In the Republic of Ireland, an artificially wealthy, highly educated, treaty-enmeshed constitutional democracy, the following statement was enshrined:

"4. Marriage may be contracted in accordance with law by two persons without distinction as to their sex."

It doesn't say Natural Persons. My Limited Company has personality but no distinguishable sex.

Thankfully there's the "in accordance with law" phrase so we can sleep ok.

We humans are sleep-walking into ancient nightmares made real through our own curiosity.

What a time to be alive.

Thankfully, there's Mathematics. I made a blackboard today.

Edit: em dashes available on request

I'm Irish. We're way more legal than you.

Listen to anyone from China.

Some notions:

- finding counter-examples is one of the most exploratory uses of calculation

- there is no evidence, not even in the hands of the inimitable Terence Tao, that Approximate Intelligence (AI) is insightful rather than inferential*

- people who enjoy Mathematics, even amateurs, do so for the beauty

- AI is only good in the hands of those who can provide corrective context

- AI unchecked is a remarkably inefficient noise engine

- Mathematics will provide joy to the curious 'til the heat death of the Universe

- AI is contributing to the heat death of planet Earth

- anthropomorphism, of which I am otherwise not a fan, may yet be a saving grace as without proprioception we may not morph

- we may need to redefine the Turing Tarpit of Perlis

If any of this nonsense really troubles you return again to thermodynamics and revel in the joy of being the local universe's pinnacle of meaty evolution. And go outside and smell the flowers.

* Caveats abound

And yet the phrase "be kind" appears nowhere on that page

The rest is noise in an expanding universe

is much more fun and, obviously, vastly more powerful.

Yes! All the endings are happy and the unfinished stories are utterly fascinating. And there are already so many stories with happy endings!

Mathematics is our best bildungsroman

Thank you everyone. I come here to learn and I do. The standard of discourse is heightening.

You're amazing

I can see this becoming transformative and superseding Excel, which is a bold claim to make. But this is compliant (with Excel), performant, extensible, free, and in-browser. This could easily become almost an emacs-level editor.

Think of the interfaces that could be built to this in this?

I'll be sharing this with every student I know.

And the name is a winner.

Apropos of nothing, just saying, and this thread is a great example.

I always want to read more books after a good dose of hacker news.

Apropos of nothing, just saying, and this thread is a great example.

I always want to read more books after a good dose of hacker news.

Don't eat rotten fruit. Go read a fuckdamn math text instead, with a nice cup of tea or coffee and a view of the local vegetation in the background. Then take a walk and count your fingers and toes.

Tongue-no-longer-in-cheek:

I reckon the C core of Emacs is some of the most battle-hardened code out there. Verification, a-la SEL4, is probably irrelevant but still nice. Guile is modern and performant but Elisp is still its own little joy. Literate programming is always nice until it gets in the way. Straight is good enough for me now. Macros are always cool and a leaderboard would be fun, but patch algebra is really nice, see jujutsu nowadays. And beard length is gendered and so only partially admissable. Infinity categories are way out there and always good for a reference.