As far as I see it, I use the term "online fathers" in a rather cynical manner. In real life, I interact with parents who are struggling, I know some who are suffering from depression (I'm lucky to belong to a sports club where some dads unload). This is real life.

But go online and you'd think you're some sort of freak for not being completely transformed and having unconditional daily joy from being a dad.

By the way. The last week has been a good week. I've had a lot of work stress, but my children seem to have somehow sensed it and they're being extra kind to me, giving me lots of hugs and just wanting to be with me. It feels WONDERFUL. Like you, I love them more than I would have ever known, would literally die for them. But it is also ok to admit it is very hard, and there is a big loss of self and other aspects.

Keep going!

I don't believe it is that black and white. Yes, automation eliminates some jobs, but overall moves everyone (on average) further up the productivity line, which improves lives, again, on average.

That is why we live like kings now compared to people of the past.

But circling back to the point, if AI does the same thing, eliminates expensive manual coding and other similar work, that is essentially the same thing we've been doing to other people for decades.

I also wasn't prepared for a bit of a curve ball and I have experienced a loss of self that hasn't recovered or been compensated for yet.

I often wish I felt like a lot of other online fathers, but I take comfort in knowing there are a lot of others out there like me who struggle with parenthood. I hope I figure it all out in time!

In my opinion, verbosity is often used to swamp an argument, so brute forcing correctness. Just so I can swipe the ~~insult~~ critique more broadly, you often find the same on philosophy forums. You won't get engagement if you try to distil their arguments down to more concise points that are easier to debate or refute. You need to use the in-group signalling of lengthy posts, complicated language and appeal to authority.

(Just so you're aware, I'm aware, this is going to really annoy some people, nevertheless, I believe it is true).

What actual bugs do people have with it, and why do we think it is worse than a human coded tool?

I'd love for the government to print a bunch of money eroding the value of my mortgage debt. I feel sorry for everyone who don't already own houses, because it'll push them even further out of their reach.

No it most certainly is not, despite what MMT subscribers claim.

If I had inside information, and didn't want to make it obvious, I'd just take the opposite side of any bet for candidates I knew wouldn't win.

I can't imagine anyone but someone extremely gifted at first parse understanding learning mathematics from wikipedia. No effort is made to make it understandable for the average reader.

But aren't you literally just proving what I'm saying? The original argument was that everyone should have to post through peer reviewed journals, I said that is probably gatekeeping too far, and your response above just confirms my suspicions.

> Second of all, it’s extremely aggravating to read all these software people criticizing mathematicians, who almost universally have low salaries and who chose to go into this profession because they care about contributing to human knowledge.

I probably agree with you, except I have never and am not criticising mathematicians. I am only saying that there are quite a lot of reports around that the academic world is fierce and that sometimes there are high barriers to getting something recognised.

No idea if it is true or not, but my personal opinion is that it isn't going to matter much in the future. If it exists, then people will work around any gatekeeping.

Please read that again, I am not on the inside here, so anything I say is just based on reading stuff from aspiring academics and articles in that mode. To my amateur eyes, there seems to be a problem in the academic world, of some sort, but how big it is, or isn't, I don't know.

Is that ok?

So, assume I, a complete amateur, no PhD, no connections or academic record to speak of (I have an MSc only, from the 90s, in a third world country) thinks I've discovered something, how do I go about "publishing"?

To me, I could easily see value where I self publish somewhere, where other similar non-connected people can see, crowd source the verification (basically peer review) and if it turns out to be useful, it'll be used.

Maybe it would be easy for me to get it formally published, but I doubt it.

  1. The write terrible unmaintainable code
  2. They can't just improve any code retrospectively
  3. You're going to be maintaining it

But, I genuinely mean it when I say that we are not far away from the point where verifications (functional, non-functional), as long as they're comprehensive enough, will be all that is required, and I don't expect to be reading the nitty gritty details of PRs in a few years time.

It is only a mess if it doesn't work correctly in a functional and non-functional sense. All other coding conventions are invented to make it easier for humans to maintain code. Agents don't care, they will happily chug away pressing the virtual keys endlessly, changing whatever the previous agent left.

My main worry is that we get to a point where they have something much, much smarter than anything public and access is gated by extraordinarily high costs.

That probably can't happen though right? Inference is surprisingly cheap compared to the training.

> - releasing papers using the normal process to allow peer review

I'm not an academic but I've heard enough stories about how this can very much act as gatekeeping that I don't think it is a good request.

1. Other humans also review my code and I know they won't approve until they're ok with it anyway.

2. I don't trust that the verifications we have at the moment are good enough to catch the errors LLMs still make.

So trust me, I'm not a "vibe coder"

But I can see the writing on the wall. We're not really maximising the potential of these things by doing it this way. In my particular industry, we're in an arms race for clients who can easily move to a competitor. So we need to be continually improving. How I predict this unfolding is that we'll need to get much better at verification of correctness (functional and non-functional) and once that is satisfied, humans will stop manually writing and reviewing code, otherwise you'll just lose to your competitors. At least in my industry, maybe not all.