You're - deliberately? - confusing scope. There's the objective and the subjective. Humans not being objectively special doesn't mean one human can't be considered special by another. And if my wife doesn't get that distinction, well... I'd probably question my choice in partner.
Nobody claims we are objectively special, whatever would that even mean. Person said they feel awful which is clearly subjective and you proceeded to bash him for that. You are on hackernews, we are aware we are atoms.
Person made a claim about intelligence becoming a product (arguably it has been on the market for a long time; see knowledge workers) "that you can [now] quantify and buy with electricity". That points to the rhetoric often pushed that humans are [objectively] special, because intelligence. Or at least were. And it's the reality wakeup call that's driving that feeling of awfulness/despair/outrage/whatever else, as has been posted about here and elsewhere multiple times.
This is a problem of wealth distribution and it's fair to feel in a such way if your edge as an employee is being taken away. Being or feeling special is irrelevant.
You're shifting. Nothing was said here about job security. As stated, this is someone who feels awful because intelligence is now a thing that's available to machines. A similar - albeit lighter - tone to this[0], where in the article the author describes being in some "spiritual crisis", and that "The creation (or even the pursuit) of novel mathematics is one way that humans have historically accessed the ineffable and encountered the divine and mystical". Have a look at some of the comments, if you never saw it before.
If someone believes deeply that they can fly if they jump off a cliff and flap their arms, is it putting them down to tell them it's fiction and things will end badly if they try?
I hardly see any mortal danger here in a way you do. If you really want to help try making your comments sound less aggressive. Now it seems as if you are jumping out of a bush and beating people up with a club because you think they are headed for the cliff. You must have already noticed what are you trying to say is rarely taken at a face value because of that.
Even if there's no immediate mortal danger, there's still potential danger. Like said person may live on the plains with no intention of going anywhere with a cliff. But they eventually may. Or they could infect others with their belief, like how cults tend to work.
I really don't want anyone to take anything I say at face value. What I want is for people to generally be more logical and think things through on their own, particularly things in which there's at least potential danger. And sad to say I've instead been seeing a lot of kool aid drinking, even around here.
Is the author suggesting that understanding has no value? because this is what I could gather from reading this.
Edit: Another depressing fact is that he generously paid to LLM megacorps while piggy backing on human help for free and in the end calls the proof his or LLM's.
Is a YouTuber speedrunning a game by exploiting an integer overflow bug suggesting that gaming has no value? No, they're just having fun with the medium.
To answer directly: I think understanding is the primary value. And I have reasons to hope that my "work" here can ultimately contribute to a better understanding: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49761718. However, there are also other reasons to do things than producing value. You can do things for fun, to show they're possible, to ask meta questions about the field.
Following your analogy it is not a very fair game if it allows winning for those having access to latest exploits. Playing against skiddies who bought the hack kind of ruins it.
I read your comment and my edit was inspired by it. Your article only mentions nameless mathematicians, without really giving credit.
>Over the years, Berarducci, Pitteloud, Pommersheim and Shahriari, and L'Innocente and Mantova developed increasingly strong results about exactly that. This proof builds on all of that work and claims to finish the refinement conjecture.
Regarding who I've talked to over email, I wasn't sure I want to "out" them explicitly in the article due to the article's likely polarizing nature, but, since he already engaged in this thread, I can confirm that this person was Prof. Mantova (who is a co-author of the primary paper that the result I published rests upon, and who I did explicitly credit in the text of the article and in the references).
I have not had an extended conversation with anyone else.
>Following your analogy it is not a very fair game if it allows winning for those having access to latest exploits. Playing against skiddies who bought the hack kind of ruins it.
You misunderstood the point of my analogy. The point was not that it is a game in which you "win" or "lose" and thus I have "won" or something like that.
The point was that "obtaining a true proof without understanding it" doesn't imply "understanding has no value" any more than "completing a game in an unintended way" implies "playing has no value". You stated a false implication. That false implication is what I am highlighting with the analogy. Understanding has a societal value; doing something weird for the fun of it has value to the person doing it; sometimes people do things with no value at all, and that's okay too. Each individual act is not a statement about what kinds of things have value.
Personally, I do not see mathematics as a game of "win" and "lose". If the broad value is primarily in understanding (which I think is correct), then my "contribution" doesn't make much dent in that. However, it might, as Prof. Mantova mentions, help show the way to an actually useful proof that improves collective understanding. That would please me beyond merely having had fun. In any case, I've enjoyed the experience of it in part due to the absurdity of it. Maybe it requires a certain kind of sense of humor.
Regarding the models, as far as I know, all of the models I have used are currently broadly available. Yes, they require subscriptions so access is not democratized yet. There's nothing I can do about that. I think it's unreasonable to require that someone playing around with LLM's must use the inferior free models.
I had not read the proof or any part of it because it is LLM generated. Most mortals won't for the same reason. It looked to me as if Prof. Mantova stepped from the crowd to get some credit which was not given. But maybe he did not care for it in the first place so you are right, it is not for me to judge.
And about the "value" I think we picked different meanings for this word:
For me for something to have value means it can be used for something else. In this sense you cannot pick what has value. There are people with deeper understanding of the subject than yours yet they were unable to use it to come up with a proof. You had no understanding but you had succeeded. Therefore understanding in this particular case had no value. You did not have to state it, it flows as a natural conclusion.
You can also say that being good at chess or catching all the pokemon has a value for you or for some society. This is true but it has to do with self-actualization rather than dealing with circumstances.
I also do not see how you can say you did not win anything. This proof will be a great addition to your portfolio which in turn will serve as a leverage while searching for your next job, even if it never comes up explicitly. It is a dream for some folks to be talked about on hacker-news. Good for you that you can treat is as if it was nothing, and I do not mean it as an irony.
I am very new to this but applying human intuition this still feels like cheating. Knowing all the question that will be on the exam and working on understanding them even if you are never given answers will obviously give you and edge.
what you describe would be cheating. My approach is the opposite. What I did was "You are born during the exam, given access to a training set and the questions then learn from scratch during the exam"
I find it highly ironic that his is the second article on the main page right after "avoid building technologies that could be used by a police state".
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