An Earth Dug Into Hyperbolic Terrain

Character has 2 PhDs: either they did a dual degree program and are braggy about it, had a life-changing experience after their first degree and pivoted their whole career, or they find the structure of being a PhD student, despite all its stress, more comfortable and familiar than the stress of finding a Real Job and have a very indulgent advisor.

Character has 3 PhDs: who keeps accepting them to PhD programs. Either this person needs psychological help or their department needs to be investigated for its academic standards. Probably both

Being one with the currents of reason as they take shape not merely within formulae and proofs but within groups of people, among hundreds and hundreds of proofs, within bodies of work. The stuff that takes you a year to learn to do in 5 mins. Dunking your head in the clear stream in which god fishes for theorems, oxygen be damned.

This is one of the things that bothers me so much about the use of LLMs for proofs (even Lean checked proofs). They output five hundred pages of stuff that no one has the time to read, is often subtly wrong (and Lean isn't the be-all end-all of proof correctness either but that's a separate can of worms), and takes from us (in the literal sense of prevents the author from doing themselves) the part of maths that I love most: the musing! The pontificating. The imagination! The imagination that comes from working through shit yourself and letting the waves take you somewhere you never saw coming! The informal reasoning that can only come out of a deep understanding of technicalities.

1 guy stabs 1 guy: not funny. that's murder.

2 guys stab 1 guy: even less funny. that's two against one.

I didn't wake up one day and think "Oh gosh, I'm a gnoll stuck as a human, whatever shall I do!" It was a slow awakening, of trying to understand my internal experience and figuring out how I wanted to express it, and what language could express it.

It was years before I went from "I wish I had fangs" to "I feel like I was meant to be a gnoll, like I'd be happier that way" before finally landing on "I'm a gnoll."

I mean to play a LITTLE devil's advocate… the first time you make a web page that has nothing in it and asks the server to put this over HERE and that over THERE and checks the user's browser configuration to reflow and reorganise the page to look good in multiple situations, it is MASSIVELY COOL and you feel AWESOME and you just want to do this ALL THE TIME and you really, really need someone to step in and put their hands on your shoulders and look you in the eye and say "this is a terrible, TERRIBLE user experience when your server is not IN THE NEXT ROOM." Because it's so much fun! As a web developer when you can go "I WILL CONTROL THE ENTIRE PAGE, ELEMENT BY ELEMENT, IN REAL TIME" you just want to laugh like a cartoon villain and demand that the user kneel before you. Someone has to stop you. Someone has to tell you "DON'T BE EVIL" because it's just so ATTRACTIVE.