Lecturer at the University of Manchester. Computational linguistics, NLP, digital humanities, Celtic studies. He.
Joined July 2015
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I like how the air-pollution section of the Met Office forecast is always oblivious of whatever else is happening at the moment.
We came to the point when exactly the same things are being said about music and mathematics.
ft.com/content/2c21c250-d186…
There is a meme abt answering your own SO/Reddit question incorrectly to provoke ppl into giving the real answer. I’ve suddenly realised that this is my one and only strategy for making ppl explain things to me: ask a seed question, rephrase the answer, rile them up, repeat.
Over the years, I bought three Bialetti products (a mid-size moka pot, a larger one, and a cafetiere/French press). Two out of three were of very low quality, so my global market is now lost to them.
I have always been somewhat puzzled by how/why people cite my work, but now that hallucinated references have started coming in, I can finally put these thoughts to rest.
Dmitry Nikolaev retweeted
I don't think this is true: it will just select for a very particular kind of mathematician: the G. H. Hardy.
If you read C. P. Snow's foreword to the Apology, it becomes clear that Hardy's most substantive mathematical contributions came about from taking the highly creative and technically impressive (but otherwise utterly inexplicable) accomplishments of Littlewood and Ramanujan, and figuring out how to explain, interpret, and communicate them in a manner that was simultaneously rigorous, precise, and beautiful.
It's ironic given his derogatory comments about mathematical exposition in the Apology, but Hardy's real skill lay in the beauty and clarity of his prose and his explanation. He was always the one who wrote up the final manuscript for publication, but he was almost never the one who provided the underlying results or ideas. (Again, Snow's foreword makes clear that the Apology is, amongst other things, a work of immense self-hatred.)
In a world where Littlewoods and Ramanujans are commodified, be a Hardy.
Dmitry Nikolaev retweeted
10 remarks on AI and math that can be true all at once:
1. The recent progress is stunning and exciting.
2. The Quasi-Riemann Hypothesis is arguably Fields-medal level.
3. Mathematics is being transformed and there is no way back.
4. OpenAI doesn't give a fuck about the future of mathematics.
5. Half-baked unreadable preprints claiming major results can effectively stall mathematical progress.
6. Some mathematicians are responding with naive, overly defensive comments.
7. The social-media wankers framing this as "OpenAI tramples gatekeeping" have no experience of mathematical research.
8. The product of mathematics is clarity and understanding. Not theorems, by themselves.
9. Mathematics is a critical infrastructure of human cognition. The human need for understanding isn't obsolete and it can't be offloaded to machines.
10. We haven't "solved" mathematics and we won't get there before the Sun burns out.
We don't know much about the prehistorical state of mankind, but probably there was much less economical coercion, bc there was no economy. Then there was all of recorded history, which mostly consisted of various types of economic coercion, and now we're back to light coercion.
A thread of exuberant in-situ questions. To be augmented. Additions welcome. Exhibit 1: Young Sherlock.
It turns out that if one closes the macOS Gemini app it immediately restarts itself. So the only way to really close it is to uninstall it. So long, mate.
Dmitry Nikolaev retweeted
ugh, this came out just when i needed it
The optimality of the packing for 11 squares has been formalized in lean thanks to Astra and Claude! Huge thanks to @ojoshe, @kleddamag, @wand_125, @guzhou0806, and @ctjlewis for aiding in the process.
Image credit: jlevy.github.io/squares/case…
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In my experience, a random Substack post is somehow worse than a random LinkedIn post. Not to throw shade on people who publish wonderful stuff on Substack! It’s just that some kind of long-form-AI-slop-before-AI-slop has seemingly become normalised there.
Firefox's vertical tabs cannot be enabled on a window by window basis. Move a single tab to a new window to see two things side by side and you lose a large chunk of the screen space. Disable vertical tabs and lose the ability to choose tabs easily in the first window. Amazing.
