Greg Langmead

i.e. it’s an impressive mere-stochastic-parrot. It’s impressive in its use cases, but the ratio of people attributing human properties to it is nearing 100%, so it’s going to remain good to be annoying about the parrot thing.

Luckily the bailey and the motte are both correct.

“The Silmarillion” is a silmaril.*

*a very heavy lift by an inspired and focused mind

I’d like to see more care taken to report interactions phenomenologically: “when I read the output I considered the thoughts it generated in my mind to be apt.” Have wonder at yourself, dear human, and if you enjoy your cool robot sidekick, take pride in YOURSELF.

Imagine the machines all just dumping their outputs into a directory that the whole planet shares. Imagine no human ever looks at it. What took place? NOTHING.

The machine emits text. It is the reader who promotes that text into semantics. The reader then sometimes humiliates themself and attributes the semantics to the machine. Or the machine emits a formal proof. We need a human to tell whether we give a shit about the theorem.

AI boosterism (since the ‘40s) is obviously taking advantage of our ignorance about our consciousness and intelligence, using that as a loophole to argue those properties onto the machine. If they don’t yet mean anything, then they don’t for the machine either.

AI Crushed the Math Olympiad—Or Did It? AI models supposedly did well on International Math Olympiad problems, but how they got their answers reminds us why we still need people doing math

@sciam.bsky.social gave me the opportunity to share some personal thoughts about the recently reported AI results from the #imo2025:

www.scientificamerican.com/article/math...

Until Bilbo rescued the Dwarves from the spiders, they considered him a DEI hire.

We have the word ‘token’ so we can be clear that they are drained of semantics.

NSF invests over $74 million in 6 mathematical sciences research institutes The U.S. National Science Foundation is investing over $74 million in six research institutes focused on the mathematical sciences and their broad applications in all fields of science, technology and...

NSF announces funding for ICARM: the Institute for Computer-Aided Reasoning in Mathematics, based in Carnegie-Mellon . Amazing! Carnegie-Mellon press release here: www.cmu.edu/news/stories...

www.nsf.gov/news/nsf-inv...

Truly ugly story. What I’m especially resonating with is the moral gap between the people who knew how to make the stuff — so, 100% of the value and the purpose — and the “business” people who surround that and make all the life and death mistakes. What do we need those people for exactly?

A corollary of functional organization: only leaders who have shipped, with their bare hands, BBX models, may demand BBX-based features. For any value of BBX.

Read this article about being organized functionally instead of by product: https://hbr.org/2020/11/how-apple-is-organized-for-innovation

My future employer (perhaps self) will have this philosophy. My ex does not, extremely ironically.

I left my employer after 14 years. I have a backlog of activities, but will return to the workforce “soon.” I want to give back. I do have two concrete deadlines: a talk in October, and a doctor encutment in the new year.

The manosphere is to men as ideology is to ideas, as bravado is to bravery, as confidence is to cocksureness. It reads the wrong books, learns the wrong lessons. It's Wormtongue in a dungeon dreaming he's a dragon on the wing. It believes the world owes it the glutting of all its desires, now.

I’d like to indicate my disgust and non alignment with this post that tries to speak for my generation (which notably includes cone-headed nazis). https://www.linkedin.com/posts/christinawodtke_the-old-timers-who-built-the-early-web-are-activity-7356335847614402560-8nKx

We also ran into Chuck who is a follower of the channel. He also complained about having to spend money on games from our recommendations. Love the beard Chuck!

Frege's Values | Long Head Gottlob Frege had a healthier and more humanistic view of the separation between the doing of math and the formalization of math than today's AI advocates do.

My essay about Frege that pivoted to Szegedy, from 2021: greg.langmead.info/writing/frege/

AI's makers, AI's boosters, AI's fans, are able to get there if and only if they feel in their soul that performance on test sets is 100% of human experience and achievement. Olympiad questions = math.

Dave White on X: "the openai IMO news hit me pretty heavy this weekend i'm still in the acute phase of the impact, i think i consider myself a professional mathematician (a characterization some actual professional mathematicians might take issue with, but my party my rules) and i don't think i" / X the openai IMO news hit me pretty heavy this weekend i'm still in the acute phase of the impact, i think i consider myself a professional mathematician (a characterization some actual professional mathematicians might take issue with, but my party my rules) and i don't think i

Cri de coeur: x.com/_dave__white...

I feel the pain. I was horrified to hear in 2021 of Christian Szegedy, who said "Mathematical reasoning is not about mathematics per se, it is about reasoning in general." They love AI and hate us, and themselves.

siliconreckoner.substack.com/p/intelligen...

“‘I cannot be certain,’ he said, ‘that this is the crack ye came up through. But through a crack no bigger than that ye certainly came.’”

It’s a metaphor for Hell, for life, and for certain phases of life.

3/3

“Using its thin end as a pointer, he made me see, after I had looked very closely, a crack in the soil so small that I could not have identified it without this aid.”

2/3

For reasons, this passage from “The Great Divorce” by C. S. Lewis captures my mood:

"My Teacher gave a curious smile. ‘Look,’ he said, and with the word he went down on his hands and knees. I did the same (how it hurt my knees!) and presently saw that he had plucked a blade of grass.”

1/3

If I could turn time back, \
If I could get it back, \
I’d take the words that hurt you back, \
And you’d come back.

I just finished the Audible version. “Fun” is the right word. Good good good. And it ended differently than any of my shifting guesses.

Wish I’d seen this sooner.

I can’t think of anyone less able to value this insight and give it priority than myself at this point in history.

Billionaires Convince Themselves AI Is Close to Making New Scientific Discoveries

Billionaires are convinced AI is on the verge of making new scientific discoveries because they don't understand how AI chatbots work.

I mean this mostly as a model of accountability. We are all accountable for things that could have been known to us. I’m aware that not everyone in fact knows them, but I am very fatigued of being in the weeds of sussing who believes what. I’m looking for a simple framework.