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Posted by subset 9 hours ago

Old and new apps, via modern coding agents(terrytao.wordpress.com)
340 points | 96 commentspage 2
muragekibicho 8 hours ago|
The article's awkward opening statement proves it wasn't written by AI.

I have been interested in machine-assisted ways to do and teach mathematics from as far back as 1999, when I started coding several applets in Java 1.0, both for my complex analysis and linear algebra courses, to visualize various mathematical objects I was interested in (such as honeycombs or Besicovitch sets).

kccqzy 7 hours ago||
It’s very much Terrence Tao style. His style is having long sentences that could have been broken down into shorter sentences but he chose not to. It doesn’t really affect reading comprehension.
r_lee 5 hours ago||
i would take this every single time over some Claude rewrite slop
vatsachak 7 hours ago||
Using LLMs to generate dashboards is probably their most productive use case
apitman 55 minutes ago||
I don't think it's dashboards specifically, I think it's things that require a relatively small amount of code that fits in the context window and is easy to iterate on using natural language.
lanstin 2 hours ago||
And then to write installers so your coworkers who aren’t liking instructions like “then make a gpg key and install pinentry-mac” can use the extremely useful vibe coded dashboards to make the prod site transparent and viewable, digestible to eyes.
a-dub 5 hours ago||
even though there's still a lot of work to push things over the finish line, i have enjoyed how much it has reduced the activation energy for starting and finishing "one of these days..." projects!
ashu0x 2 hours ago||
Using Fable with Anthropic Design skill works every time.
koe123 7 hours ago||
I am far from a mathematician but I am excited by the possibilities of using AI for generating more math. Math in my mind exists purely in the world of forms, and cannot be appropriated for profit, but is downstream to everything else. I am keen to see what this enables.
lioeters 6 hours ago||
It may be a question of perspective, but in my mind mathematics is upstream to everything else, including physics, biology, etc. And it doesn't just exist in the human mind or the "world of forms", as in Platon's realm of ideas. It's more fundamental than that, closer to the foundation from which all existence emerges. Our reality is like a shadow of a shadow, a fleeting illusion, compared to the eternal reality that gives birth to all lesser realities.

As for profit, there's a reason why governments and AI companies are hiring philosophers and mathematicians. It's not to make the world a better place for everyone, or to encourage the progress of human knowledge; but to gain cutting-edge advantages over their competitors. Same reason why theoretical physicists were prized before/during the Second World War.

koe123 4 hours ago||
Interesting point, I think you are right about it being upstream!
lanstin 2 hours ago||
I have never seen a profitable enterprise that doesn’t have a core of people good at math defending the maximum money behavior. A lot more people graduate with math degrees than can get jobs in research maths, but finance, operations research, insurance companies, logistics, all can hire a lot of them. As a software engineer with a math degree, I find that some of software is like math, but not very often like research math and relatively few of my colleagues have math degrees.
kyleclouthier 2 hours ago||
Nice
mikkolaakkonen 5 hours ago||
This is amazing!
botro 3 hours ago||
I wonder if LLMs modify their output when they realize they are interacting with a famous person.

By famous I mean someone whose biography is in the training data. All models know a lot more about Terrance Tao than they know about me, when he's working on his projects do the models know they don't need to explain "Besicovitch sets".

Since the system prompt likely includes something about not insulting the user, does the LLM modify it's responses if it realizes it's talking to famous politician, like "dont mention the time $politician was cancelled".

apitman 52 minutes ago|
You could test this by starting your sessions with "I am Terrance Tao"
jdw64 7 hours ago||
His website using mathematical knowledge is refreshing. There's a small UI bug, but personally, I wish more educational materials were this rich in audiovisual content.
onionsential 6 hours ago|
[flagged]
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