> So if you’re interested in keeping honey for hundreds of years, do what the bees do and keep it sealed

Doesn't this make honey somewhat less unique? Aren't there many foods that will keep for hundreds of years if kept sealed?

Most foods taken from nature will still rot in their naturally-sealed forms. Pressure canned foods last a long time but use far more robust and energy intensive processes than a thin layer of wax and "the way that it is" to seal and stabilize the contents.

Ferments could be an outlier but usually dance on the edge of rot by design and can last longer than the raw cabbage or milk or meat they start from, but like honeycomb, they must be carefully stored.

The seal for honey has only the role to prevent it to absorb water from air.

As long as honey retains its original water content, it will not spoil.

In sufficiently dry air, you could keep honey without a seal.

For most sealed food, the integrity of the seal is much more important, because it must prevent bacteria and fungal spores to land on the food.

Yes. Good episode about fake honey and its interaction with almond growing: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/beeconomics-101/

I recall a comment from somewhere that it was cheaper to put up a large monitor over a hole in the wall than to pay someone to patch it...

You can put an OLED TV over a hole in the wall and it's cheaper than getting someone to fix the drywall.

Haha, that actually sounds plausible, but, since monitors are backlit, your hole will be glowing.

Nobody outside a gas station wants a glowy hole.

> He’s 23 years old and has no advanced mathematics training.

How is he even posing the question and having even a vague idea of what the proof means or how to understand it?

> “I didn’t know what the problem was—I was just doing Erdős problems as I do sometimes, giving them to the AI and seeing what it can come up with,” he says. “And it came up with what looked like a right solution.” He sent it to his occasional collaborator Kevin Barreto, a second-year undergraduate in mathematics at the University of Cambridge.

Seems like standard 23 year old behavior. You're spending $100-$200/mo on the pro subscription, and want to get your money's worth. So you burn some tokens on this legendarily hard math problem sometimes. You've seen enough wrong answers to know that this one looks interesting and pass it on to a friend that actually knows math, who is at a place where experts can recognize it as correct.

Seems like a classic example of in-expert human labeling ML output.

According to the article he was using the free ChatGpt tier at first, I til someone gifted him a Pro subscription to encourage "vibe-mathing'.

Couldn't he have just asked ChatGPT if it was correct? Why do we still feel the need to loop in a human?

There's two major reasons to loop in humans.

1. How can we be sure ChatGPT knows it's correct or not? It gives out incorrect answers to complex questions all the time. The very fact that it gave out a correct answer is worth talking about.

2. The type of human that can verify a mathematical proof is also the type of human that knows the appropriate communication channels to let every other math-human know about the proof. The math-humans will know the impact that proof has on math, and how to apply it.

Because society is run by humans, not chatpgt.

my guess would be due to having an interest in the field

Is it worth it to buy a super-yacht?

Also minus the cost of the unsold copies.

It's Brooklyn. It's one room.

An expression of surprise and appreciation that the author, an expert in his field, is actually a HN participant.

Thanks for the tip off to the Israel angle to this work. I knew it must have been in there somewhere.

I think it's unlikely that many Americans know who Netanyahu is or could find Israel on a map.

sure, many Americans don't have a great relationship with the map- as per the trope. Even if many Americans are unable to locate Iran on the map, they know that Israel is pulling us into a third world war, at least every time they have to fill their gas tanks, paying historic fuel prices. Thanks,O̶b̶a̶m̶a̶ Israel!