alt Hacker NewsThe "visual intro" misses a lot, and wastes half the space by introducing the complex numbers algebraically without a single visual because it's LLM slop.
A "visual intro" that doesn't even mention Mobius transformations[1] or Riemann surfaces [2] or any of the beautiful, colorful ways to visualize complex functions [3], or..
..well, it's just lazy LLM slop.
Is it better than the average high school introduction to the subject?
Sadly, yes. But it's such a low bar.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0z1fIsUNhO4
You’ve asserted several times in this thread that this is “LLM slop”. Having read a decent amount of math content on the internet, I’m not sure I quite agree, so I’d like to hear why you think it’s LLM slop?
For one, this article has (charmingly?) terrible math rendering, rather reminiscent of someone copy-pasting random pictures of equations from the Internet and supplementing them with Word’s Equation Editor or something. An LLM would have just dumped a pile of LaTeX and called it a day. For another, I don’t sense any of the usual writing tics that are suggestive of LLM writing. I don’t claim either of those are remotely definitive, but my personal feeling is that this was largely hand-written and aimed at a very introductory level (i.e. not the sort of level that will benefit from knowing about Riemann surfaces).