecture puts one in the same rank as Erdős Pal, because it doesn't.
When the first mainframe computers came along, there was a brief flurry of conjectures, some of them longstanding, which were either proven or disproven by brute exhaustive search. What's happening now is different in magnitude, and even in kind: but more in magnitude than in kind.
It wouldn't be fitting to be glib about the disruptive effect this is having, and perhaps (although I don't think so) we'll cross some threshold at which it doesn't even make sense to contemplate humans doing authentic intellectual labor. That would be bad. If you think that's on the horizon, you're right to be upset about it; I don't, but I won't try and persuade you otherwise, because the point is far from obvious, and both of us are predicting the future, which is known to be a risky business.
The "publish or perish problem" which this new development surfaces is not new to this development. The entire concept is well past its sell-by date, and while mathematics is perhaps the intellectual pursuit least corrupted by the dog-and-pony show, it is and has been undignified, inhumane, and always to some degree dishonest. Time to come up with something better.
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