Notices by Jon Sterling (jonmsterling@mathstodon.xyz)

@Andrev @feld @pretentious7 I mean, it is a better technology for literally anyone who wants to cook well using traditional cooking techniques. I am not sure what to say beyond this…. Regarding a gas bottle, I want to cook with gas in my kitchen, not in my garden. And if I still lived in a flat, the latter wouldn't be an option anyway. Gas infrastructure is very important and good. Especially when electricity costs such an absurd amount these days.

@feld @pretentious7 Indeed... (But, I would not mind of those horrible showerheads were outlawed — and bring back incandescent lights please too!)

@feld @pretentious7 Yes... Well, I do see awareness of this in the western media to some extent, but maybe it is still not well known.

I think it is part of the cycle of capitalism-imperialism. Lenin made it very clear how this works in his 1917 pamphlet (https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/).

China is in an interesting position because they are simultaneously a "backward country" in Lenin's terms with cheap labour (and so they have swallowed up the productive capacity of more advanced imperialist countries), but they are developing quickly and are thus preparing for the inevitable rising cost of labour and declining rate of profit domestically by building up an empire.

@pretentious7 @feld Why? Why does the bourgeoisie do anything? Wealth, power, the metastasis of their wicked system...

Holds for the Chinese bourgeoisie just as much as it holds for ours.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/18/opinion/china-xi-jinping-trade-manufacturing-tariffs.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

I am obviously the last person to be a fan of Xi Jinping, but this article is hilarious… They are mad that (checks notes) China has spent its money building critical distribution and manufacturing infrastructure instead of just letting it rot like the “advanced” US and UK economies do?

Yeah, it turns out that building bridges and roads and factories is a great idea, both for resilience at home and abroad. Who would have thought? Certainly not me, who rides over approximately 400 potholes every day on my way to work…

@ploum @benoitb @albertcardona This is not true: you don't have to switch from GPL to AGPL to make your software available over a network.

@ploum @albertcardona I don't think we should have contributor license agreements, which seem to exist only to ensure that the (often corporate) steward of the project can unilaterally change to a non-free license in the future. Having copyright diffused among all the contributors (many of whom would be unreachable in the future) makes this completely impossible, and this is a feature rather than a bug.

@julesh This is a good question, and I'm not sure but something makes me doubt it (or, if there is such a framework, it is probably restrictive enough that all the logics it generates are overly similar).

I do think it is important to think about what the purpose of cut elimination is today — it is a technique that simplifies (1) establishing coherence theorems and (2) deciding word problems.

For both of these, I do think that the 'deep intuition' you mentioned is still needed, but 'the worst proofs ever conceived' might be avoidable if you are open to achieving these goals using tools other than cut elimination.

The thing about cut elimination is that you can have two presentations of the same theory, with one satisfying cut elimination and the other not. But every reasonable property of the theory (including presentability by cut-free normal forms!) is going to be invariant, so the calculus "from which you eliminate cut" becomes pretty unimportant, and what becomes important is specifically the cut-free presentation itself.

From this point of view, cut elimination recedes from view and we focus on the question of presenting by normal forms (which may be substantiated in ways that are more modular than cut elimination).

I see so many adults and professionals talking about how they are using LLMs to deepen their understanding of things, but I think this ultimately dives headlong into the “Gell-Mann amnesia” effect — these people think they are learning, but it only feels that way because there are ignorant enough about the topic they're interested in to not detect that they are being fed utter bullshit.

How shall we answer this? I think it speaks most urgently for people who actually know things, those with "intellectual power", to democratise our knowledge, throw aside the totems that make our fields inaccessible and obscure, and open the gates to the multitudes who wish to learn.

At first it seems like it would be easy to compete with LLMs (because they say only bullshit), but to actually compete with LLMs we need to produce educational materials that actually explain things properly. Any 'proof by intimidation' will immediately send our student to the LLM. The moment you rely on something that you haven't explained, same deal. So it may be that this era has a silver lining: we must finally teach mathematics properly.

The era of ChatGPT is kind of horrifying for me as an instructor of mathematics... Not because I am worried students will use it to cheat (I don't care! All the worse for them!), but rather because many students may try to use it to *learn*.

For example, imagine that I give a proof in lecture and it is just a bit too breezy for a student (or, similarly, they find such a proof in a textbook). They don't understand it, so they ask ChatGPT to reproduce it for them, and they ask followup questions to the LLM as they go.

I experimented with this today, on a basic result in elementary number theory, and the results were disastrous... ChatGPT sent me on five different wild goose-chases with subtle and plausible-sounding intermediate claims that were just false. Every time I responded with "Hmm, but I don't think it is true that [XXX]", the LLM responded with something like "You are right to point out this error, thank you. It is indeed not true that [XXX], but nonetheless the overall proof strategy remains valid, because we can [...further gish-gallop containing subtle and plausible-sounding claims that happen to be false]."

I know enough to be able to pinpoint these false claims relatively quickly, but my students will probably not. They'll instead see them as valid steps that they can perform in their own proofs.

@julesh Yeah, this is not easy... With the major funding models, I really have to ask myself whether it is worth getting the money at all.

If I spend all the time that is needed to get enough money to hire one (or god forbid, two) postdocs for a couple years, what I get in return is a lot of management overhead and realistically speaking not a ton of "added power" in my research (because the mission of a postdoc is rightly Get A Job After This, not Make a Long Term Impact). I don't think this problem can be solved in a model where only the tiniest minority of researchers (faculty like us) have any long-term job stability.

Perhaps it is different in more applied areas or lab sciences, but I have for this reason felt that the reason to hire postdocs is mainly to support the continued health of the field by giving good young people a job and a chance to catch their breath before going on the faculty market. If I wanted my own research to go as rapidly as possible, I would hire nobody...

WE MUST FUND INTELLECTUAL INFRASTRUCTURE FOR THE LONG TERM
(a call to action)

http://www.jonmsterling.com/jms-013G.xml

“I am calling for the endowment and funding of independent research institutions on a permanent or decades-long basis, whose mission is not bound to a specific tool but rather to a set of scientific principles and society-level goals to be achieved on a generational timescale. … It is time for us to build and sustain the scaffolding for the next three centuries of Science.”