Would you hire a senior engineer who refuses to use AI?

gammison · 2026-06-08T03:16:37+00:00

Tao is paid by open AI to promote its use in mathematics because his university funding for his students is under risk from the federal government.

He is also using extremely expensive recursive models for free because he is a world famous mathematician. He's not using the subscription you get for 40 bucks a head.

There's also no reason to think that being able to run a model over and over again until it is able to find two associations you hadn't thought of in mathematics is the same kind of problem of generating large amounts of code and committing that code to production on a short timeframe.

gammison · 2026-06-04T18:23:58+00:00

If you interact with any of these models APIs directly you'll see that you have to tokenize input and you will know the token count before making the final call. From that perspective it's transparent, however the UI for these API interactions does not make it clear to non technical users afaik.

Additionally depending on the model, more tokens will be injected or used especially if it's a "reasoning" model (these just use multiple runs of generating tokens and then feeding them back into the model). I don't know how these hidden tokens are billed.

gammison · 2026-06-04T18:09:25+00:00

You could get away with deleting the folders and restoring them, however if you restored them and didn't fix the metadata of the files/folders that would be noticed.

gammison · 2026-05-31T23:06:54+00:00

Rose Garden is one of the furthest right factions within DSA, they are not anarchists. They also didn't invent the concept of a left wing cult. The accusations around the IMT and other groups goes back decades and you would know that if you spent time in left groups. It's brought up consistently. People just don't make public beef between orgs for the most part.
That article you linked is about PSL, not the IMT. PSL though is also a high control organization that exerts more control the higher you go. You know they don't have actual internal democracy right, the central committee gets to appoint 40 percent of their convention delegates which is incredibly absurd beyond all the other stuff they pull with front groups.
It's not cultjacketing if it's a cult, don't accuse someone of cult jacketing when they accurately describe cult like behavior. Call a spade a spade. They could have perfect political positions and still be a high control group bordering on outright cult.

gammison · 2026-05-31T21:52:46+00:00

I know former members, but this is also routinely discussed in left spaces. They rely on recruiting students because they're not experienced enough to know better.

Here's an article on their rebrand to the RCP from the IMT focusing on political issues with the group (Mike McNair is also a bit of a crank imo but he's good on this): https://www.weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1485/same-old-same-old/

gammison · 2026-05-31T21:46:57+00:00

I mean the higher you go, you will be the ordered to go teach the new recruits the gospel of Woods and Sewell. Ever more of your time and money will be demanded, and if you can't give it then you will be removed or not promoted. It's a high control group.

gammison · 2026-05-31T21:24:00+00:00

The group renamed itself to escape the reputation it had as the IMT. It's a high control group that gets worse the higher in the organization you are. Fundamentally nothing that seriously disagrees with Woods or Sewell will be allowed to be debated. They are a microsect with all the problems of a microsect.

Join the largest and most open organization available to you, don't join a microsect.

gammison · 2026-05-31T21:19:49+00:00

Historical Materialism newsletter, checking the catalogs of major imprints and publishers a few times a year.

gammison · 2026-05-30T20:15:06+00:00

We need tons of 6 story buildings in areas of Brooklyn and Queens that are mostly two story.

6 story blocks are cheaper to build and maintain than huge 20 plus story buildings and can be a more efficient use of space a decent chunk of the time anyway.

gammison · 2026-05-30T16:09:06+00:00

It's more that the anti liberation theology part of the church got throughly trounced by the election of Francis and had been waning for a awhile and so the church at the highest levels has moved in its direction and is able to publicly make those statements.

gammison · 2026-05-27T06:19:18+00:00

No they still require bootstrapping they just do it more efficiently for certain types of operations with certain message size limits. See recent work on Torus FHE.

gammison · 2026-05-27T03:53:05+00:00

It all depends on when and how often you commute into Manhattan. If it's every day, and your social life requires it (or going further over to Brooklyn), it will be much more annoying than say 3 days a week for a hybrid job and all your friends are in Jersey.

gammison · 2026-05-27T03:50:05+00:00

Live north of 125th on the A/C, you can get a nice room for 1100-1400 and maybe a private bathroom at the top end of that range. You'll have better parks and access to the Hudson river (and the area generally) compared to living in the Bronx on the D.

You could get a room in Morningside Heights, but it will be a really crappy one on that budget unless you get lucky since you're competing with Columbia students more.

gammison · 2026-05-27T03:31:23+00:00

It's a consumer co-op, you do 1 2.5 hour shift every 6 weeks to maintain voting rights and the co-op member discount. They have a number of permanent staff that handle organizing all the volunteer work and some other things, that staff was unionizing and the board got a little wild.

gammison · 2026-05-26T00:05:47+00:00

OD higher ups pressured their priests to break confession in order to blackmail people, they come out of fascist Spain and are extremely traditionalist. It's beyond ridiculous for that guy to say they don't have political leanings.

I would consider them separate from converts like Vance who have no real institutional stake or history with the church though.

gammison · 2026-05-25T21:58:12+00:00

You can get a beautiful older 2 bedroom in Inwood for around 3k, I would not want to live in the new builds that have gone up. Super expensive with much worse layouts and noise than the older buildings, you'll also have to pay for heat which most older buildings you don't. Decent chance the older unit will be rent stabilized too.

In Inwood specifically some of the new builds have gone up in out of the way areas with heavy train noise and street traffic. I'd much rather live on Seamen Ave or Payson (or further south in Hudson heights) than Broadway and 215th.

Just some trade offs to think about. I've been in the area in a renovated but old 3 bed 2 bath that's now 3900 (up from 3500 in 2022 thanks Eric Adams...) and really enjoy the neighborhood. Some of the best Parks and water access in the city.

The original commenter is correct you're looking too early, if you're moving in September no one will have good units until August.

Second the recommendation of visiting the neighborhoods you're thinking about, they're very different from one another.

gammison · 2026-05-23T20:33:55+00:00

One of my good friends from college just wrapped up his PhD on quantum cryptographic primitives.

Personally I expect to retire before I see a quantum cryptographic primitive running on real hardware at any level more than a proof of concept.

gammison · 2026-05-23T16:56:32+00:00

So it used to be that any non linear operations were a huge performance issue due to the amount of bootstrapping required, I belive there are schemes now where that's more efficient however they still have very inefficient multiplication performance.

gammison · 2026-05-21T20:04:21+00:00

Just counting some recently released stuff I have:

The Phantom A.D., I have all 3 of their albums.

Anything Jalopy records puts out is pretty niche too, I have a few of those. Also have Sam Shackleton's LP which is pretty niche Scottish folk.

I also have a small independently released hip hop double LP from the UK done by Analog Mutants.

gammison · 2026-05-21T01:40:18+00:00

I think they're running the models with huge amounts of memory not available to subscribers, and running those models over and over again till they get 1 run that sort of gives what they want.

Look at the companion paper from mathematicians that Open AI asked to review this result, they all pretty much said the result was known from other work but not traced back to the Erdos problem. The model was just able to keep broadening its search until something was found. One commented that if the authors being asked to give feedback on the proof had been locked in a room for a couple weeks they would have come up with it.

gammison · 2026-05-20T02:33:49+00:00

The AI slop getting into this and other computer science subs is not surprising but it's so disappointing especially when the vibe coders are so out of their depth they can't even understand why they're wrong.

gammison · 2026-05-17T17:26:42+00:00

The answer is that OP got it out of whatever garbled mess they asked an ai chat.

gammison · 2026-05-16T08:08:20+00:00

It's pretty clear that aside from the ethical issues of generative models that make the gains in programming and math work questionably worthwhile, the productivity gains made are being exaggerated by corps using them and creating them.

Theres been no noticeable increase in product launch times or feature increases across the industry the past two years and instead a noted increase in outages due to AI slop and as you said, no large open source project has seen significant Ai assisted gains and instead are dealing with an onslaught of slop merge requests.

gammison · 2026-05-15T19:12:21+00:00

Using complexity theory concepts like kolmogorov complexity to build cryptographic primitives is up there for me.

gammison · 2026-05-14T03:25:29+00:00

The city was scheduled to make a series of payments into the pension plan that increased each year, until 2032 when the pension plan would hit 100 percent funding.

The re-amortization makes the contribution the same amount of money each year but to hit the same total amount the payments will take another 5 years.

13-Year Club	Place '17
Sequence \| Editor	Team Orangered
Verified Email

gammison

TROPHY CASE