Okay. I FINISHED THE TRANSLATION. Fifty entire pages of modern Chinese philosophy about Western philosophy. It's nominally about "artificial intelligence" but in typical philosophical fashion, it's actually about, uh, colonialism, Catholicism, Van Gogh's weird fucked-up blood and thinking really hard about one specific random photograph of a street.

If you are curious about what is being taught right now in actual Chinese university classrooms about Western philosophy, you should read it. I highlighted several passages that are of particular interest to a Western reader who wants to understand how China sees itself and sees the West.

https://厄.net/backup/western-philosophy-chinese-perspective-ai.pdf

#chinese #translation #philosophy

🆕 A blueprint for formal verification of Apple corecrypto

Learn more about the formal verification methods used for ensuring the mathematical correctness of corecrypto's post-quantum ML-KEM and ML-DSA implementations.
We are also releasing our Isabelle libraries, ARM64 model, and Cryptol-to-Isabelle translator!

https://security.apple.com/blog/formal-verification-corecrypto/

#FormalMethods #PostQuantum #Security

This is *brutal*...

"There are no more juniors. There was a funeral for their passing in 2024. Nobody came. The machine does what they do now, but cheaper. Of course, juniors weren't valuable for what they produced, they were valuable for who they would become: the senior engineer who knows where the bodies are buried. We optimized for output, and abolished apprenticeship. A few years from now, we'll wonder where all the seniors are. We shot them. Nobody will remember."

https://www.stvn.sh/writing/programming-still-sucks-fqffhyp

ETA:
This is by @stevendotjs, who absolutely nails a bunch of things I've been feeling for a while now, but had no idea how to articulate...

We are transitioning in mathematics from an era of proof scarcity to an era of proof abundance, but our mathematical infrastructure and culture has not yet adapted to this. As mentioned previously, there is now a strong (and growing) impedance mismatch between the three core components of mathematical problem solving: proof generation, proof verification, and proof digestion.

An early sign of this transition could be seen in the chaotic response to the initial "First Proof" challenge, in which many more potentially viable solutions to the given problems were produced than could be readily verified or digested, either by experts or by automated tools. And now we are seeing the same impedance mismatch at the Erdos problem website, where (since the release of GPT 5.5, as well as the highly publicized recent solution to Erdos problem #1196) there is now an unprecedented backlog of nearly twenty claimed full or partial solutions "pending assessment": https://github.com/teorth/erdosproblems/wiki/AI-contributions-to-Erd%C5%91s-problems . (Prior to this recent surge, this category contained one or two solutions at a time at best.) (1/5)

I think that Ky Decker’s blog post about “AI” and burnout (https://ky.fyi/posts/ai-burnout ) is worth reading. I am experiencing a bunch of similar feelings, and the paragraph starting with, “I encountered each of these scenarios over the past few years”, is a description of a living nightmare.

I am thankful to work with skilled and thoughtful people who are grappling with these things, and luckily, my passion for helping people is, so far, catapulting me through the moral injury of “Claude said this” and “Claude did that”.

Funny enough, today also marks my 14th year of working at Apple, adjusted for when I started my internship. Despite the broader industry getting more morally perilous, more full of shit, and less fun, I’m far from done trying to make authentication technologies more usable, delightful, and secure. Onward.