Notices by Matt McIrvin (mattmcirvin@mathstodon.xyz), page 2

@skinnylatte the dangers I worry about almost all boil down to the gap between what actually existing "AI" can do, and what people think it can do. People ranging from children to venture capitalists. LLMs seem to have a powerful ability to generate misplaced trust.

@skinnylatte My wife had an interesting observation along those lines, which is that managers and investors seem to see AI as a tool to give cheap junior employees the productive power of more senior ones; but really junior workers are the ones least equipped with the judgment to see whether the AI is leading them down a wrong path. What they need is something the AI doesn't have.

@mekkaokereke @craignicol A few decades from now the whole world is going to run out of countries making lots of babies.

But we're not there yet. Won't be for a while. And anyone who is marginally less racist now is going to benefit when the global shortage comes. Is there any country in the world that will learn? Dunno. I was hoping the US actually had a better shot than most of Europe but I guess not.

@Sylvhem Similar reasons, too. In French it's because they used to pronounce those letters 1000 years ago, and in English it's probably because the word was imported 1000 or 500 years ago from another language with completely different spelling rules, or because the spelling was vaguely established at a time when all the vowels were pronounced differently.

@Robert_Brandt @JoshuaACNewman @cstross @nyrath And yet, New Hampshire is still absolutely full of libertarians, living in more conventional societies and complaining that the government is oppressing them.

@futurebird @JorgeStolfi @dymaxion @whknott I think that all the way back to at least Leibniz there was this idea that you might be able to automate the general search for truth by reducing it to turn-the-crank derivations. It's the same impulse that leads people to treat ChatGPT as an oracle.

@dymaxion @futurebird @whknott Where I wish people understood calculus is in *political* discussions, particularly involving economics. Not any of the techniques, just the basic idea of a function, its derivative and its integral being different things.

And maybe the idea that if you have a function of multiple variables, its rate of change is going to depend on which specific things you're holding constant.

But that last one is a HARD idea. It doesn't even really show up in AP Calculus, it's a later class. It trips people up when they're studying college-level thermodynamics.

@hannu_ikonen @mekkaokereke I learned it from conservative anti-feminists who were trying to get me to be anti-feminist, anti-abortion etc.

Of course that's bullshit and it didn't work. But getting out in front and acknowledging things is one way to forestall that kind of argument. It doesn't work when they talk about how the Democrats used to be the Southern white supremacist party either, because everybody knows that.

@ZachWeinersmith Do you think the punch-card property actually contributes to the comic effect of the stories? Thinking of Henri Bergson's theory of comedy emerging from "the mechanical layered on the living".

(The simplicity of it might help make the stories comforting to read.)

@futurebird They don't like any of that stuff but they'll put up with it if it means they don't have to go on a voyage of discovery and complete a self-taught computer science course to get a simple thing done.

A perennial problem in open source etc is that computer people enjoy the voyage of discovery, and many kind of think that attitude is the entrance fee for being fit to use a computer. But not everyone is like them.

@TerryHancock @dalias @futurebird A pattern I notice a lot with open-source projects is that the one-time installation and setup is the hardest part, and unfortunately that's the first impression people get. I think it's because the developers will tend to work on the problems that annoy *them*, and the things you only have to go through once are way down that list.

@inthehands I think there is one exception--for a lot of people in creative fields who may have some kind of borderline ADHD condition, getting past the blank page or the digital equivalent is a real struggle. And if there's something that can push them past that step from nothing to something, they'll find it useful.

There's a powerful temptation to just use version zero, though, especially if you're not the creator but the person paying the creator.

I've been reminiscing a lot about calculators lately. I started learning math just when electronic scientific calculators were replacing slide rules as tools for engineers.

But scientific calculators are themselves almost extinct outside of the classroom, because computers, smartphones and tablets running powerful CAS or numerical software can do all the kinds of computing you really need... unless you're not allowed to use them because of classroom or exam restrictions.

So the market has contracted to education, and the high-end calculators sold today, though they're extremely powerful, are very much catering to students rather than to engineers or scientists. There's a lot of power siloed into user-friendly apps, but less ability to link those together into powerful custom-built systems of your own design.

And inevitably, because I'm getting old, I have a lot of nostalgia for old ones... particularly for HP's RPL line, starting in the late 1980s with the 28C (which was woefully underpowered, but the potential was there) and continuing through the very capable 28S and 48/49/50 series.

The ones I actually had were the 28S and the 48SX--the latter got stolen after just a few years; it was too damned expensive to leave lying around. I still have the 28S somewhere though the batteries for it can be hard to find. But I've been getting back into messing with them through emulation. Here's Calculator Culture's review of the 48SX that goes through its innovations, strengths and weaknesses.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yujtxo5efbE

HP's scientific calculators were quirky in that most of them until quite recently solely or primarily used postfix or Reverse Polish Notation (RPN), a stack-based system in which every operator followed its operands: to add 2 + 3, instead of

2 + 3 =,

you'd press

2 [ENTER] 3 +.

These calculators had a stack, that is, a list of numbers represented as a vertical tower that they would generally enter and exit from the "bottom" (in HP's terminology, at least). In the addition above, the ENTER key would signal that you were finished typing a number and put the 2 on the stack. The + would implicitly do an ENTER if necessary, then take the bottom two items off the stack and add them.

For more complex calculations, there was no messing around with order of operations or nested parentheses--the stack was everything. So, say, (4+5) * 3 - 2 could be entered as

4 5 + 3 * 2 -

(where it's understood you type ENTER after every number not followed by an operator.)

The joke was that an advantage to using an HP was that nobody ever asked to borrow your calculator more than once. But for complex calculations off the cuff, people who used them soon learned to prefer RPN to algebraic entry, and I still like it.

I think one of the things that fundamentally bothers me when conspiracy theorists get into scientific topics is the basic laziness of it.

There are a lot of things about the universe that are hard to understand or that nobody understands, but to a remarkable extent it's basically an open book. It takes a lot of effort though. It works in complicated and subtle ways that the human brain isn't trivially suited to comprehend. Trying to understand all that is a huge adventure.

These people imagine that all of the big questions of existence have easy peasy answers but that they only seem hard because someone is deliberately hiding the answers from them, like some annoying nerd who won't let them copy their homework. We got the answers all handed to us on a silver platter but they're locked up in a government warehouse somewhere next to the Ark of the Covenant.

@futurebird he hasn't adjusted to the newfangled innovations of the Harry Truman administration.

@noracodes I'm a programmer and I think I could give a 10,000 foot view of what happened when you did this in 1996, but there's so much extra magic in there now since they got rid of an independent search bar that I might second-guess myself.

@IPEdmonton @mekkaokereke @mickeleh

We do, in some places. I have never had to stand in a significant line when voting in person in my small Massachusetts city. The places where it is chronic seem to be minority urban neighborhoods in places with hostile state governments. It's hard not to think that it is intentional vote suppression.

@futurebird The whole creepy incel/PUA subculture is absolutely obsessed with "objective" laws of human desirability, masculinity, femininity, etc. that are based on physical measurements and sound straight out of some 19th-century text on physiognomy. There seem to be a lot of young men who are attracted to this stuff as an explanation for why they have trouble fitting into the world.

What it all reminds me of is a guy on my first-year college dormitory floor who was preoccupied with making these numerical rankings of how cool or extroverted or "alpha" all of the boys on the floor were. I could see him becoming a menace on the Internet but he didn't quite have it at the time.

@inthehands I recall the Bing one faceplanted on not recognizing that a movie's release date was in the past, even though it could tell you today's correct date if you asked. And then it doubled down with seemingly angry language when challenged on the point.