> You say that like it’s even remotely feasible at the frontier of mathematics and not a monumental group effort to turn even established proofs into such.
people on hn love making these kinds of declarative statements (the one you responded to, not yours itself) - "for X just do Y" as a kind of dunk on the implied author they're responding to (as if anyone asked them to begin with). they absolutely always grossly exaggerate/underestimate/misrepresent the relevance/value/efficacy of Y for X. usually these declarative statements briskly follow some other post on the frontpage. i work on GPU/AI/compilers and the number of times i'm compelled to say to people on here "do you have any idea how painful/pointless/unnecessary it is to use Y for X?" is embarrassing (for hn).
i really don't get even get it - no one can see your number of "likes". twitter i get - fb i get - etc but what are even the incentives for making shit up on here.
It feels good to be smarter than everyone else. You see your upvotes and that's good enough for an ego boost. Been there, done that.
I wish we were a bit more self-critical about this, but it's a tough problem when what brings the community together in the first place is a sense of superiority: prestigious schools, high salaries, impressive employers, supposedly refined tastes. We're at the top of the world, right?
Do selection dynamics require awareness of incentives? I would think that the incentives merely have to exist, not be known.
On HN, that might be as simple as display sort order -- highly engaging comments bubble up to the top, and being at the top, receive more attention in turn.
The highly fit extremes are -- I think -- always going to be hyper-specialized to exploit the environment. In a way, they tell you more about the environment than whatever their content ostensibly is.
isn't it sufficient of an explanation that one has occasionally wasted a ton of time trying to read an article only to discover after studying and interpreting half of a paper that one of the author's proof steps is wholly unjustified?
is it so hard to understand that after a few such events, you wish for authors to check their own work by formalizing it, saving countless hours for your readers, by selecting your paper WITH machine readable proof versus another author's paper without a machine readable proof?
To demonstrate with another example: "Gee, dying sucks. It's 2025, have you considered just living forever?"
To this, one might attempt to justify: "Isn't it sufficient that dying sucks a lot? Is it so hard to understand that having seen people die, I really don't want to do that? It really really sucks!", to which could be replied: "It doesn't matter that it sucks, because that doesn't make it any easier to avoid."
I don't think it matters, to be quite honest. Absolute tractability isn't relevant to what the analogy illustrates (that reality doesn't bend to whims). Consider:
- Locating water doesn't become more tractable because you are thirsty.
- Popping a balloon doesn't become more tractable because you like the sound.
- Readjusting my seat height doesn't become more tractable because it's uncomfortable.
The specific example I chose was for the purpose of being evocative, but is still precisely correct in providing an example of: presenting a wish for X as evidence of tractability of X is silly.
I object to any argument of the form: "Oh, but this wish is a medium wish and you're talking about a large wish. Totally different."
I hold that my position holds in the presence of small, medium, _or_ large wishes. For any kind of wish you'd like!
Unavoidable: expecting someone else to do the connection isn't a viable strategy in semi-adversarial conditions so it has to be bound into the local context, which costs clarity:
- Escaping death doesn't become more tractable because you don't want to die.
This is trivially 'willfully misunderstood', whereas my original framing is more difficult -- you'd need to ignore the parallel with the root level comment, the parallel with the conversation structure thus far, etc. Less clear, but more defensible. It's harder to plausibly say it is something it is not, and harder to plausibly take it to mean a position I don't hold (as I do basically think that requiring formalized proofs is a _practically_ impossible ask).
By your own reckoning, you understood it regardless. It did the job.
It does demonstrate my original original point though, which is that messages under optimization reflect environmental pressures in addition to their content.
If enough care about this that can and will do something about it (making formalization easier for the average author), that happens over time. Today there's a gap, and in the figurative tomorrow, said gap shrinks. Who knows what the future holds? I'm not discounting that the situation might change.
Its super easy to change imho: one could make a cryptocurrency, using PoT: Proof of Theorem, as opposed to just proof of stake or proof of work.
What do Bitcoin etc. actually prove in each block? that a nonce was bruteforced until some hash had so many leading zero's? Comparatively speaking, which blockchain would be more convincing as a store of value: one that doesn't substantially attract mathematicians and cryptographers versus one that does attract verifiably correct mathematicians and cryptographers?
Investors would select the formal verification chain as it would actually attract the attention of mathematicians, and mathematicians would be rewarded for the formalization of existing or novel proofs.
We don't need to wait for the magic constellation of the planets 20 years from now nor wait for LLM's etc to do all the heavy lifting (although they will quickly be used by mathematics "miners"), a mere alignment of incentives can do it.
I grossly underestimate the value of the time of highly educated people having to decode the arguments of another expert? Consider all the time saved if for each theorem proof pair, the proof was machine readable, you could let your computer verify the proclaimed proof as a precondition on studying it.
That would save a lot of people a lot of time, and its not random peoples time saved, its highly educated peoples time being saved. That would allow much more novel research to happen with the same amount of expert-years.
If population of planet A would use formal verification, and planet B refuses to, which planet do you predict will evolve faster
Currently, in 2025, it is not possible in most fields for a random expert to produce a machine checked proof. The work of everyone in the field coming together to create a machine checked proof is also more work for than for the whole field to learn an important result in the traditional way.
This is a fixable problem. People are working hard on building up a big library of checked proofs, to serve as building blocks. We're working on having LLMs read a paper, and fill out a template for that machine checked proof, to greatly reduce the work. In fields where the libraries are built up, this is invaluable.
But as a general vision of how people should be expected to work? This is more 2035, or maybe 2045, than 2025. That future is visible, but isn't here.
It's interesting that you place it 10 or 20 years from now, given that MetaMath's initial release was... 20 years ago!
So it's not really about the planets not being in the right positions yet.
The roman empire lasted for centuries. If they wanted to do rigorous science, they could have built cars, helicopters, ... But they didn't (in Rome, do as the Romans do).
This is not about the planets not being in the right position, but about Romans in Rome.
I could believe you, an internet stranger. And believe that this problem was effectively solved 20 years ago.
Or I could read Terry Tao's https://terrytao.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/ma... and believe his experience that creating a machine checkable version of an informal proof currently takes something like 20x the work. And the machine checkable version can't just reference the existing literature, because most of that isn't in machine checkable form either.
I'm going with the guy who is considered one of the greatest living mathematicians. There is an awful lot that goes into creating a machine checkable proof ecosystem, and the file format isn't the hard bit.
20x the work of what? the work of staying vague? there is no upper limit to the "work" savings, why not be 5 times vaguer, then formal verification can be claimed to be 100x more work.
If ultimate readership (over all future) were less than 20 per theorem, or whatever the vagueness factor would be, the current paradigm would be fine.
If ultimate readership (not citation count) were higher than 20 per theorem, its a net societal loss to have the readers guess what the actual proof is, its collectively less effort for the author to formalize the theorem than it would be to have the readers guess the actual proof. As mathematicians both read and author proofs, they would save themselves time, or would be able to move the frontier of mathematics faster. From a taxpayer perspective, we should precondition mathematics funding (not publication) on machine readable proofs, this doesn't mean every mathematician would have to do it, if some hypothetical person had crazy good intuitions, and the rate of results high enough this person could hire people to formalize it for them, to meet the precondition. As long as the results are successfully formalized, this team could continue producing mathematics.
Russia’s kleptocracy has impoverished the country so much that it now needs attrition in its male population to keep people from rising up against the current leadership. War is how you keep poor citizens from rebelling against you. When the war is over, historically the returning soldiers (especially in Russia) overturn the leadership. So there is never an incentive to stop a war. Especially a losing one.
The fact that it's a fragile kleptocracy basically reduce to 0 any possibility of a normal future. Puppet state at best, if someone is willing to take them. I expect they already planned what to do with the returning soldiers, not that they will like it or accept gracefully what's in store for them.
Those cover Russia's motivation, which is indeed strong. You can add that Putin wants the glorious Soviet Empire days back, and that without additional buffer zones Russia is very vulnerable to land invasion (in Summer). Russia has plenty of reasons to conquer much of Europe
But I don't see Russia's capability to do so. Their kleptocracy has impoverished the country and has repeatedly lead leadership (including Putin) to overestimate their own capabilities. Male population faces attrition from war and alcoholism. Leadership has a habit of dying in mysterious accidents or falling out of windows, reducing the amount of experienced leaders available and discouraging anyone with a brain from rising up too far. And they are barely able to advance in Ukraine.
There are legitimate concerns that Russia might attack other countries once the Ukraine war concludes. They might even make some initial territorial gains because they are in full war economy while Europe has only scaled up enough to support Ukraine, and has depleted ammunition stockpiles. But I don't see them getting very far
Yes, this was in fact an explanation of a joke. "In Soviet Russia, Rome is a poor city" requires both a currently-existing Soviet Russia, and Rome to be a part of it. Both of those are far-fetched. "Russia seems poised to invade Europe in the near future" is a bad explanation, since they are currently invading a country geographically in Europe.
Why wouldn't it happen? America's new direction is that Europe is the enemy, and massive resources will be poured into propelling the already popular right wing parties, which are Russian puppets, into power. They don't need boots on the ground to conquer the continent, they just need a cynical population that doesn't see the difference between good and bad, just like in the US.
there's 2 AMD KMD(kernel mode drivers) in linux: amdkfd and amdgpu .. the graphics applications use the amdgpu which is not supported by amdgdb .. amdgdb also has the limitation of requiring dwarf and and mesa/amd UMDs doesn't generate that ..
In a lot of places in the US, the lower of the shelf price and the scanner price is by law the most they can demand, at least for retail sales to consumers. Attempts to stop the customer from leaving after having paid the legally appropriate amount would be criminal acts by the store, no?
I did call it a theoretical option and not a practical option. Although they might be a little more sympathetic to someone who is white, in a business suit, has a photo of the shelf price on their phone, can confirm that a surveillance camera captured them paying the shelf price, and is lucky enough to either get a cop who knows about the local price accuracy law or can point the cop to a visible posted sign about the law in the store.
Not to mention that cops only have powers to arrest/issue tickets, not to adjudicate disputes. This isn't Judge Dredd where cops can mete out judgements as they see fit. That's the whole reason why we have courts and judges.
It's not about adjudicating disputes in an arbitrary sense, it's about enforcing consumer protection laws about prices displayed and then charged at retail. Many places legislate that the lower of shelf or scanner price be the maximum price charged.
>It's not about adjudicating disputes in an arbitrary sense, it's about enforcing consumer protection laws about prices displayed and then charged at retail.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how the legal system works, at least for common law ones. When cops "enforce" the law, like arresting someone or towing a car, they're only allowed to do it because there's some immediate need. In the former case, it's because having a criminal roaming around the streets is a danger to society, and in the latter case because the car is blocking traffic and needs to be removed. In both cases you still need a judge to ruled that the person actually shoplifted or parked illegally. None of these factors apply in a dispute over pricing, and it's not the police's job to strongarm the shopkeeper to accept the lower-marked price. Indeed, in the two examples, there are often cases where no actions are taken at all, for instance issuing a summons instead of arresting someone, or issuing a ticket instead of towing a car.
> When cops "enforce" the law, like arresting someone or towing a car, they're only allowed to do it because there's some immediate need.
Not at all true. They can enforce the law because there's a law being violated, not because there's an immediate need for the enforcement.
> In the former case, it's because having a criminal roaming around the streets is a danger to society, and in the latter case because the car is blocking traffic and needs to be removed.
There are so many cases where cops can arrest someone who isn't being a danger to society in any way, like someone who illegally crossed the border into the US (a criminal misdemeanor) and is otherwise fully law-abiding. Or for an example under state law, a cop arresting someone who is intentionally underpaying state income tax (criminal tax evasion) has no immediate need to take that person into custody before conviction but is 100% allowed to do so if probable cause exists, at least until the initial bail hearing.
> In both cases you still need a judge to ruled that the person actually shoplifted or parked illegally.
Not before a cop gets involved, no. The judge comes after the cop.
> None of these factors apply in a dispute over pricing, and it's not the police's job to strongarm the shopkeeper to accept the lower-marked price. Indeed, in the two examples, there are often cases where no actions are taken at all, for instance issuing a summons instead of arresting someone, or issuing a ticket instead of towing a car.
This has nothing to do with strongarming the shopkeeper to accept a lower-marked price in the sense of an ordinary pricing dispute between private parties, it's about enforcing state or local laws that regulate this in cases where a shop is violating applicable laws.
It is true that many of these laws only allow administrative fines in response to complaints or inspections, not anything as proactive as I was describing. The theoretical viability of my idea of simply leaving with the item after paying the legal maximum price at the cash register and involving the cops if stopped actually depends on state contract law, and likely specifically its judicial precedents: if that state would view the buyer's offer to buy at the shelf price as accepted on the terms of the store's invitation to treat since the counteroffer from the cash register's scanner was illegal, then title transfers to the buyer at the time of payment and an attempt to stop them from leaving would be a crime that the cops could in theory be called for. If the state would view the buyer's offer to buy be rejected even though the counteroffer was itself illegal, then yeah the only available enforcement is the administrative complaint / inspection / fine procedure and the buyer never gains title to the property. I expect this legal conclusion would vary from one state to another.
I think we all agree that this theoretical option is very rarely practical, and I'm not pretending otherwise.
>There are so many cases where cops can arrest someone who isn't being a danger to society in any way, like someone who illegally crossed the border into the US (a criminal misdemeanor)
Does only committing a "criminal misdemeanor" somehow exempt you from arrest?
>Or for an example under state law, a cop arresting someone who is intentionally underpaying state income tax (criminal tax evasion) has no immediate need to take that person into custody before conviction but is 100% allowed to do so if probable cause exists, at least until the initial bail hearing.
Right, because arresting people who refuses to show up to court is needed for the justice system to work at all. Otherwise people can just shirk their court dates and never face judgement. There's plenty of other reasons to arrest people besides the two examples I provided, they're not supposed to be exhaustive.
>This has nothing to do with strongarming the shopkeeper to accept a lower-marked price in the sense of an ordinary pricing dispute between private parties, it's about enforcing state or local laws that regulate this in cases where a shop is violating applicable laws.
This makes as much sense as calling in the cops to report health code violations.
> Does only committing a "criminal misdemeanor" somehow exempt you from arrest?
It does not - and that's exactly my point! Cops are allowed to arrest that criminal even though there's no immediate need to arrest them. So, immediate need is not a prerequisite to cops arresting someone.
> Right, because arresting people who refuses to show up to court is needed for the justice system to work at all. Otherwise people can just shirk their court dates and never face judgement. There's plenty of other reasons to arrest people besides the two examples I provided, they're not supposed to be exhaustive.
Yes, but cops are also free to arrest people who they are confident will show up to court, if there's probable cause that they've committed a crime. Again, the point of that example was that immediate need is not required before a cop can arrest someone.
> This makes as much sense as calling in the cops to report health code violations.
I agree that it would be best if there were a separate agency that could respond on the spot for this type of issue, other than the regular police department and other than a slow administrative complaint/inspection process which doesn't lead to enough of a fine for stores to change their processes.
But I was discussing the possibility of the sale completing according to the law and the store trying to stop the customer from leaving with their purchase because they didn't pay the illegal overcharge. That would indeed by a crime attempted or committed by the store, assuming the law considers the sale to have been completed, and that is indeed something within the scope of what cops can handle.
To use your health code analogy: sure, in general, administrative complaints are the way to handle health code violations. But what do you call it if a restaurant worker sees something which they know or reasonably should know is toxic to humans spill into a customer's order, and then they serve it to the customer anyway without a warning? Yes, that's a crime as well as a health code violation. There are plenty of cases where cops can legitimately be involved in things that can also be handled administratively. Whether or not cops are likely to respond in useful or timely ways is a completely separate question from what the law allows.
(Tangent: Cops also quite often handle administrative fines of even smaller magnitude than what we're discussing here, but usually when the aggrieved party is the government and the wrongdoer is a random individual, like issuing non-criminal $60-100 fines for not paying a public transit fare of a couple of dollars. It's rare for them to do it when the aggrieved party is a random individual and the wrongdoer is a business.)
Edit: I'm already down one - for people that don't read wikipedia here are the 4 dimensions of alienation of a worker as listed in the wiki:
1. From a worker's product
2. From a worker's productive activity
3. From a worker's Gattungswesen (species-being)
4. From other workers
Edit2: People [in America] will moan about their jobs, their bosses, their dwindling purchasing power, their loss of autonomy, etc etc etc but then come back as champions of capital. You see it all the time - "my job sucks but entrepreneurialism is what makes America great!!!!!!!". I've never seen a more rake->face take than this (and on such an enormous scale). It's absurd. It's delusional.
I don't specifically disagree with Marx's theory of alienation. However I disagree with communism. I think communism makes the problem worse, not better.
Identifying the bad stuff is not hard. Marx is far from unique in being able to do that. I find his class framing and assessment of the roles the various classes do in the status quo to be particularly good even if it ought to be deeply unflattering to the HN tax brackets.
Advising on where to go from there in an actionable way that produces good results is the hard part. Marx didn't do it. Those attempting implementation of his ideas have an exceptional record and not in a good way. And worse still, some of the worst aspects of those movements are the ones that stuck around to be peddled again and again under different brands.
I mean, there's a really simple solution between "Ayn Rand cinematic universe" and "abolishing private property" that gets you downvoted to oblivion: suggest forming a union. No communism required, just workers with bargaining power, like in other developed nations (Germany has very strong unions. Coincidentally, they also have a high quality of life and infrastructure that works). Instead, you get a bunch of people making six figures who sit around either whining or hand-wringing about losing their jobs, while continuing to support the economic system that is abusing them. After a certain point, you just have to throw your hands up and hope that people someday realize the power they have.
The bad idea from Marx that lead him astray into pseudo-science territory wasn't worker alienation. It was the labor theory of value (and the other stuff he created to make it looks like it works).
Worker alienation is perfectly visible on the real world. I don't think anybody disagrees it's common.
But software development is different. There has been many decades where software developers suffered very little alienation. It only changed with the universal adoption of "corporate agile".
At age 62, I'm wondering which mythical decade did not alienate software developers?
There was a brief ray of hope in the late 90s, with the startup gold-rush idea that we would all be millionaires soon. Then the I realized the founders had 4000x my equity those companies...
Developers used to be freer to choose their tools, organize their routines, decide the result of their work, acquire transferable knowledge, and had access to their tools without any link to any organization (though that one has been steadily improving instead of post-peak).
My 40 years of alienation was not about equity, I was pointing out that the optimistic "We are all going to be rich" vibe of the 90s was wishful thinking due to the massive inequality in the tech world.
Few teams other than green-field start-ups have flexibility regarding tools or technology. My first job was COBOL, 'nuff said about that. Even at start-ups the leads / architects choose most of the technology, and many of my ideas were shot down, such as using C++ in the late 90s, and using Scala in 2010.
People seem to think agile has increased alienation, when in fact the pre-agile world was also terrible. What matters is the quality of the team, not the methodology.
> But software development is different. There has been many decades where software developers suffered very little alienation. It only changed with the universal adoption of "corporate agile"
Lol are you really gonna go with "I'm a software developer, fuck all the restaurant workers, teachers, plumbers, janitors!"
This is why Marx's ideas failed in the West - toxic individualism - and flourished in the East.
I don't know how delusional you have to be to look at the conditions behind the Iron Curtain, where nations had to build walls to keep their citizens from leaving and a meaningful number of people were willing to risk death to get out, and say they were flourishing, but I'm glad I don't have what it takes to get there.
Name the Eastern nations plural that built these walls please. As far as I am aware, the G in GDPR stands for Germany, a country/nation/state which is (and always has been) firmly Western. People on here have such an infantile recollection of actual history.
Anyway, leaving aside debates of where the prime meridian of West vs East falls, it should've been manifestly obvious that in 2025 I was talking about China...
You mentioned one, which is North Korea, and I'm sure you're going to concoct some story to deflect the fact that China only began moving towards any semblance of prosperity after ditching Mao's fundamentally flawed economic policies, so have at it.
As Sartre said - it's pointless debating people like you because you're just amusing yourself and it's only my responsibility to use words responsibly.
You ran the usual leftist playbook of bobbing and weaving around the list of atrocities combined with a round or two of no true Scotsman. You skipped the attempts to change the subject with some whataboutisms for some reason, but that's fine.
You said people were flourishing in the East under the opposite of "toxic individualism", which would be the collectivism of the numerous failed attempts to implement socialism.
I pointed to the fact that those nations (past or present) do not allow their citizens to leave freely, including building physical barriers to prevent people from leaving, and you try to argue that I was only talking about the Berlin Wall and that East Germany, a vassal state of a USSR that generally isn't considered part of the traditional western world, is clearly part of the west. I'd say that's wrong, but it's far from the only example so it doesn't matter.
I did mention the iron curtain, but another primary example is North Korea, and you no true Scotsman that away and say you were obviously only talking about China.
The same China that doesn't allow citizens to leave freely, where millions died under idiotic leftist economic policies, and where the rise from abject poverty to a middle income nation is perfectly correlated with the rejection of the path to communism and the adoption of more liberal, individualistic economic policies, and is another great example of my point.
In short, see my comment above, get bent, and go troll elsewhere.
The sentiment is shared with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, Wilhelm von Ketteler, Louis Blanc and probably lots of other less known people. Marx's theory of alienation is far more developed and nuanced than the generic cog-in-the-machine critique that is explored by many other people of various political inclination, not only Marx.
> Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, Wilhelm von Ketteler, Louis Blanc
...
> generic cog-in-the-machine critique that is explored by many other people
literally only one of the names you mentioned were writing post industrial revolution - the rest had literally no notion of "cog in the machine"
you're trying so hard to disprove basically an established fact: Marx's critique of exploitation of labor post industrial revolution is certainly original and significant in his own work and those that followed.
Exactly. That's why you can't jump from "people don't feel like they own their labor" and "people bemoan their boss" to Marx's theory of alienation.
> literally only one of the names you mentioned were writing post industrial revolution - the rest had literally no notion of "cog in the machine"
But the very framing that this is an ill that is unique to industrial society is Marxist. Slavery, corveé labor, taxes, poor laborers, marginalisation existed for thousands years in one form or another.
> you're trying so hard to disprove basically an established fact: Marx's critique of exploitation of labor post industrial revolution is certainly original and significant in his own work and those that followed.
I don't dispute that Marx's critique of exploitation of labor post industrial revolution is original or significant. I dispute your claim that people who share similar sentiment have to agree with Marx's theory of alienation.
> positions are encoded as strings over the alphabet on 2 bits
This is the most pedantic way of saying "binary 2-tuples" I've ever seen. Also for quadtrees this is inferior to base 4 because you can assume clockwise (or counter) ordering.
I don't think that's what they meant. It's the case you can use literal strings of bits to encode a (2^n)-tree node, so you use actual bitstring comparisons and operations to manipulate them. Rightshift gives you the parent and things like that.
I don't think this is something the article cares about, though.
Uh, base 4 is exactly what I meant. I guess I wasn't very clear that I mean positions are encoded as bitstrings, with one pair of bits for each level (and triples of bits for octrees). Is that clear enough for you?
people on hn love making these kinds of declarative statements (the one you responded to, not yours itself) - "for X just do Y" as a kind of dunk on the implied author they're responding to (as if anyone asked them to begin with). they absolutely always grossly exaggerate/underestimate/misrepresent the relevance/value/efficacy of Y for X. usually these declarative statements briskly follow some other post on the frontpage. i work on GPU/AI/compilers and the number of times i'm compelled to say to people on here "do you have any idea how painful/pointless/unnecessary it is to use Y for X?" is embarrassing (for hn).
i really don't get even get it - no one can see your number of "likes". twitter i get - fb i get - etc but what are even the incentives for making shit up on here.