How in god's name—irrespective of how valid this is, and its very valid—is this even remotely germane to the issue of AI in mathematics? Rattling off incidents and making the case that there is discrimination and sexists in mathematics (yeah no shit), how is this related to the issue of AI that was raised in the letter? Are the complaints raised in that letter any less valid because the mathematicians who signed them make part of a community which has reproachable behaviour, both past and present? I really don't get it.

Why does it have to be about that? The author says they agree with the letter in the first paragraph.

It's a clumsily made point, but I think the gist is that the letter asks AI to align to a certain ideal vision of the field of math, that the math community itself is not well aligned to. I don't think the article makes this point well, though, just by listing these incidents. Don't get me wrong - each incident is important and worthy of attention in its own right, but I find the overall argument to be pretty weak and strongly reeking of whataboutism.

You are right.

This just reads like a rancorous rant.

In any human group there will always be issues on how we treat each other dependent on time/context/culture. But while not condoning it, this issue is orthogonal to that of misaligned AI.

The communique from the mathematicians when shorn of polite language is blunt viz.

AI companies are stealing our hard-won lifelong research findings, which we were already sharing freely, without attribution/credit and building upon them without informed consent nor compensation.

The above is true for "misaligned AI" in all the Sciences. It is time the Scientific Community got together and sued the hell out of the AI companies.

The letter claims that AI is destroying the mathematics community as is now. The blog asks whether the mathematics community as is now is worth saving.

> mathematicians (as a community, even though there were outliers) didn't care - not even the slightest - about the impact of LLMs and generative AI, other type of AI and machine learning until it started impacting them. So I have no sympathy for their community at all. They brought all this AI dystopia on us

Wait wait wait. The research mathematicians brought this AI dystopia on us. Not the techbros, not Silicon Valley, not the global financial system and its tentacles, not surveillance capitalism... No, it was the postdocs working on ultrafilters for C(2,3) epimorphisms on symplectic manifolds. That's certainly a take.

I think it's obvious that the target audience has a huge overlap...

I wouldn’t say obvious, no. It’s what I observe, yes. But I have some doubt about my observations scaling up to a valid statistics. Lots of folks out there are not techies yet do care about the environment. I can’t see them caring much about grapheneOS, but maybe I’m wrong.

Poster said huge overlap, not huge audience:)

But I agree with the overlap. I use e/OS partly because I can run it on a Fairphone. I'd love to try Graphene.

Is there a huge demographic for grapheneOS and/or fairphone? Let alone one that doesn't overlap with the archetypes that post here?

Design is so personal. I love Material 3 Expressive personally. Each to their own :)

At least it is now consistent with the rest of the OSs UI.

It’s amazing that you don’t think any of this is based on real HCI.

People prefer larger tap targets on touch screens.

Larger than what? That only goes so far.

And tons of whitespace doesn't make the tap targets bigger. It exacerbates the problem of bigger targets causing less to fit on the screen.

> People prefer larger tap targets on touch screens.

Only in a completely stupid, nonsensically A/B tested notion of "prefer". I'll refer you to this ~~excellent piece of satirical writing~~ actual post from Google design team: https://design.google/library/expressive-material-design-goo...

Yes if you don't think about the matter for more than 6 seconds you would indeed conclude that, and retreat to the comfortable cliché of "it's just a tool". Meanwhile, I'm glad that there are still people who _think_ about issues and ponder the consequences and reflect on things before they become a reality.

I'm an AI skeptic, but I don't see how this squares with what the organisers of the event actually say. "It previously suggested that math researchers already have no place in mathematics"? I don't see this.

The website previously said, “What is the role of a mathematician when AI can solve conjectures faster?” but they have removed it, possibly as a result of the letter since it happened after.

Also I want to mention that the letter is not about AI skepticism, in any direct way at least.

> As a parallel example, can we prove the phase of the moon had no impact on the NS solution? No, not without a bunch experiments run at different phases of the moon.

The _gall_ to say something like this. Do you perhaps think we are all stupid?? This very blogpost claims not to know if their work was used as input for this model. I don't even understand how that is possible, surely you can know if something is part of the training data, even if you are in the dark about what impact it actually made, qualitatively. The moon....

> Knowing most of the recipes we use, there's really no reason to think such contamination happened.

Yeah sorry but I don't trust you. I don't trust people or companies that have shown themselves to be dishonest before. Especially when the previous paragraph is comparing plagiarism and training data contamination with, _the phases of the moon_.

Might even be you're actually telling the truth, but the boy that cried wolf and all that.

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As an aside, I would bet very good money at how most (all?) these companies are flouting their ZDR.

Lmao my friend, the whole "drama" is that there are allegations of plagiarism.

> "I deeply apologize for this extremely poor choice of words, it is the opposite of what I was trying to convey."

The AI-isms are seeping into their speech :)

Holy late capitalism. Everything revolves around line-go-up, and sociopaths rule the show. These people cannot even collaborate like civilised scientists on one of the most famous open problems in mathematics?

“It would be simpler if Levent was not an Anthropic employee” I cannot believe this shit.

Soon Levent will just be turned into soylent and he will have never been an Anthropic employee. We still need some progress here though.