Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
The idea that AI will be a boon for searching the mathematical literature is undermined somewhat by how it shits the bed there too.
Every time I hear a moderate AI argument (e.g. AI will be an aid for searching literature or writing code), it’s like, “Look, it’s impressive that the AI managed to do this. Sure, it took about three dozen prompts over five hours, made me waste another five hours because it generated some completely incorrect nonsense that I had to verify, produced an answer that was much lower quality than if I had just searched it up myself, and boiled two lakes in the process. You should acknowledge that there is something there, even if it did take a trillion dollars of hardware and power to grind the entire internet and all books and scientific papers into a viscous paste. Your objections are invalid because I’m sure things are gonna improve because Progress.”
I am doubly annoyed when I turn my back and they switch back to spouting nonsense about exponential curves and how AI is gonna be smarter than humans at literally everything.
Closely related is a thought I had after responding to yet another paper that says hallucinations can be fixed:
Wouldn’t f(x) = x^2 + 1 be a counterexample to “any entire (differentiable everywhere) function that is never zero must be constant”? Or are some terms defined differently in complex analysis than in the math I learned?
I’ve never heard of a function being called entire out of complex analysis. But still, it is zero at i.
A fact that AI gets wrong.
It’s worth noting that, unlike a real function, a complex function that is differentiable in a neighborhood is infinitely differentiable in that neighborhood. An informal intuition behind this: in the reals, for a limit to exist, the left and right limit must agree. In C, the limit from every direction must agree. Thus, a limit existing in C is “stronger” than it existing in R.
Edit: wikipedia pages on holomorphism and analyticity (did I spell this right) are good
flaviat explained why your counterexample is not correct. But also, the correct statement (Liouville’s theorem) is that a bounded entire function must be constant.
Or Picard’s little theorem, which says that if an entire function misses two points (e.g. is never 0 or 1), then that function must be constant.
Who is flaviat? I don’t see that handle on this lemmy or Greg Egan’s mastodon account, and Egan just re-tooted someone who gives x^2 + 1 as a counterexample.
Does this link work for you to see the comment? https://awful.systems/comment/9163259
now it works! I do not understand the two sentences “I’ve never heard of a function being called entire out of complex analysis. But still, it (what? - ed.) is zero at i.”
I believe those sentences can be paraphrased as, “The term entire function is only used in complex analysis. The function f(z) = z^2 + 1 is zero at z = i.”
the poster is referring to the function
f(z) = z^2 + 1deleted by creator