There's quite a lot of nuance here, I guess, which isn't unexpected. It's quite a useful anecdote. At the very least, we can't just wave it away like it's not useful. It may generate sub-standard paintings or completely miss the point of art, but if it makes your proofs better, it seems insane to not have it help.

Well, wait, I don't think that actually disproves the claim. I'm not saying it's not impressive, I just don't think it's as novel as you say.

When I ask an LLM to write me code that does something 'novel', it usually does quite a good job. I'm just using the freely available models, but they quite competently write code that is not truly derivative of any other code. If I give them some code of my own that has a bug in it, they'll find the bug and patch it, and that bug is, for all intents and purposes, unique.

You're still seeing a bunch of old patterns rehashed--I presume that other proofs introduce infinity families, and they can iterate through inside a clear logical structure to test whether or not something works. Again, this is impressive work, but I'm not personally convinced that this is 'novel' in terms of the broader corpus of mathematical knowledge. It didn't invent a new field of mathematics to solve your problem.

Even if you didn't prompt it, take a look sometimes at the contemplations of the models, if that's available to you. Before the model even arrives in your hands, it's got stacks of prompts giving it meta instructions, and it then generates prompts for itself to check your work. I think it would be interesting if you ran your experiment again on a new account that's fresh and see if you can watch the chain of reasoning. You might be right, it MAY be doing something TRULY novel, but as I've said, I've got my doubts.

Obviously, you're a mathematician and I'm not; I can't tell you that you're wrong about it if you insist that it is doing something new.

Democrats are not "prioritizing trans athletes". It is Republicans who talk about them all the time, incessently. You are example #1.

I never thought of the AI box experiment as an entirely theoretical thought exercise, but since we seem to have put LLMs on the internet as soon as we were the least bit capable, there never was a meaningful "box" in the first place.

The estimates of the number of children who died due to cuts in USAID is in the tens of thousands. Still terrible, but you don't serve any constructive purpose by exaggerating by several orders of magnitude.

In 2001 supposedly it really was "human error". Some humans told Hal 9000 to lie to the astronauts and not reveal that an alien artifact had been found on the moon. And that was a mistake as they probably either knew or could test what would happen to Hal.

This is remarkably similar to things going wrong with AI now, actually.

Indeed. I built a Raspberry Pi Pico based controller for some flashing LEDs on my drone. It has red and blue LEDs and I wanted them to flash with the cycle of three short flashes then a pause; alternately the red LEDs then the blue LEDS. Took barely a minute to code that in python and dump it onto the board. In such cases it doesn't matter that the language is interpreted because the task is not demanding of the hardware.

The "Police Drone" still flies to this day! :-)

How interesting it would be to do a drive-around with an open wifi hotspot in the car -- just to see how many LG TV sets try to connect and find out what data they send.

Just saying, for a friend :)

I saw a video by a photographer and he points out that the quality of photos is not the reason to buy a dedicated camera. After all, you can buy a $2000 Ricoh that only takes black and white photos now; the iPhone will, in most circumstances, take 'better' photos, or at least more true-to-life photos.

But a dedicated camera focuses your attention. If you carry your camera, you're concerned with photography. You're not distracted by texts or whatever. And so your photography is likely to be better--you're paying attention to the task in a way that you rarely will with your phone.

Actually probably not the chip is larger, but the lens is larger. The aperture allows it to be less blurry in bright light.

The chip is larger so it collects more light and thus improves low-light photography, but this would make bright-light photography worse (by reducing depth of field). The aperture fixes this for bright light, thus allowing the better low-light performance.

The examples comparing prices are all comparing them to battery-backed systems that can continuously produce the rated power. The solar panels or wind turbines will be capable of far higher peak power that is used to charge the batteries. I have no idea whether any numbers being quoted here are accurate, but the posters are absolutely describing "base power" when quoting their prices.

Yes... we could destroy Putin's nuclear torpedo before it even made it to the UK coast! :-P

There was a parking lot there before. And LA has plenty of other examples of similar architecture, some of it considered LA landmarks

Reading scores fell more sharply in students from better-off backgrounds

Sounds like at least we have achieved equality in stupidity!