log(info) #7

Kusama in Photos — Glass An icon's impact on photography. glass.photo

why I can't stop thinking about Papua New Guinea and what I think everyone should know about it When you talk about Papua New Guinea, people may say, oh, is that the place where: notnottalmud.substack.com

Heavyweight - Jonathan Goldstein Podcast - Pushkin www.pushkin.fm

Jonathan Goldstein is back with new episodes.

ARD Mediathek has the last season (season five) of Babylon Berlin, so if you’re in the country (or know what a VPN is) and speak the language:

Babylon Berlin - Staffel 1 der Serie - jetzt streamen! Die fünfte und letzte Staffel der Erfolgsserie in der ARD Mediathek. Die Drehbücher beruhen auf dem Roman www.ardmediathek.de

So denke ich heute an Dich, und morgen. Und ich vermisse Dich bereits so sehr wie nichts anderes in meinem Leben. Dein Lachen, Deine Augen, Dein Strahlen. Selbst die Stadt ist mir grau geworden ohne Dich. Die Stadt Berlin, die Du mir gezeigt hast. In der wir eine Zeit lang glücklich waren. Die Stadt, die es nicht mehr gibt.

• Unser Berlin

Guest post by Grant Sanderson:

If math is more than proof, we need to better celebrate the rest of it [This is a guest post by Grant Sanderson. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] A sentiment echoing throughout the mathematics communit… terrytao.wordpress.com

Obviously I agree 🙂. I’m not a mathematician; I mostly dabble in undergraduate math. But I can tell which math book authors have put in the work to explain a subject so well that, by some miracle, I feel I understand it. I can hold those mathematical objects in my head, manipulate them, and recombine them according to their properties. So I’m clearly and selfishly biased, even though personally, I cannot complain at all. At my undergraduate level there are plenty of outstanding books available.

But as an outsider and observer, this whole debate strikes me as a little weird (leaving aside the material and financial aspects of this profession, a big caveat, I know): why would it bother you that a machine has solved a problem? Wouldn’t you still want to do it yourself? It is a human endeavour, by humans for humans. The fact that a machine has solved it should just tell you that it is indeed possible to do and not a dead end. Empirical math tools have existed forever; you can play with Mathematica and get a certain degree of confidence that a given direction is not a dead end. A machine proof just gives you certainty. You still have to do it to understand it in your head (you cannot outsource going to the gym; it is your body, your muscles). Mountain climbers still climb famous peaks even when they’re not the first. Sometimes they try alternative routes, or go without supplemental oxygen, to make it more challenging. They always find an interesting twist to still do it. You can solve a math problem without supplemental oxygen (no LLMs), for example. If you’re truly interested in climbing this peak (wanting to understand this topic), it should be enough motivation, no? Taking the funicular to the peak is not the same; it doesn’t give you the same satisfaction. And that’s precisely why Grant’s argument resonates: if automated provers can deliver the answers, the uniquely human work—exposition, conceptual intuition, and asking the right questions—becomes the real point of the journey.

I’m probably naive and also it’s none of my business. I shouldn’t judge other people’s motivation and profession. The financial and reputational aspects of it are probably overwhelming, which makes this article so important.

We’re ending today with McSweeney’s.

Why We Must Return to the Office to Use AI in Person “I didn’t think a full, six-day-per-week, fourteen-hour-per-day, in-office schedule was necessary to discharge my duties clicking the ‘generate’ button, foll... www.mcsweeneys.net