For reasons that aren't even clear to me, I'm about 1/3rd into Barry Jay's Reflective Programs in Tree Calculus and about 1/10th into Frank Waaldijk's Natural Topology, which I've been reading side-by-side. Smashing these two into each other is pretty fascinating, even as I'm not sure what to make of the mixture yet.

Having sat with the notion for about six months now, I think Jay's critique of the Church-Turing thesis has legs. I don't see clearly yet exactly where and how the limits of computation manifest in his own system(s), which of course they must. But I think he's correct that this thesis as it's colloquially presented (and taught to students, including me!) is misleading at best and false in a certain important sense. Apparently he is regularly called a crackpot for forwarding this critique even though it's straightforwardly demonstrated.

Waaldijk's book is more of a constructive mathematics exploration. In this it is closely related to computer science, but it's focused on traditionally mathematical notions like topological space. The latter is usually quite complicated, but Waaldijk shows that the core concept of compact space can be represented with finitely-branching trees, making these spaces amenable to computation. Since we imagine physics taking place in spaces that are topological (among other things) there's potentially an interesting bidirectional flow of ideas between computer science and physics.

Jay calls his central notion "natural trees". Waaldijk calls his central notion "natural spaces". In both cases I think the intended sense is "with minimal artifice".

#ComputerScience #computation #math #mathematics #topology

Several of the LLMs have produced inaccuracies which have been uncritically communicated to our customers by CrowdStrikers who failed to exhibit due diligence. Those errors were caught by said customers, and they were embarrassing to us all.
...
Now we have an engineer, if you can call him that, working on a project that will introduce more than 30k lines of AI generated code into our codebase, without a single unit test. It will be impossible to do a proper code review on this much code and it will become a maintenance nightmare and possibly a security hazard. I don't need to tell you how much management is cheering on that.

From @brianmerchant@mastodon.social 's latest newsletter: https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/how-ai-is-killing-jobs-in-the-tech

A ticking timebomb in the making. It's especially galling that CrowdStrike is doing this, given their epic fail just last year.

A while back I wrote in a post here:

under Taylorism the workers who actually do the work and know it best no longer have a say (opinion) in how that work gets done. Pseudo-scientific principles (scientific management, the astrology of MBAs) dictates all. Computers, from the very first, were intended and designed for this purpose.

riffing on what a lousy person Charles Babbage was and the lousy anti-worker plans he had for the proto-computers he designed. Among other things generative AI is another manifestation of the MBA pseudoscience known as scientific management and exists in a long line of digital technologies stretching all the way back to Babbage's.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #AgenticAI #tech #dev #computation #ComputerScience #labor #organizing