No one stops you from doing mathematics for the romance of it, just as no one stops you from growing your own tomatoes. But if you want to grow tomatoes and make your living that way, it seems unlikely you'll make it if you go at it the same way people did 500 years ago.

Put another way - if you want your hobby to support you financially, it has to offer enough value for others, even if that value is "I enjoy knowing someone is doing this, without me benefiting directly". Simple as. Otherwise, accept it's just a hobby.

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sintara 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think this is a really meaningful insight. There's passion projects and there's - let's call it "industrial production".

Developers long had the privilege that what they were passionate about also aligned with what industries needed - at least somewhat. Then, outsourcing dev shops and later Claude and Codex turned code into industrial production. That doesn't mean we don't get to enjoy sipping a nice glass of wine and coding the 2D platformer we always wanted to exist - but it does mean that industrial production of code is less satisfying now.

The same is true for mathematicians and will be true for ever-increasing swaths of life. It's understandable to be sad about it and to miss the times when you were the mythical 10x coder with the super-high bus factor - but it is important to distinguish between activity oriented towards individual satisfaction and activity oriented towards outcomes, and not to allow the first to hinder the second.

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lanstin 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This advice is so contrary to good outcomes that I am astonished. Even aside from the amazing utility of funding super smart people to follow their curiosity about the world, maths, species, string theory, neural networks, etc., just keeping it to coding, you don’t want engineering to just implement specs, you want curious people to dig under what is being said; the space of potential solutions in software is so great that you can’t waterfall your way into the best solution; it is a search, and one where the quest for elegance and abstraction and beauty enable not a ten X coder but a solution that catapults the company 100 or 1000 fold over the competitors with less elegant solutions. It’s the whole ideal behind Paul Graham’s beating the odds. It’s the story of companies that grew 70% a month while their competitors tried to make plans. Maybe you all are too young but companies that innovate and constantly delight the community are possible and systems that implement the software can be amazingly more elegant and expandable than expected. on the outsourcing, the places I have seen outsourcing succeed it is because the company can find and pay more minds either that precious gift of abstraction and simplicity and created or renovated systems so well that the outcomes based teams were just scratching their heads in wonder, if they had enough wit.

I have seen inelegant minds generate big balls of crap with AI and I have seen people wield them like scalpers thru the space of possible solutions.

I don’t disagree with using LLMs, but some puritan call for industrial efficiency as the answer is really missing the story on the last forty years of software innovation.

If the parent and grand parent represent common attitudes, no wonder so many companies are constrained by ugly software.

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sintara 7 hours ago | parent [-]

I really sympathize - but the truth also is that the vast majority of coding is commodity software production. "Process data from a website form" sort of stuff. I take your point that some coding is only possible when great minds go on open ended searches for novel approaches, but there's a limited subset of projects where that's a necessity.

	▲	lanstin 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		And all that needs automation, whether by LLM or something else. Software done right should always be solving novel problems.

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bluedel 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I really can't get behind this. The idea that our jobs being interesting and fulfilling was just a happy little accident, a weird artifact of capitalism, and that if that goes away, oh well, too bad. Back to the thankless back-breaking grind. It's just the way of the world.

That's just so defeatist and pessimistic.

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shafyy 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Completely right. I think what is suprising about this wave of automation is that until now automation happened to more manual, blue collar work. I for one didn't really think that it will happen to software development up until some months ago.

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vuurmot 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's funny because I remember people said these things about gaming and computers when they were at their infancy

You are right that there will be some people who cannot financially continue with Mathematics as a career. I think that is horrible for society.

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d4v3 9 hours ago | parent [-]

> I think that is horrible for society.

Why do you think that?

	▲	Cyph0n 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		1. Society has (implicitly) invested resources in order get these individuals to a place where they can push and prod at the boundaries of mathematics. This investment is lost. 2. The majority of mathematicians are passionate about what they do, which typically means higher productivity. Forcibly transferring them to a different field means we lose that productivity. 3. Aspiring & passionate mathematicians will see how the field is impacted and will end up doing something else instead. This is not just a loss for the field, but also a loss for humanity because that person could have ended up being the next Terrence Tao. Taken together, it is hard to foresee what the 2nd and 3rd order effects will be, especially because of how pure mathematics is a “trickle down” field where advancements find practical usecases later on in the sciences and in engineering.

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bigbadfeline 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> But if you want to grow tomatoes and make your living that way,

You forget that we live in the age of AI abundance, "make your living" and "support you financially" aren't arguments with any weight here. Let's get clear about this, because the AI bros did a bait and switch and replaced the promised "AI abundance for you" with "sacrifice yourself for AI".

It's a really important point - math and logic skills are essential for not taking the bait. In other words, besides a science tool and an art, math is a tree where geniuses and not-so-geniuses can sharpen their claws, because being dull is an existential hazard, especially when a bunch of sneaky AI bros are hell-bent on using AI against you.

> if you want your hobby to support you financially, it has to offer enough value for others

Nah, AI is supposed to offer more than enough value for others, it's easy to do, those who can't make it happen should get out of the way, it's that simple. The BS has to stop, it's either deliver AI abundance or get rid of any and all AI altogether. There's no middle ground here, or rather, the middle ground is a swamp of existential hazards.