thrwayaistartup's comments

> This is is just wrong? Syntax rigour has almost nothing to do with correctness.

1. It's all fine and well to wave your hand at "Syntax rigour", but if your code doesn't even parse then you won't get far toward "correctness". The frustration with having to write code that parses was extremely common among the students I am referring to in my original post -- it seemed incidental and unnecessary. It might be incidental, but at least for now it's definitely not unnecessary.

2. It's not just syntactic rigor. I gave two other examples which are not primarily syntactic trip-ups: understanding nested loops and simple recursion. (This actually makes sense -- how often in undergraduate math do you write a proof that involves multiple interacting inductions? It happens, but isn't a particularly common item in the arsenal. And even when you do, the precise way in which the two inductions proceed is almost always irrelevant to the argument because you don't care about the "runtime" of a proof. So the fact that students toward the end of undergraduate struggle with this isn't particularly surprising.)

Even elementary programming ability demands a type of rigor we'll call "implementation rigor". Understanding how nested loops actually work and why switching the order of two nested loops might result in wildly different runtimes. Understanding that two variables that happen to have the same name and two different points in the program might not be referring to the same piece of memory. Etc.

Mathematical maturity doesn't traditionally emphasize this type of "implementation rigor" -- even a mathematician at the end of their undergraduate studies often won't have a novice programmer's level of "implementation rigor".

I am not quite sure why you are being so defensive on this point. To anyone who has educated both mathematicians and computer scientists, it's a fairly obvious point and plainly observable out in the real world. Going on about curry-howard and other abstract nonsense seems to wildly and radically miss this point.

>> They are conceptually/abstractly rigorous, but in "implementation" are incredibly sloppy.

Maturity in concept-space and the ability to reason abstractly can be achieved without the sort of formal rigor required by far less abstract and much more conceptually simple programming.

I have seen this first hand TAing and tutoring CS1. I regularly had students who put off their required programming course until senior year. As a result, some were well into graduate-level mathematics and at the top of their class but struggled deeply with the rigor required in implementation. Think about, e.g., missing semi-colons at the end of lines, understanding where a variable is defined, understanding how nested loops work, simple recursion, and so on. Consider something as simple as writing a C/Java program that reads lines from a file, parses them according to a simple format, prints out some accumulated value from the process, and handles common errors appropriately. Programming requires a lot more formal rigor than mathematical proof writing.

Maybe that's not true for al (although a 35 minute bike ride with existing fitness gets you a long way surprisingly fast). But one can lift while watching TV. One can do squats while doing laundry. Etc.

Of course, in each case, one of those two options is far less comfortable. For commuting that's particularly true in the winter. But WRT physical fitness, the barrier is almost always "discomfort" and almost never "time".

Universities DO have a monopoly on credentialing. Credentialing, contrary to popular opinion in these parts, is actually a useful function.

Providing education and credentialing is not typically free. You need to acquire physical space, hire teachers, and so on. Education could be at least one order of magnitude less expensive than it is now, and it some cases probably even two orders. Education could also be subsidized 100% for the first N most qualified candidates, at point of use, using tax dollars. But there is no way to make it free.

The average college tuition and fees at four-year schools in 2020-2021 was $19,020.

> and the average student will roll out with between 100k-200k in debt

The average federal student loan debt is $37,338 per borrower.

Like I said, everyone keeps missing the point.

You can see this in high school test scores, in placement exams, in Freshman college performance, and even in new grad hire cohorts.

The autodidact set has realized that they can teach themselves a lot of what they would've learned in coursework at colleges. There are still some elite career pathways where formal education is necessary, but an autodidact who doesn't want to follow one of those career pathways now knows that they can go without.

American colleges provide a useful-if-overpriced service to non-autodidacts, but their product is not ready to deal with students who are YEARS behind in their formal education.

More importantly, though, most judges are not philosophers.

That's super interesting and is news to me. Thanks for sharing. Would you mind linking to relevant statutes or court decisions?

(This isn't a "citation needed" post -- I believe you, and I'm genuinely curious to read more, but can't find anything!)

This is categorically false for both software and movies.

For other media, this ignores the effect of zero-effort copying.

A good example from a recent gig: one of our scientists had a HUGE pile very complicated MATLAB, based on several dissertations worth of novel work on both numerical analysis and highly domain-specific mathematical modeling.

Our software engineers needed to either call into or directly use the MATLAB code. Sometimes changes were necessary. This caused a ton of friction for two reasons. First, our SWEs didn't know much MATLAB. Second, you'd have to read two or three papers of complicated mathematics to even understand what the code was doing prior to changing it, and most of our software engineers topped out with Calculus or maybe a Linear Algebra course. So our engineers were unfamiliar with both the tech stack and also the "knowledge" stack.

In that case, I think it's more accurate to say that the software engineers were unfamiliar with the scientist's tech stack than the other way around. There's no way in hell them or anyone else was going to come anywhere close to correctly rewriting the MATLAB code in any reasonable amount of time. And even if you could, the knowledge stack problem still exists.

You can think of hiring those types of scientists as one-man startups that are bringing in their own tech stack and debt that your existing org has no idea how to integrate. You need to plan that reality into both compensation amount and vesting/earning scheduling.

For compensation, err on the side of "way over asking", since this is going to suck harder than the scientist thinks. They are probably going to want to leave, and you need to be able to get them to stick around. (The dynamics here are similar to a startup founder or exec after a merger, but with slight difference: the scientist's "FU money" is a pretty much guaranteed cushy professor of practice gig.)

For vesting, err on the side of paying out bonuses or RSUs early but with a big vesting cliff 2-4 years out. So they get the cash before it vests. Get 'em hooked and don't let 'em leave until the work is caught.

And definitely bank on them leaving once the first cliff is hit.

Looking back, it's a bit absurd to say that GOFAI would've got to AGI if only the Frame Problem could be solved. But the important point is why that sounds so absurd.

It doesn't sound absurd because we found out that the frame problem can't be solved; that's beside the point.

It also doesn't sound absurd because we found out that solving the frame problem isn't the key to GOFAI-based AGI. That's also beside the point.

It sounds absurd because the conjecture itself is... just funny. It's almost goofy, looking back, how people thought about AGI.

Hallucination is the Frame Problem of the 2023 AI Summer. Looking back from the other side of the next Winter, the whole thing will seem a bit goofy.

I think we will see that transition throughout the economy, actually: software will continue to be very important, but the marginal value add of someone writing software will depend on their having deep domain expertise.

The fact that those jobs are offset by growth in solar and energy jobs doesn't help without a centralized wealth transfer, which ain't gonna happen.

The problem with US political-economics right now is that the future of the country depends on making a series of "society wins, some regions win, some regions lose (win-win-lose)" decisions. Because the societal win is net, it could be made into a very attractive win-win-win situation. But everyone knows from the last half century of globalization that taking win-win-lose and turning it into win-win-win is a false promise that won't pan out.

(1): Taking notes in PowerPoint is sensible if you want an entire conference room to be able to read the notes, as they are being taken, from their seats, and without any fuss about font sizes and so on.

(2): Additionally, since the final "product" will be a PPT, having the notes already in a PPT file means you get to skip some copy/paste steps.

It's still a bit silly and a bit of a cargo cult in the online-first world, but I get how it happens.

> Not OneNote, not Word, not even freakin' Notepad.

Hey, I'll take PPT brain damage over the even worse brain damage that causes some orgs to do everything in a buggy ass Salesforce version of google docs... give me MBA brain-rot bullet points over MBA brain-rot fancy versions of five paragraph essays any god damn day...

One of our big questions is whether it makes sense to rent or to buy for training/finetuning/RLHF. The advantage of renting is obvious: I don't think that this phase of the project will last very long, and if it turns out that the idea is a success we'll have no problem securing funding for perma-improvement infra.

The possible advantage of buying is that we would then have the hardware available for inference hosting. We do expect some amount of demand in perpetuity. Having that ongoing cost as small as possible would allow us to continue serving the "clients" we KNOW would benefit a lot from our service with minimal recurring revenue.