Early view, why π is in the normal distribution (beyond integral tricks)

I appreciate the concern, and my opinions on AI art are still forming so I'm curious to hear any thoughts you have on it. I agree with the goal of helping artists early in their careers, which was a lot of the motivation behind hiring Kurt in the first place. While I can definitely think of unethical uses of Midjourney, e.g. asking it to create a work in the style of a living artist, I feel happy to experiment with letting artists use it as one tool in the arsenal, as long as we're all thoughtful about how it's used. In this case, the question was never one of hiring (or licensing from) an artist vs automating that job away. It was always going to be the case that this particular artist provided something to illustrate that scene, and the question was how they went about it. Midjourney allowed for a much more rapid process in exploring many different potential approaches, even if the final results still required a lot of work by hand to make them look good and consistent. To me, this kind of usage feels like it's amplifying the kind of creativity that artists are best at, and I was really pleased with the final output. Of course, that's just my opinion, and like I said I'm all ears for other perspectives.

3blue1brown

This is a lovely video, well argued, and I agree with the comments saying that the illustrations fit well with the existing 3B1B aesthetic. However, although I'm sure Kurt Bruns worked in good faith when producing them, I was disappointed to see that the illustrations were "aided by Midjourney." As it stands, that's a very ambiguous assertion, since the most recent image black boxes can be anything from a gentle style filter to an outright hallucinator. Perhaps they're mostly Kurt's original work, in which case I question the necessity of Midjourney's involvement. However, if not, I can't help but think that the single piece of "original art," the friends from high school, could easily have been licensed from a young artist whose work is just as evocative but is entirely their own, and who would benefit from exposure on such a popular channel. Whether or not "AI art is theft" is almost certainly a false dichotomy given the range of applications that the tools have, but there's nevertheless a case to be made that we're all better off if artists and illustrators are able to make a living, especially early in their careers.

Greg Jensen

Great video! I love the part where the normal distribution just comes from asking for two reasonable properties to be satisfied - beautiful. There is a similar example in coding theory (rateless codes or fountain codes) where essentially one wants to be able to decode exactly one symbol in each step and this has to lead to exactly one symbol decodable in the next step. This single requirement leads to the Ideal Solition distribution. For anyone interested: http://www.inference.org.uk/mackay/dfountain/LT.pdf

Maxwell again! This guy - he's the key to so many advances we're enjoying right now, be it thermodynamics or the applications of electromagnetic waves. Just a note: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuWEqE4k230 has a video on Maxwell. What the historian didn't mention enough: Maxwell was also engaged in education and social issues.

While talking about Gaussians and volumes of hyperspheres, one of the fun related tricks is to generate random points in balls or on spheres using Gaussian-distributed random numbers, or vice versa. ("Marsaglia polar method")

Jacob Rus