Zürich, Switzerland
Joined March 2007
Daniel Gasienica retweeted
This is an incredible moment in this history of mathematics, computer science, physics & science with some of the hardest problems in human history being solved by AI over a period of weeks. Depending on your perspective, it's either a crisis, a triumph, or both. I don't think anyone knows for sure. We're all trying to make sense of it. I oscillate between fear/dread and optimism/excitement on a daily basis. The rate of progress is insane, including today's announcement from OpenAI of more problems solved. To help make sense of all of it, here's my conversation with three mathematicians about this moment. Each of them is an expert in the field of each of the biggest problems solved: Navier-Stokes, quasi-Riemann hypothesis, the unique games conjecture and complexity theory more generally. Ankur Moitra is a mathematician and theoretical computer scientist at MIT, visiting the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Steven Brunton (@eigensteve) is a mathematician and fluid dynamics expert at UW. Alex Kontorovich (@AlexKontorovich) is a mathematician at Rutgers specializing in number theory.
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Daniel Gasienica retweeted
WHAT IS IT CALLED WHEN YOU CANNOT MARKET THE PRODUCT BUT YOU KEEP ADDING FEATURES?
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Daniel Gasienica retweeted
You can either fear AI or use it as a tool to build things that you thought were impossible for you to even attempt. As long as AI still answers to our wishes, we should aim to be more ambitious with our projects.
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This! Ask for nice animations, drag & drop, full desktop like behavior from web apps (keyboard shortcuts, paste files, etc.) that would have taken you days before. No more!
My general advice for using AI for any purpose is to ask yourself: "how do I make what I am doing even more ambitious?" You do this until you either hit a wall and then you know the shape of the frontier (useful!) or you find out that the AI can do more than you think (common!)
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It would if it weren’t for compile times 😅
maybe haskell will have its time in the sun
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The Opus 5.5 effect
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Just as Dropbox brought `rsync` online, @ZoomHub is bringing `vips dzsave` online 💥
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Daniel Gasienica retweeted
Don't forget: you're no longer working with humans
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Daniel Gasienica retweeted
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Daniel Gasienica retweeted
So basically, today PHP got two critical bugs that let anyone run code on your server without even logging in, which is bad, and then the details leaked before the patch was even out, which is worse, and it works on WordPress and MediaWiki and Magento and Joomla and Laravel, and Censys says like 1.5 million servers are running a version with no fix, so the NSA was like "take your system offline," and the FBI was like "take your system offline," and CISA and the UK and CERT-EU were all like "take your system offline," and then the Prime Minister of Japan, the actual Prime Minister, posted at 5:55 in the morning telling 48.8 million people to take their system offline, so everyone took their system offline, like the Dutch cybersecurity agency took its own website offline, and the Dutch parliament went offline, and the Port of Rotterdam went offline, and Finland and France and Denmark started pulling government sites, and Wikipedia went down, and Archive.org went down, and Asana and GOG and Something Awful went down, and the University of Vienna's webmail went down for some reason, and that's just PHP. Because GitLab also dropped a CVSS 10.0, which is the highest score they give out, for a bug that's been there since 2014, so that's every self-hosted GitLab for twelve years, and then LiteLLM 1.107.0 got hijacked and shipped a credential stealer and a remote access trojan in every single wheel and the Docker images, including latest, and you didn't even have to import it, just installing it was enough, and it's the second time this year, and then Railway paused every deployment on the entire platform because someone got into the environment variables, so now everyone has to rotate every secret they've ever stored there, and TiDB Cloud said someone was walking around inside with stolen credentials for basically a month and an extortion group says they took 10.6 terabytes, and Zeabur got breached for the second time in two months and is just shutting down, like the whole company, and Node.js patched remote code execution and a TLS bypass, and CISA says Plex is being actively exploited, and someone took over 300 Tor exit relays to steal SSH passwords, and SafePay ransomware has hit over 600 critical infrastructure orgs, and India's biggest bank filed a data loss incident, and Japan has been in an official state of emergency in cyberspace since October 9, which honestly explains the 5:55 AM post. Oh, and eMudhra, a certificate authority that's issued over 60 million certificates, whose entire job is proving websites are who they say they are, was supposed to be using private keys that are random numbers over a hundred digits long, and one of them was 4. Just 4. And the others were like 66 and 237. Anyway, it's Wednesday.
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Daniel Gasienica retweeted
Human-written code has a signature, and it's a stale README nobody planned to fix.
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Daniel Gasienica retweeted
Have to give the EU regulators credit where it’s due for making all Apple products use USB-C
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Daniel Gasienica retweeted
Opus 5.5 is such a good writer that I really enjoy reading its reports now. Such a huge improvement over Fable.
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Daniel Gasienica retweeted
Replying to @theo
> None of it will matter but I'm having the time of my life right now Lowkey the healthiest mindset to take on in these uncertain times
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Second or third time this week I read someone using DEFCON 5 as scary, even though that’s ‘business as usual.’ Scary is DEFCON 1 👀
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I highly recommend @ryanlpeterman podcast with Scott Aaronson 👏
Ex-OpenAI researcher Scott Aaronson admits AI one-shotted open problems from his 25-year-old papers, while accelerating the atrophy of his own mathematical skills: “This summer I fed in some of the open problems from my papers 25 years ago, and just boom, boom, boom. It solved them in a one-shot way." "These are problems that probably I could have solved if I had spent enough time, more like 100 hours at the least. But these days I don’t really get contiguous hours to think." "AI accelerates the atrophying of my own skills. If it’s something you could work out in some hours, but GPT can just work it out for you right now, that is very tempting to do, and I often do it." @UTAustin
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Daniel Gasienica retweeted
Funny how frontier models still estimate a task to take 2 weeks when it literally proceeds to do it in 2 hours
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