Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Last substack for 2025 - may 2026 bring better tidings. Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Yes, they are trying to automate releases.
sidenote: I donāt like how taking an approach of mediocre software engineering to mathematics is becoming more popular. Update your dependency (whose code you never read) to v0.4.5 for bug fixes! Why was it incorrect in the first place? Anyway, this blog post sets some good rules for reviewing computer proofs. The second-to-last comment tries to argue npm-ification is good actually. I canāt tell if satire
would you be willing to elaborate on this? i am just curious because i took the opposite approach (started as a mathematician now i write bad python scripts)
The flipside to that quote is that computer programs are useful tools for mathematicians. See the mersenne prime search, OEIS and its search engine, The L-function database, as well as the various python scripts and agda, rocq, lean proofs written to solve specific problems within papers. However, not everything is perfect: throwing more compute at the problem is a bad solution in general; the stereotypical python script hacked together to serve only a purpose has one-letter variable names and redundant expressions, making it hard to review. Throw in the vibe coding over it all, and thatās pretty much the extent of what I mean.
I apologize if anything is confusing, Iām not great at communication. I also have yet to apply to a mathematics uni, so maybe this is all manageable in practice.
One important nuance is that there are, broadly speaking, two ways to express a formal proof: it can either be fairly small but take exponential time to verify, or it can be fairly quick to verify but exponentially large. Most folks prefer to use the former sort of system. However, with extension by definitions, we can have a polynomial number of polynomially-large definitions while still verifying quickly. This leads to my favorite proof system, Metamath, whose implementations measure their verification speed in kiloproofs/second. If you give me a Metamath database then I can quickly confirm any statement in a few moments with multiple programs and there is programmatic support for looking up the axioms associated with any statement; I can throw more compute at the problem. While LLMs do know how to generate valid-looking Metamath in context, itās safe to try to verify their proofs because Metamathās kernel is literally one (1) string-handling rule.
This is all to reconfirm your impression that e.g. Lean inherits a āmediocre software engineeringā approach. Junk theorems in Lean are laughably bad due to type coercions. The wider world of HOL is more concerned with piles of lambda calculus than with writing math proofs. Lean as a general-purpose language with I/O means that it is no longer safe to verify untrusted proofs, which makes proof-carrying Lean programs unsafe in practice.
@Seminar2250@awful.systems you might get a laugh out of this too. FWIW I went in the other direction: I started out as a musician who learned to code for dayjob and now Iām a logician.
This is darkly funny.
Thank you for the links
Those look suspiciousā¦ I mean when you consider that the set of propositions is given a topology and an order, āThe set
{z : ā | z ā 0}is a continuous, non-monotone surjection.ā doesnāt seem so ridiculous after all. Similarly the determinant of logical operations gains meaning on a boolean algebra. Zeta(1) is also by design. It does start getting juicy around ā2 - 3 = +āā and the nontransitive equality and the integer interval.no need to apologize, i understand what you mean. my experience with mathematicians has been that this is really common. even the theoretical computer scientists (the ālemma, theorem, proofā kind) i have met do this kind of bullshit when they finally decide to write a line of code. hell, their pseudocode is often baffling ā if you are literally unable to run the code through a machine, maybe focus on how it comes across to a human reader? nah, itās more important that i believe it is technically correct and that no one else is able to verify it.