Possibly, but then again, when I need to study a paper, I print it, when I need just to skim it and use a result from it, it is more likely that I just read it on a screen (tablet/monitor). That is the difference for me.

Maxima, despite its shortcomings, is a great tool for symbolic computation.

Have you tried Maple? It is also proprietary but it comes from (originally) Waterloo University, and is used in Academia too.

Honest question: I think Maple is really a competitor, even if less known.

Prob I am a very small minority here, but I used Maple a lot in the past and I liked it a lot. More standard syntax than mathematica, and overall much much easier to debug. In particular, as far as I remember, maple allowed for more transparency in the mathematical methods used in some computation than mathematica, as I could just see what it was doing exactly when an unexpected result came or I wanted to understand some method. When you work a lot with integrals, limits and special functions there is always a shit ton of assumptions and cases all over the place, and if something is missed somewhere the computation can just get wrong. There were some few times I would actually get wrong results in mathematica. When the language is more like a black box, it is hard to know what happened.

That is also my feeling, although it has been ages since I last worked with Maple. But some colleagues of mine at other uni do use it instead of Mathematica. Thanks for the detailed reply!

You have a stochastic process in, more or less, 10.000 dimensions (dimensions, not states). “They” are trying to “limit” its behavior with some rules. But I have full control over the initial conditions. That’s it. Any idea that “One can make it safe” is. not just delusional, it is false.

Well, then poetry is not literature.

No, the argument is even dumber than that. The person who writes a poem hasn't created any literature.

The person who hears that poem in circulation and records it in his notes has created literature; an anthology is literature but an original work isn't.

> No, the argument is even dumber than that. The person who writes a poem hasn't created any literature.

Sure they have, by virtue of writing it down. It becomes literature when it hits the paper (or computer screen, as it were).

(Unless you mean to imply that formulating an original poem in your mind counts as "writing", in which case I guess we illustrate the overarching point of value in shared symbols and language and the waste of time in stating our original definitions for every statement we want to make)

> Unless you mean to imply that formulating an original poem in your mind counts as "writing"

You're close. I'm making the point that, in modern English, no other verb is available for the act of creating a poem.

Here's a quote from the fantasy novel The Way of Kings that always appealed to me:

>> "Many of our nuatoma -- this thing, it is the same as your lighteyes, only their eyes are not light--"

>> "How can you be a lighteyes without light eyes?" Teft said with a scowl.

>> "By having dark eyes," Rock said, as if it were obvious. "We do not pick our leaders this way. Is complicated. But do not interrupt story."

For an example from reality, I am forced to tell people who ask me that the English translation of 姓 is "last name", despite the fact that the 姓 comes first.

Similarly, the word for writing a poem is "write", whether this creates a written artifact or not. And the poem is literature whether a written artifact currently exists, used to exist, or never existed.

(Though you've made me curious: if the Iliad wasn't literature until someone wrote it down, do you symmetrically believe that Sophocles' Sisyphus is no longer literature because it is no longer written down?)

> I'm making the point that, in modern English, no other verb is available for the act of creating a poem.

Make, Create, Formulate.

> I am forced to tell people who ask me that the English translation of 姓 is "last name", despite the fact that the 姓 comes first.

"Family name" is availabe, commonly used and a better traslation than "last name" here, no?

> Similarly...

You're probably pretty alone in this thinking.

I don't think the metaphysical argument about Sisyhus is interestng or relevant.

I don't consider all movies to be literature. Do you consider all movies to be literature by definition?

I also write computer programs and banking checks. Does that make them literature to you?

> I'm making the point that, in modern English, no other verb is available for the act of creating a poem.

You literally used another perfectly acceptable verb in modern English besides “writing” for the act of creating a poem in the very sentence making this claim, which somewhat undermines the claim.

If it’s not written down, then that’s true.

Once someone writes it down, it is.

Sure in the context that you mean it’s an oral tradition.

His vision of business strategy. There are others, though.

Yes, but the machine itself is deterministic and logically sound.

>Yes, but the machine itself is deterministic and logically sound.

Because arithmetic itself, by definition, is.

Human language is not. Which is why being able to talk to our computers in natural language (and have them understand us and talk back) now is nothing short of science fiction come true.

They are not even coins. Coins do not get a pseudonym of their users attached for ever.

When you transfer monero to someone else there isn't a trace of where the money was before nor to whom it belonged.

You might be confusing monero with all the virtual "coins" out there.

Not only that: most likely LLMs like these know how to get access to a remote computer (hack into it) and use it for whatever ends they see fit.

I mean... If they tried, they could exploit some known CVE. I'd bet more on a scenario along the lines of:

"well, here's the user's SSH key and the list of known hosts, let's log into the prod to fetch the DB connection string to test my new code informed by this kind stranger on prod data".