That would be funny... but also foolish. Iran is thrilled to have Trump right where he is, doing all the dumb things he's doing.

They sold their souls. Now they want them back. I am low on sympathy.

Valid! (Including the gray and the beard, though my hair is still mostly black. Mostly.)

The point, though is that there are lots of grandmas with varying levels of computer knowledge, many of whom can and should be moved to a Linux system that is harder to screw up. Or, honestly even better, a good Chromebook.

On that topic, I did that for my father-in-law around 2010. I got tired of cleaning up the mess he made on his Windows laptop, so (with his permission) I upgraded him to Debian. It was hugely lower-maintenance for me.

The really funny thing about that particular case is that my father-in-law was a retired Full Professor of Computer Science! His problem wasn't that he didn't have the background or ability to manage a system himself, it was that he didn't want to. At his life-stage, the computer was a tool that he used, mostly as a web browser to buy parts for the farming and antique furniture refinishing that were his passions. Also, he had very thick fingers and constantly fat-fingered stuff, literally. What he really needed was a Chromebook with a full-sized laptop keyboard (a bigger-than-normal keyboard would have been even better), but Chromebooks didn't exist yet.

I'm a grandpa and I'm using a computer. My wife is a grandma and she's using a computer, too.

Or let's put this another way. Show of hands - how many of you "spicy autocorrect" / "stochastic parrot" people had "AI will start mass-solving Erdos problems" on your forecast list a couple years back? Huh, none of you? Fascinating!

Take some time to reassess your priors. And while you do so, understand that, yes, they are doing logic / reasoning.

They weren't discovered by an LLM. They were known conjectures that were proven by an automated solving language that was linked to an LLM.

I'll take "Things That Didn't Happen For $200", Alex.

Only a handful of meaningful proofs have ever been done by automated formal theorem solvers (the Four Colour Theorem being the most noteworthy example - but its proof is so long that humans can't verify it). By contrast, AI tools have been solving Erdos problems en masse. The majority of them just bog-standard commercial models. In case you need help, the only ones on that list that were hybrid (AI / non-AI) in the actual solving phase are:

1) AlphaProof / DeepMind Prover Agent / AlphaProof Nexus
2) Aristotle (Harmonic)
3) Seed Prover / Seed Prover 1.5 (ByteDance)
4) AxiomProver (Axiom Math)

In each of the above, LLMs come up with the lemmas / strategies but then use Monte Carlo search ("brute force") or likewise to investigate what they came up with. These are a minority. In the "AI Standalone" category, these "hybrid" tools made up only ~20% of attempts and successful proofs. Hybrid tools actually made more of a contribution in the "AI Alongside Literature" (related literature found afterward) and even more of the "AI Building On Literature" (related literature known beforehand) categories, which is the opposite of what people like you expect.

And even with the hybrid tools, it's still the AI doing the heavy lifting when it comes to strategy. Non-AI theorem solvers, again, don't have a spectacular record for churning out novel proofs to unsolved problems. Tools like Lean are more about mathematical rigour - a passive environment that requires a driver (a human or AI) to feed it actual strategies, lemmas, and proof steps. And no, you cannot brute force "strategy" in the vast majority of cases, which is, again, why automated theorem solvers don't have much of a track record with unsolved mathematical problems.

Let's take a random example: the disproof of the unit distance conjecture. It was solved purely by a general purpose commercial GPT model, not custom-trained to mathematics, with no external tools. Read what the various mathematicians reviewing / commenting on it have to say (sections #3 and onward). Seriously, don't skip reading them, actually read them. This was one of Erdos's favourite problems. He mentioned it commonly in his lectures. Essentially every mathematician working in complex geometry has thought about this problem. The approach that the model came up with was highly novel approach, based on CM-fields and class field towers.

I know you don't want to accept this reality, but it is the reality, so you better improve your ability to accept it,. The field of mathematics is already doing so.

Dang, link didn't post.

Ah, good 'ol "Model Collapse" theory that people have been pounding on for years now, predicting an imminent collapse in model capabilities. How has that been working out for you?

Except what the US is actually facing, at least in the near term, is just the opposite, a worker shortage.

You can't pay royalties to the entire internet. That's not realistic.

What is practical are things like taxes to fund public benefits, or requirements of returning things to the commons (for example, open models).

So, $22.50 per day, or $113 per week. How much does one of your people cost, all-in, including benefits? It's unlikely that it's less than $100k per year, and very likely at least double or triple that, if not five times or more. At $200k/year for 50 weeks, that's $4k/week. At the current token price, the AI makes a $200k engineer 3% more productive, the company is breaking even. If it makes them 1.5X or 2X as productive it's a clear and unquestionable win, even with higher token prices.

As for me, think AI makes me about 5X more productive than I would be without it, and that's just considering volume of work. Honestly, I think the quality is a little higher than I'd do myself -- not because the AI writes better code than I do (it definitely does not), but because I'm able to be pickier and do more and larger refactors than I would if I had to do the grunt work myself. Also because I have Claude write documentation that, frankly, I just wouldn't get around to if it were me. The documentation is not nearly as good as if you gave me a dedicated technical writer... but the $2500 I spend per month in tokens would come nowhere close to paying a writer, even if we ignored the coding productivity.

I keep hearing things like "my grandmother got so confused, I set her up on Zorin/Mint and she couldn't tell the difference."

The more people just use their PC's to get on websites the less they seem to notice if they use Windows or Linux.

I suspect GP's point is that every malware blocker in every browser is likely to treat this kind of script as hostile, except for Chrome because Google are currently nerfing the ability for blockers to intercept hostile scripts in one of the most blatantly user-hostile changes they've ever made.

If Apple play along with Safari then every other browser and its malware blocking plugins are about to be toast in a huge retrograde step for Internet privacy. But not even Cloudflare is going to get away with blocking every iOS device if Apple continues to allow blockers to intercept this kind of script.

Did anyone mention recently that simultaneously controlling both the most popular web browser and several of the most popular ad-supported web properties might be a little anticompetitive, and that it's about time that Google was broken up? It's probably time for that drum to start beating a bit louder again.

Somewhat, yes (and this most definitely includes the federal government!). On the other hand, small organizations don't have the same opportunities for economies of scale. This is what drives consolidation in most markets; the bigger players can outcompete the small ones because they have efficiency opportunities the small ones just don't, and greater consolidation increases that... up until it gets balanced and then exceeded by bloat, which lets smaller players back in.

That's what happens in competitive markets, anyway. The healthcare market is so heavily regulated that it may not work the same way.

You can only move workers by paying more, either moving them from one job to another or from being unemployed to being employed. But if you're already very close to full employment (which we are; prime-age employment is 83.3%), then in order to get more workers you have to get more people.