I've done that, mostly during the time that Grandma had their machines loaded up with crap that they barely functioned. Thinking they needed to get a new machine. I loaded Linux Mint and they didn't look back.

Sokath, his eyes uncovered!

It is exactly Stockholm syndrome, with a sprinkle of not knowing just how stable other OS' are. The Linux classes I was teaching, after months of pickering around with Windows, ended early after all the students had things running problem free. Went through the syllabus at light speed, when the previous classes were a study in frustration, mostly figuring out what Windows update broke. They want to do more, so I have to figure out a new class.

If Microsoft can convince the users that their piece of guano OS and its poor performance is just a universal trait of OS', and that MacOS and Linux are even worse, the koolaid is easier to drink.

As long as you are in a situation that you can install and use it.

It shows how pathetic a product Windows is when you have to install outside applications to get raw basic functionality.

I feel badly for you. When people can only post with one angle, it usually involves deep seated trauma. Have you considered therapy?

And not even a good one. I have been struggling with W11's various issues, like reinstalling onedrive, placing programs on onedrive, which breaks them, it's abysmal audio issues, it's BOHICA updates, that destabilize the system even before installation, randomish program settings changes.

I even started to think "Maybe you're just getting old and losing your touch Olsoc you dotard old twatwaffle!" I mean, it's hard to imagine that Microsoft could put out this bad a product.

Then I tried an experiment. I dug out a W10 laptop that was sitting around, and installed the programs I was having problems with on W11.

And... they worked. Took 30 minutes to install and set up. Worked great - it wasn't me. And there is the undeniable fact that now that W10 isn't supported by Microsoft any more, that it is stable now.

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.

Even in the darkest of times, humans can find humor no matter the source. You ave evolved into permanent desperate ennui. How's that workin' out for ya?

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).

I find that Anubis is a lot, lot less of a pain in the arse than Cloudflare's captchas. Usually I said right through Anubis in a second or two. Cloudflare usually requires at least a click, and often a stupid game.

Two reasons it's allowed.

1. The iPhone sells well.

2. Android lets you replace most of the OS, including core parts like Google Play Services.

There is definitely a case for requiring better interoperability where people do things like replace Play Services and then find that their banking app won't open because there is no way to tell it that the device is secure, but it's mostly enough to ward off Microsoft style anti-trust issues.

Sucks for people with accessibility issues though. Moving the mouse in a straight line, say because they have a joystick or their eye tracking software interpolates, is going to get them blocked or forced to do a long captcha challenge that isn't very accessible either.