It also doesn’t fit the narrative but the idea of self-reference in art didn’t start with Escher either. For example the Arnolfini wedding portrait by van Eyck[2]

[1] Bb A C B in modern notation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BACH_motif

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnolfini_Portrait The artist can be seen in a reflection in the central mirror that he has ostentatiously signed his name above. It’s an incredible painting and worth a trip to the National Gallery to see if you’re ever in London.

The only mathematical figure I feel you could reasonably compare to Bach would be Euler. I would read that book if someone wrote it.

Euclid isn’t surprising. School children used to learn plane geometry from Euclid until the 1950s or so. I learned geometry at school using a syllabus from Euclid and we learned the modern form of Euclid’s postulates etc but we didn’t study Euclid itself.

[1] Taylor series were developed in the modern form by James Gregory who was trying to reverse engineer how Newton had come up with his series expansions. I say rediscovered above because they were first written down by Madhava of Sangamagrama who gave Taylor series expansions for the trigonometric functions and natural logarithms/exponential function in the 14th century.

This is also why I said “whose only job”. In a good org, the security team doesn’t only say no to devsecops requests, they also do trainings to skill up other teams, keep the network secure, proactively seek out and understand external threats, work with external vendors etc etc …

If you had an AI company and want it to be ethical you have to find a way to make ethics everyone’s responsibility, and have the consequences of poor ethics bite the people who make those bad decisions. If you just outsource it to the ethics group what happens is

1)everyone else thinks they don’t need to worry about ethics

2)the ethics group need to justify their existence so introduce a bunch of guidelines that everyone initially thinks are reasonable but over time people think are increasingly out of touch

3) The ethics group start to “make difficult calls” and say no to things. Initially everyone supports this and feels like the system is working as it should but over time everyone starts to just see them as an obstacle to work around

4)everyone else starts to try to work around what the ethics group says

5)The ethics group grows powerless and disconnected. The people who work around them “get things done” so get promoted etc whereas they only visibly put roadblocks in peoples’ way, so they get sidelined.

6)Eventually they get disbanded with some corporate announcement thanking them for their hard work, thought leadership etc. All that has been achieved is a lot of wasted time and bad blood.

[1] … taken out by my employer etc.

For one thing, Fermat wasn’t actually a “professional” mathematician. He was a lawyer and judge and was known for having remarkable intuition but not really troubling himself too much with details of proofs etc. For example Descartes famously called him a “deficient mathematician”[1] in an angry exchange of letters over a technique that Fermat had discovered to geometrically construct a tangent to a particularly problematic curve called Descartes’ Folia using a technique we would now recognise as being the definition of the derivative as the limit of the difference quotient.

[1] Explained entertainingly here https://youtu.be/xKfEmbWBgvM?is=qLnPvPXGDqgJCDC3

In fact the Langlands programme began with Langlands writing his ideas in a letter which he wrote to Andre Weil because of his association with the TSW conjecture.

I enjoyed this explanation https://youtu.be/4dyytPboqvE?is=VFFjLHSk7vgosN54 by Ed Frenkel.

1) I had a ton of paper notes, looking back, curating, finding old things etc is really hard.

2) An electronic device gives you the ability to cut and paste, move things around on the page, resize stuff, drop in screenshots (so I often screenshot a page of something I’m reading, drop it into a note and annotate it or make my notes about it all around the original) and (best of all) infinite erase with no skank left behind on the page and no surrounding myself with tiny little bits of eraser to clean up.

3) I have all my notes with me on my device even ones I made years ago vs in my study I have box folders and notebooks full of notes filling cabinet after cabinet, I couldn’t possibly carry all that around with me.

1 and 3 are nice, 2 is the killer app. Once I made the switch I find it painfully limiting to go back to having to make notes on paper.

[1] My system in case people are interested is Notability and a paperlike screen protector. It is fantastic. All notes back up automatically as pdfs in box (which I then copy to my linux laptop) and I can search them using AI just fine even though I’m writing equations and my handwriting is god-awful. The notes are all pdf so if notability gets bought out and becomes terrible I just drop it like a hot potato and move on to something else no loss of notes. I tried a colleagues RM2 and the screen didn’t feel as nice to write on as my paperlike screen protector. I also found the latency distracting - I couldn’t write as fast as I would like to.

https://www.bls.gov/ces/

[1] https://cli.github.com/

The next gen will have an alarm with snooze button.

As I understand it, the way to achieve what you’re going for would be to calorie-control both groups and then set a percentage of calories from protein and specify for the vegans what the breakdown needed to be between grains and pulses. That would be a right royal pita to manage so might be more overhead that it’s worth idk. On the other hand it may make the study more definitive.

I’m always skeptical of studies like this because the group that shifts to a vegan diet might just be shifting to a healthier diet in general and therefore that might be the effect you’re seeing rather than an effect that shows veganism is better than meat eating per se. Like what if people in a third group kept eating meat but had some sort of controlled meat-eating diet. They may well see an improvement just because now they’re thinking about their diet to meet the restriction and so are making healthier choices as a side-effect.

Source: not an expert but have been vegetarian for nearly 40 years at this point and vegan for about 10ish of those. Veganism kind of crept up on me so I don’t know the actual day I started. I don’t have an opinion about whether anyone else should eat meat. My choice is just about what I eat.

Outside the world of foss there are for example multiple games that are highly respected that were all entirely or largely developed by a single developer. Rimworld, Songs of Syx, Dwarf Fortress, Ostranauts and many others. In a proprietary context I have myself deeply understood codebases and worked with others who have also.

That being said, you are arguing against a straw man that neither I nor the rust article propose. They are not saying maintainers need to understand all the code they are saying the person submitting a pr needs to deeply understand that pr. Why? Because they want to build a community who deeply understand various aspects of rust so when things need maintenance there are experts around who even if they don’t know a particular piece are invested in the success of the project and know enough to get up the curve and fix whatever needs to be fixed.

1) Code is the least interesting bit in some ways - they’re trying to build not only rust but a community of experts around rust which is able to maintain and improve it in the long term and the authors of prs need to understand the code deeply and show a willingness to be part of that long run. Llm-generated code even if it looks polished doesn’t indicate a human author who deeply understands it and is willing to be part of that long term maintenance.

2) They don’t have (and don’t want to enforce) a community consensus that llms are good or llms are bad. They just want some rules written down so everyone knows where they stand and people of either camp (and none) can get on with it.

Seems a pretty reasonable approach to me although I don’t really use rust much so don’t have a vested interest.