That neuroscience bit sounds like complete bullshit, but your annoyance is justified and I think shared by others in this thread.
There are many walks of life and some people are wired in ways that annoy us when they present themselves, or talk about themselves as this individual has. It is not only to elevate the mundane to the realm of the sublime, rather it’s to beat a profound lesson of life into us by proxy of whoever the characters are. Notice the shift from the friends, to I, to “you”. Notice the use of “you” in the blog post. You are being lectured. You need to be taught things that this individual just discovered, because you are clueless and they are wise. That is why you feel annoyed.
Whenever you hear someone using the royal “we” to lecture you, you’re always welcome to ask “who is we?”, because it’s appropriate to understand who is actually being discussed. This individual thinks that we are clueless and they are carrying the stone tablets to teach us. They have a long way to go.
> But unfortunately, looking at others is seen as being a weirdo
No it’s simpler than that:
1) sitting alone - you’re a weirdo
2) sitting doing nothing public, staring off into space like you’re a zen master - no, you’re a weirdo
3) blogposting how you sat alone in a public space for 30 minutes and how this is an “unbearable joy” - do I need to spell it out?
This person needs help. They are having an episode. If someone has gone so far as to have this level of emotional outburst by leaving their phone at home, there’s deeper issues to unpack.
For the rest of us, sitting down at the cafe to have a nice drink and something to eat while we look at the cars and foot traffic going by is a perfectly normal activity.
I think you are missing the sarcasm of the parent comment.
I am also fairly certain you have yet to actually watch Tao "demonstrate" his interaction with these technologies because if you had you would know in those demonstrations he formally verifies theorems that already have proofs, and even more importantly, that he had already formally verified twice before 'off camera'. Despite these two realities he still spends a lot of time correcting the LLMs or completely ignoring their suggestions while expressing a mostly polite appraisal of the tech's use and capability.
Of course the hype machine takes his politeness, which has more to do with his specific personality than anything to do with the tech, as universal endorsement for the tech and all of its externalities.
I called it when he started getting in bed with these malevolent tech companies that they were laundering their misdeeds through his reputation, and here we are.
Unless you claim Tao is outright lying, his statements say he's getting objective value out of AI tools. They are helping him accelerate actual math research.
Math seems like an ideal target for AI, as it provides a firm basis for identifying correctness (has something actually been proved.) I think the consequences of this are going to be enormous for mathematics, including the conversion of the entire historical math literature to formalized, checked proofs. Once that is done, once all that training data is available, the capabilities of math AIs are IMO likely to be extraordinary. Add to that the sort of Alpha Go-style self training as AI provers work on new problems.
> Unless you claim Tao is outright lying, his statements say he's getting objective value out of AI tools. They are helping him accelerate actual math research.
I lack the personal relationship with Tao necessary to determine if his words are truthful or otherwise (namely for me, paid for), but you also failed to provide "his statements" that say either "he's getting objective value out of AI tools" (however one may quantify such a statement) or that "they are helping him accelerate actual math research" choosing instead to simply claim those words as Tao's own.
All of the future tense coded "I think", "going to be", "Once that is done", and "IMO likely" in your second paragraph seem to be at conflict, in the very least tensewise, with your gp comment's past tense of "Not only said, but demonstrated."
There are many walks of life and some people are wired in ways that annoy us when they present themselves, or talk about themselves as this individual has. It is not only to elevate the mundane to the realm of the sublime, rather it’s to beat a profound lesson of life into us by proxy of whoever the characters are. Notice the shift from the friends, to I, to “you”. Notice the use of “you” in the blog post. You are being lectured. You need to be taught things that this individual just discovered, because you are clueless and they are wise. That is why you feel annoyed.
Whenever you hear someone using the royal “we” to lecture you, you’re always welcome to ask “who is we?”, because it’s appropriate to understand who is actually being discussed. This individual thinks that we are clueless and they are carrying the stone tablets to teach us. They have a long way to go.