Comment by Cheyana

1 month ago

Thanks for this. In another strange internet coincidence, I was asking ChatGPT to break down the fundamentals of the Peano axioms just yesterday and now I see this. Thumbs up!

I suspect in the near future (if not already) ChatGPT data will be sold to data brokers and bough by Amazon such that writing a prompt will end up polluting Alexa product recommendations within a few minutes to hours.

Well there was a post on mathmemes a day ago about teaching kids set theory as a foundation for math with some discussion of PA. So maybe related ideas are echoing across the intertubes in this moment?

  • > teaching kids set theory as a foundation for math

    Very reminiscent of the New Math pedagogy of the 1960s. Built up arithmetic entirely from sets. Crashed and burned for various reasons but I always had a soft spot for it. It also served as my introduction to binary arithmetic and topology.

I've noticed this too. I will be researching a topic elsewhere and then it seems to pop up in HN. Am I just looking for patterns where there are none, or is there some trickery happening where HN tracks those activities and mixes in posts more relevant to my interests with the others?

  • HN has a single front page for everyone, so it's a recency illusion. You pay more attention to details and skim over titles you haven't been thinking about.

    • It may also be that there's some common cause for (1) a topic being on HN's front page and (2) someone researching it elsewhere. E.g., maybe a couple of days ago there was an interesting social-media post related to it, and (1) one person saw it and wrote up something interesting enough to get on HN and (2) another person saw it, started digging around to find out more, and then read HN.

      (I am not suggesting that that very specific sequence of events happened in this case. It's just an example of how "I was looking this up for other reasons and then I saw something about it on HN" could genuinely happen more often than by chance, without any need for weird tracking-and-advertising shenanigans.)