(1) “Don’t Fall Into the Anti-AI Hype”
Salvatore Sanfilippo, the creator of Redis, on letting go of hand crafted code and the economic disruption soon to ensue:
It is simply impossible not to see the reality of what is happening. Writing code is no longer needed for the most part. It is now a lot more interesting to understand what to do, and how to do it (and, about this second part, LLMs are great partners, too). It does not matter if AI companies will not be able to get their money back and the stock market will crash. All that is irrelevant, in the long run. It does not matter if this or the other CEO of some unicorn is telling you something that is off putting, or absurd. Programming changed forever, anyway.
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As a programmer, I want to write more open source than ever, now. I want to improve certain repositories of mine abandoned for time concerns. I want to apply AI to my Redis workflow. Improve the Vector Sets implementation and then other data structures, like I’m doing with Streams now.
(…)
What is the social solution, then? Innovation can’t be taken back after all. I believe we should vote for governments that recognize what is happening, and are willing to support those who will remain jobless. And, the more people get fired, the more political pressure there will be to vote for those who will guarantee a certain degree of protection. But I also look forward to the good AI could bring: new progress in science, that could help lower the suffering of the human condition, which is not always happy.
(2) “The Rest of the World Disappears: Claire Voisin on Mathematical Creativity”
From an interview with French mathematician Claire Voisin, about getting lost in the art and language of mathematics:
There’s the magic of a proof — the emotion you feel when you understand it, when you realize how strong it is and how strong it makes you. As a child, I could already see this. And I enjoyed the concentration that mathematics requires. It’s something that, getting older, I find more and more central to the practice of mathematics. The rest of the world disappears. Your whole brain exists to study a problem. It’s an extraordinary experience, one that’s very important to me — to make yourself leave the world of practical things, to inhabit a different world. Maybe this is why my son enjoys playing video games so much.
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You could compare a mathematical theorem to a poem. It is written in words. It’s a product of language. We only have our mathematical objects because we use language, because we use everyday words and give them a specific meaning. So you can compare poetry and mathematics, in that they both completely rely on the language but still create something new.
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It’s important to become familiar with the object you study, to the point that for you it’s like a native language. When a theory is beginning to form, it takes time to figure out the right definitions, and to simplify everything. Or maybe it is still very complicated, but we become much more familiar with the definitions and objects; it becomes more natural to use them.