okay so. when a mathematician proves a random conjecture you are supposed to politely clap. this is because it would be rude and embarrass the mathematician to point out that most conjectures are not that important or meaningful when an LLM proves a random conjecture mathematicians are caught in a funny position where they want to say "these are not very important or meaningful conjectures and having magic proofs or counterexamples come out of nowhere is not particularly interesting or useful to anybody, except possibly the person who proposed the conjecture and some of their colleagues" but saying that puts them in an awkward position - why didn't they say that when humans were doing it? was nearly all mathematics actually pointless this whole time and mathematicians were just politely avoiding ever pointing this out so they could all still have jobs? if the best defense you can come up with of mathematics as a human endeavor is, effectively, "it's really fun for us to come up with these baroque puzzles and then solve them, don't screw this up for us," you are completely abdicating your responsibility as a public endeavor that taxpayers fund. i have occasionally argued that pure mathematics lost the plot decades ago and gave up on having any kind of meaningful relationship to the rest of the human quest to understand reality. this was a slow-burning tragedy, and mathematicians have been able to hide this state of affairs from everybody else because nobody else knows enough mathematics to critique what mathematicians are doing i saw a famous professor point out a few years ago that the machine learning that underpins AI is powered by 18th or maybe 19th century mathematics, you don't need much more than multivariable calculus, linear algebra, a bit of probability. he said this as if it was a dunk on ML and AI; imo it's a much bigger dunk on mathematics. you're telling me the most important scientific revolution of our lifetimes doesn't involve any of the math that mathematicians have been working on over the last century or two? you see how that's worse, right? (tbc i'm not saying that stuff is all useless, you need a bunch of stuff from the first half of the 20th century to do physics, e.g. functional analysis, lie theory, representation theory all feed into the standard model. after 1950 or so things get more dicey) if mathematicians still want to have jobs they are going to have to do a better job than they have for the last few decades convincing the public they do something that actually matters, and figuring out what that actually is or should be. this is an opportunity for the field to do some very serious soul-searching, as serious or more serious than the foundational crisis from a century ago. this kind of whining is absolutely not going to cut it

At a bookstore, my eyes met Christopher Priest’s “The Affirmation”. While standing in the checkout line, I took another careful look at the band, which described it as “a monumental novel that serves as the ‘key’ to all of his stories.” I realized that I haven’t properly read Priest’s works. I haven’t even read “The Prestige” or “The Separation”, both of which were adapted into films. So I went back to the paperback section and bought the reissued edition of “Inverted World”. I’ll read some of his other works first, then take on “The Affirmation”.

We need an official name for not-vibe-coding. My top candidates so far: · boomer coding · chewgy coding · trad coding · Coding with capital C Suggestions are welcome.

Managed to get Fabien Sanglard's Chocolate Duke Nukem 3D compiling and running, after some vendoring, macro and VS gymnastics. Fabien must have done a great job with this because I've never managed to actually get this far with a classic game codebase before. But that fact is symptomatic of the worst part of C and C++! The damn build process. I don't think I've ever been able to pull a legacy code base and have it compile first time (even this one required some vendoring and macro and VS gymnastics). The amount of hoop jumping and bureaucratic form-filling involved is just a giant pain in the ass- the term I've heard for this kind of project setup drudgery is yak-shaving, but that is far too rosy a term for it. The one thing I crave for a C successor language is a pain-free process of *running the code*, so we can focus on what the actual code does and get to the actual fun parts.

Any language is just a frontend for Raylib. Once you realize you can't be replaced by AI.

protip: code badly! you don't KNOW what the good solution is yet. don't over-engineer early. good ideas are not waiting on square one. add a fixme. embrace the hack. love the kludge. iterate from a rough copy: bad is fast. bad is fexible. bad can be thrown away. bad is good.

Peyton will be back….. with a better impression Monday night when @Schwarzenegger joins the ManningCast.