This, and some results smartly ignoring the selected sort order because gmail suggests you "follow up", both work together to paint a vivid picture of a disassociated product team who no longer understands their customer.
I'm enjoying learning about these hard problems, but this line about credit made me chuckle:
> We helped prepare the manuscripts and formalize the proofs in Lean, and we take responsibility for their correctness
Offering to take responsibility for the correctness of a proof written in Lean feels like volunteering to be the fall guy in case someone finds a flaw in basic arithmetic, no?
There is no evidence that I can find for the claim "a bug in the Lean kernel was discovered last week by way of an LLM tricking itself and its handler into believing it had found a non-constructive proof of the existence of a nontrivial Collatz cycle."
As I currently understand it, all we know is that:
- a mathematician produced a Lean-verified counterexample to the Collatz conjecture, demonstrating a bug in the kernel
- he claims that LLMs were involved somehow but pointedly refuses to specify how
- he admits that he knew about the bug before publishing the counterexample to his repository.
Perhaps not a joke (although it sure seems to me like they discovered a bug and thought falsely disproving the Collatz conjecture would be a flashy way to announce it), but at best extremely sensationalized by the above description. If you have additional context I would be happy to hear it!
Indeed. It seems to me much more likely that the AI was directed to look for bugs in Lean, found one, and then it was directed to write a proof specifically targeting the bug.
It seems that a lot of folks misunderstand the guarantees that lean provides.
I just want to state that having "lean proofs" that build (checks) does not mean the actual real theorems we care about hold. Ignoring lean kernel bugs, ultimately a human (not an agent) has to verify the lean encoded theorem statements (specs/specifications), that the lean proofs are checked against, indeed correctly encode the real theorems. For non-trivial theorems such as these, this is an arduous and tricky task where even a little mistake could be fatal. AI generated lean encoded theorems can be huge and difficult to understand. I wonder if anyone reputable has audited these specifications.
I'm not an expert at it myself, but my understanding is there are numerous ways to "cheat" in a Lean proof (via `sorry` and similar). They're taking responsibility for fully verifying that none of these cheats were used (and that the theorem statements themselves were all correctly formalized.)
Even beyond cheating with sorries or kernel bugs, the lean encoded theorems (or specifications) must be checked by humans to see if they truly mirror the real theorem authentically.
Traditionally, a mathematician would be implicitly responsible for all that (if they were to publish Lean code) and also the intellectual work that led to the artifact of the mathematical paper (and code, if part of the contribution). This statement should rather be read as an acknowledgement of limitation of authorship from the implicit, traditional understanding.
It’s more than you get from free software - you get no proofs, no warranties and any responsibility of its authors are their pure good will. Reminder lean proofs are software!
Interesting to see they shipped an "anti-slop" taste skill:
> description: Anti-slop frontend skill for landing pages, portfolios, and redesigns. The agent reads the brief, infers the right design direction, and ships interfaces that do not look templated. Real design systems when applicable, audit-first on redesigns, strict pre-flight check.
> - *PREMIUM-CONSUMER PALETTE BAN (mandatory, second-most-recurring AI-tell):*
- For premium-consumer briefs (cookware, wellness, artisan, luxury, heritage craft, DTC home goods, etc.)...
- Backgrounds: `#f5f1ea`, `#f7f5f1`...
> Landing pages and portfolios are *visual products*. Text-only pages with fake-screenshot divs are slop.
> Em-dash (—) is COMPLETELY banned. It is the LLM's signature stylistic crutch and it is the #1 visual Tell in production tests. There is no "limited use" allowance, no "natural language frequency" allowance, no "in body copy is fine" allowance. None.
Probably not, because now you'll have all of the people who are worried about this ensuring their AI generated text never ever uses em-dashes, and then that will be the new tell.
Or we can just be more concerned with whether something is well written and well presented and accept that sometimes that is going to be AI written text.
What if you're on Windows where it's much less convenient? Also, latex and others substitute that for the proper dash, so one might do it out of habit.
Also also,it's en-dash, not n-dash. And it's correct in British English, where the em-dash largely fell out of use.
Ok. Today I learned. But I'll still continue to use -- because I don't care enough to be correct and most people will understand me regardless. Being pedantic about it doesn't seem very productive.
> Or we can just be more concerned with whether something is well written and well presented and accept that sometimes that is going to be AI written text.
Slop is slop, it doesn’t matter if it was human or LLM written. If a code comment or Slack message is 200 words long but still makes no fucking sense then it’s slop. A message can be 10 words long and riddled with typos but if the message is understandable it’s not slop.
I've been posting my writing on the internet since 1990, from a Mac where we all learned how to make en and em dashes, umlauts, accents, degree symbols, proper single and double quotes, and so forth from Day #1 and I have absolutely no plans to stop using em dashes.
Though I agree with GP: models and harnesses are being updated so hard to avoid any use of em-dashes that soon it will be a tell of human writing. The the pendulum will swing back and forth, forever.
I have been seeing people use it more who I am fairly confident are not otherwise using AI to write public-facing communications. It's almost like there's a minor movement to try and reclaim it. Either that or it's somehow getting past my AIdar.
It's notable that this appears to be used to generate frontends that look more authentic than the typical AI generated site, not as a test for what's acceptable from a human contributor.
This quote is so egregiously stupid, I'm instantly disinterested in this product now. No reason to assume the rest isn't the same applied cretinism as the quoted sentence.
I suppose all the exotic unicode characters are dead now. Anything that's too annoying for a human to type but trivial for AI to generate is probably done for. I used to enjoy using those characters. Sigh.
All due respect to the YC folks, but having a skill with 22,069 tokens is a major skill issue. Yes, ironic.
My slop control skill is a thousand tokens. Biggest problem I see with the skill is that everything is prompted via negativa. smh. sorry to be judgmental but it's hard to trust a harness that comes shipped with a skill like this.
The YC folks know engineering hype, not engineering. Most of them have been out of the game so long and focused on other things they've forgotten their fundamentals. You can hear this explicitly in shit Gary says in a lot of videos, it's directionally correct but detached from fundamentals.
Doesn’t this just lead to a new “basin of tastelessness” that, sure, looks different from current slop, but is itself just eventually slop all the same?
Neat project. I wonder how a small model could interpret movement data to provide personalized improvement suggestions e.g. "you're weaker targeting left than right, but only under these conditions"
I think as I've gotten older, the fear of expressing myself has increasingly turned into a sense of duty to do it anyway. The more people feel pressured into silence, the more important it seems not to be.
