if you do read french, proust’s “in search of lost time” (vol 1) is a lot more accessible and enjoyable than my high school teachers made it sound years and years ago. it even contains a depiction of what a learned engineer should be like.
maybe we’re inching towards rule by law vs rule of law by making things so abstruse that you need a multiyear education to understand what is allowed, when and where.
perhaps it then becomes a matter of policy to periodically reformulate the law so it is compact and understandable and illustrated with examples for the general public. i wonder if llms will be able to do this reliably ever.
what a charming time it was when that generation discovered a bunch of stuff that now undergirds daily life:
“
Dijkstra always believed it a scientist’s duty to maintain a lively correspondence with his scientific colleagues. To a greater extent than most of us, he put that conviction into practice. For over four decades, he mailed copies of his consecutively numbered technical notes, trip reports, insightful observations, and pungent commentaries, known collectively as “EWDs”, to several dozen recipients in academia and industry. Thanks to the ubiquity of the photocopier and the wide interest in Dijkstra’s writings, the informal circulation of many of the EWDs eventually reached into the thousands.
“
random sample of a trip note in which he is in ited to consult on a project that he thinks ought to be killed:
Nonetheless, Prof. Baurer was not a loser. According to some sources he contributed to the invention of the notion of "stack" and "software engineering" among other things.
> ... cannot be expected from the average programmer
Ha! He had to deal with the political B.S. of well-spoken self-important people who spend excessively long and write excessively long code/proofs getting accolades over those that just get things done in the best way! I feel for him!
Good read. Completely off topic: He traveled by sleeper train and mentioned that he slept reasonably well and very well on the return trip. In the beginning of my career I made nearly the opposite trip to Brussels by sleeper to a completely useless lobbying/networking event with little tangible content. Often sleep in sleepers is not very good. But on the return trip I only wake up when the train had already stopped at my destination and had to get off very hastily.
Not only CS was more fun without AI slop, but traveling, too ;)
i really appreciated the paper and as someone who has spent many years deciphering what the author calls 17th century-style proofs am completely aligned with the objective and the method. i personally find myself doing a version of what the author proposes (in private notes) to make sure i understand proofs i read in books or papers.
even so it would have been timely, useful, and relevant to include a comparison to proofs in lean by comparison to TLA+ even though it is not Lamport’s personal project.
it seems to me if these things were real and repeatable there would be published traces that show the exact interactions that led to a specific output and the cost in time and money to get there.
it doesn’t say what a lie group is but it gets you down the road if understanding representations and what tou can do with them. dramatically easier than fulton and Harris for self-study.
well the people who did the Higgs boson theory worked and re-worked for years all the prior work about elementary particles and arguably did a bunch of re-mixing of all the previous “there might be a new elementary particle here!” work until they hit on something that convinced enough peers that it could be validated in a real-world experiment.
by which i mean to say that it doesn’t seem completely implausible that an llm could generate the first tentative papers in that general direction. perhaps one could go back and compute the likelihood of the first papers on the boson given only the corpus to date before it as researchers seem to be trying to do with the special relativity paper which is viewed as a big break with physics beforehand.
