Also, in principle everything a GPU does could be done on pencil and paper. You could distribute the entire forward pass to the whole of humanity and have them write it out. Even if it took millions of years, the point is it’s computationally reducible to hand calculation. Is that entire process now “conscious” as well? The only difference would be the clock rate.

Also whole heartedly agree with the Opus 5 output being incomprehensible. It’s written in a way that I’d call spaghetti-tech-English. You can unravel it but it’s painful. Fables explanations is effortless and smooth. Opus 5 is user hostile.

I believe Astra is the next model beyond Sol? They used it for https://openai.com/index/ten-advances-in-mathematics/

1. If you can already program, the worst thing you can do is think of mathematics as learning a programming language. It is not, and you will waste your time being frustrated with things like syntax and notation. You get “used to” mathematics by doing it, and it’s something on its own. Just go with it. It’s ok to be confused.

2. Do the exercises, and stop asking for “solution manuals”, the point is to get you thinking and the struggle is most important part, not whether you got it “right”. Again, I think this is a programmer centric way of looking at things: “how do I know it’s right if I can’t compile it”.

Maybe that’s why programmers like the foundations of mathematics. Like if somehow they could just go to the bottom of things, the assembler/machine code of sorts, the whole enterprise would make sense. Counterintuitively, the really great mathematicians of yore, did mathematics before it was anywhere close to formalized.

I just feel like after years in industry and how I’m steering something like Fable now that all of this is irrelevant and the writing is crystal clear on the wall: Writing software by hand is in its death throes. There is no future for it besides some very niche areas. When last have you actually looked at what your high level language is actually being compiled and optimised to? We’re moving up the abstraction ladder with software.

To your point: People care about the actual output, the interface, whether it does what they want it to do, but in no way do they care about the internals and how it’s built. That’s an implementation detail. And that’s where all the fun of the craft actually sits.

This is not unique to software engineering though, go take a look at the maths and mathematics subreddits. There are guys doing PhDs in maths who are too afraid to run their dissertation topics through the latest models because it might just solve the problem they’ve spent the last few years working on in a few hours. They absolutely hate that problems are being blown away where people have spent years trying to figure out. It feels like the same psychological pain software engineers are going through.

I built something similar to this by cloning the Diogenes repo and getting Claude to re-implement it in Python (it’s a very old battle tested Perl code base, so a great reference implementation) and using the TLG database for the Greek and Latin texts. You can take this even further by integrating it with the Barrington Atlas (there are scans on Anna’s Archive) for looking up ancient place names, so you have dictionary + map lookups. If you’ve read any of the Landmark series books you’d known what I mean.

Also better if you can generate chapter by chapter critical apparatus on difficult grammar and Anki decks. It’s an annoying part of learning these languages to have to stop and look up words, I like spending a few days learning vocab before reading and it makes it so much more pleasant than having to stop and look things up the whole time.

Obviously all this stuff is copyright so it can never be shared, but I don’t care it’s for my own personal use. I also bought like 6 hours worth of Ionnis Strattakis’ recordings where he reads a bunch of Ancient Greek in reconstructed Attic pronunciation and fine-tuned a text to speech model (styletts2) with full accent markings and breathings. It’s extremely natural sounding. My long term goal is to have a personal tutor that I can speak Attic to and basically have lessons with everyday (speech to text -> llm-> text to speech). All the pieces are there to actually do this.

LLMs have been an absolute game changer for me who is a hobby classicist but also knows how to build software. They are so amazingly good at Attic Greek and Latin, it’s like having the best teachers in the word at your fingertips for some really niche topics that it wouldn’t be possible with otherwise. Also extremely good at managing, building, cleaning up, deduplicating Anki decks.