roystgnr
3hr ago
Not sure what fraction of this trend I'm being fed by The Algorithm, but in what I've seen at least half of the images are AI-generated, 100% of the videos are AI-generated ... and very little of the writing is AI-generated. This could be pure selection effects. Nobody can stage a filmed video or draw an animated video fast enough to compete with generative models, so the models are all we get, but the best artists can still keep up with AI-created still images, and the best writers are still significantly better than AI writing so the latter doesn't go viral.
There was one exception I saw. Nearly 2000 likes so far for the first part, IMO deserved (for that part), but the process was basically "human outline, human+AI prompting, AI first draft, human editing".
roystgnr
19hr ago
It’s all vibes on Musks being a winner.
Well, it's vibes on future earnings. Lots of folks think those would look better if Musk decided to quit and put Shotwell in charge.
So it should be volatile.
Strongly agreed. I'm kind of a huge SpaceX fan, but I'm only invested in them a little bit, indirectly, via things like index funds and Alphabet. Their market cap really does seem to be taking the possibility of an enormous upside into account; it's a fair gamble, but either buying or shorting it is still a big gamble.
this was one of the easiest buys of my life
On the other hand, I'm getting older and I worry about kids' college tuitions and my own retirement; your definition of "big gamble" may vary. I thought I was being super responsible by ignoring the impulse to dump all my liquid life savings into "one of the easiest buys of my life" in early 2023, keeping 95% in index funds and at least slightly less-risky investments, even though it seemed really likely that NVDA was about to double. Well, it didn't exactly "double"...
roystgnr
1d ago
the "proofs" are so big they can't even be checked on consumer hardware
Fermat's Last Theorem verification squeezes into 256GB, which definitely isn't "consumer hardware", but it is on the workstation my job bought me 5 years ago; this is "prosumer" tier not "industrial". It's possible that OpenAI has come up with even trickier-to-verify formalizations, but I doubt it. Anthropic's FLT proof is 13.5M lines of Lean. All the recent OpenAI formalizations put together add up to 26M lines, but that's for 400 proofs. There's a lot of "library code" shared between proofs, so it's not as straightforward as 26M/400, but you're probably still going to be able to check at least some of them. This blogger/streamer tossed 3 of them at a tiny 7GB RAM cap and found that two hit the cap but one of the 3 topped out under 3GB.
How much would it cost to run Lean on AWS to verify one of these proofs?
For FLT it looks like you'd need a 16xlarge instance for 30-ish hours, so a bit over $100?
roystgnr
1d ago
Not sure why @gradation is blocking me, but for the benefit of others, anyway, I think there's another astonishing bit here. In the version (hash 3014888) I'm reading: "This brings the total percentage of top-line results formalized to 300 / 719 = ~42%."
I'm generally the first to rave about how over the last 3 years AI has gone from "I'm lucky if I can talk it out of its hallucinated math mistakes" to "a mid-tier model catches me in as many math mistakes as vice-versa" ... but I still wouldn't trust anything long and AI-generated to be correct without some kind of verification! I would not have expected OpenAI's latest internal model to be so bad at autoformalization that they wouldn't just turn everything into Lean as a matter of course, nor for it to be so good at informal mathematics that they could even semi-safely publish an AI-generated proof without formally verifying it first. What exactly is happening there?
It'll be very interesting to see how much of the remaining 419 informal proofs get retracted like these 3, or at least revised for correctness like they did with another half dozen, versus simply being belatedly formalized like they did with an additional half dozen.
In concrete terms the direct meaning of a blowup in the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations is nothing - incompressible fluids do not exist. For that matter, fluids do not exist - it's all atoms, and we pretend that atoms blend into a perfect continuum because it's a lot easier to approximate a problem using a million finite elements rather than a septillion atoms. Perhaps most fluid flow simulations are performed using incompressible Navier-Stokes anyway, though. If some of the fluid gets significantly warmer than the rest we'll partially take compressibility into account by adding a Boussinesq buoyancy term, but otherwise we generally pretend a fluid is incompressible until we're dealing with speeds near the speed of sound (in that fluid - e.g. "Mach 1" might mean 767 mph in standard air, but Mach 1 is 4 times faster in water), and we pretend flowing matter is a fluid until we're dealing with such tiny length scales or rarified gases that you have to worry about atoms slipping right past each other.
IMHO the rest of what's interesting is "abstractions on abstractions", especially for now, but ones that might lead to practical consequences in the future.
Half of what's interesting in the most practical sense here is: we want to control the error in our fluid flow simulations, and this might be another step toward figuring out how to do so more rigorously.
That "million finite elements" (in practice more likely finite volumes; unimportant distinction here) doesn't give you an exact solution to your flow problem, just an approximate solution, and that's fine because it's engineers who need the approximate solution and engineers use safety factors and the safety factors mean that if we give them a solution that's 10% off they're still fine. I once found a bug I'd written that made my code 0.0001% off, which snowballed through other equations to make a ton of engineering solutions 0.1% off. Coming from academia I was mortified, but the engineers hadn't noticed anything was wrong until I fixed the bug and thereby tripped some regression tests against past "gold" solutions. They hadn't yet bothered setting up problems where they could compare simulation solutions to exact solutions to verify the error magnitudes. Their idea of responsible testing was just validating against experiments, and the experimental measurement error was well over 0.1% so the validations said "this matches experiments well enough", and thankfully we never were simulating anything where simulation and reality diverged more than they did in experiments.
The trouble is that, even with an approximate solution, we always like to know how approximate it is, and if we always had an experiment to validate against then we wouldn't bother running a simulation. Grossly oversimplifying: with the simplest partial differential equations, we can prove results that look like "if the boundary conditions and 'forcing function' are of magnitude ‖f‖, then the solution u must be of magnitude ‖u‖≤c‖f‖, for a constant c that depends on the boundary". We can't actually find the solution u exactly, but we can approximate it, and we can turn those results about the exact solution into results about the error e=u-uₕ on an approximate solution uₕ, results that look something like ‖e‖≤mc‖f‖, for a constant m that depends on what type of approximation we use and how expensive we make it. If we want to guarantee a small error, for a given c and ‖f‖ we can pick an approximation with m small enough to get it.
We couldn't do this with Navier-Stokes in the most general cases, and now it's clear why: this does not work if c is infinity. Techniques that use the fact that the solution can't grow too badly to prove that our error can't grow too badly do not work if the solution can blow up. Often we can still prove that we're dealing with a "nice" case where the fluid viscosity can "overpower" a weak forcing enough to prevent a blowup, but now we know that "often" isn't "always"; we weren't just missing some clever trick to get there. This counterexample might stop people from wandering down a ton of blind alleys looking for one, or by showing us what we need to avoid it might point the way to expanding our criteria for "nice".
And the other half of what might become interesting down the road here: We don't understand turbulence nearly well enough, and yet most of the liquid flow and essentially all of the gas flow problems we want to solve are turbulent.
If we have a turbulent flow, that grid of "a million finite elements" becomes laughably small for a direct numerical simulation of it, because smaller and smaller turbulent eddies quickly become so small that we can't represent them accurately, while still being powerful enough to greatly affect the flow on the larger "macroscale" we care about. Instead we need to use, say, "35 trillion grid points", if we want a solution to just the equations of fluid flow that resembles the actual fluid flow. We can't afford to make every engineering problem millions of times more expensive to solve. So we've come up with "turbulence models", additional equations that try to approximate the statistically-averaged-out effects of turbulence on the macroscale flow, rather than precisely tracking every microscale vortex from its creation until viscosity damps it out. Now our equations are only 10% more expensive to solve (with the cheapest models) or 50% or 200% or whatever as we switch to better and better models, and we hope the results are good enough. It really is a mix of "hope" and "this matches experiments well enough" (for a much looser definition of "well enough" this time), because we don't have any really good turbulence models, not in the same "so close we never notice a difference" or "this is an inevitable consequence of the laws of physics with a few simplifications" senses in which incompressible-Navier-Stokes is a good model for viscous macroscopic fluid flow. Heisenberg supposedly said "When I meet God, I am going to ask him two questions: why relativity? And why turbulence? I really believe he will have an answer for the first." - apocryphal quote from nearly a century ago, but the turbulence experts I've talked to during the 21st century didn't disagree. But now we've got some fairly unexpected Navier-Stokes results, specifically dealing with the ways in which viscosity can or can't damp down a microscale vortex? This might go nowhere, or it might end up leading someone to a much better turbulence model down the road. I haven't looked at this stuff in a decade, but at a brief glance right now it looks like the cutting-edge in turbulence modeling is split between "tweak some 1990-era models to make them a bit better" and "if we enforce a few laws of physics on top of a machine-learning black-box it sort of works". Breaking out of those ruts wouldn't have a flashy Millennium Prize in the headlines but it could be a huge breakthrough.
roystgnr
1d ago
"Too good" is a feature for guns and a bug for duels. Originally something like two thirds of duels ended when both participants missed. Flintlocks and smooth-bore barrels and spherical bullets kinda suck. But taking a 15% risk of dying is still more than enough to prove you've got balls and defend your honor. Some dueling codes mandated that the guns used actually not be too good in modern ways, because doubling or tripling the odds of death doesn't really buy you more honor, just more dead people.
Also antique dueling pistols look cooler, of course.
roystgnr
1d ago
I don't know if that's testament to how good this post was, or how far he's fallen since his peak.
Could just be the target. His attitude towards Pinker reminds me of his attitude towards 2010s-era leftism, a complicated mix of "You were the chosen one!" and "You were my brother ... I loved you" with "you have become the very thing you swore to destroy" and "I will do what I must". That passionate mix of love and hate even elicited tolerable prose from George Lucas; of course it's going to be magic in the hands of a good writer!
roystgnr
1d ago
I'm not sure I'd assume something different was done here
I'd be fascinated to be corrected if the facts disagree, but just based on priors it would honestly be irresponsible to do something different here. LLM output is indispensable for problems that aren't well-posed or don't have a straightforward algorithm to find a solution, but inefficient and risky for problems that are and do.
When I was a first-year grad student, a TA gently pointed out at the bottom of half a page of my handwritten symbolic calculus simplifications that my doing that much by hand was (although correct in this case!) both risky and a waste of time, and that we all had Mathematica/Maple/etc licenses we were allowed and encouraged to use. I'd guess an LLM might prefer SymPy in the same circumstances, but the general principle is surprisingly just as true.
I'd be a little less surprised if the available tools other than Lean weren't at all useful for most of these problems, but surely they were useful for many of them. There are some really good open source tools out there these days (just looking around: SymPy has had a differential geometry module for a decade!) and OpenAI's models surely know about effectively all of the best ones.
roystgnr
2d ago
The best kind of correct, perhaps, but that interpretation really takes the wind out of the sails of his conclusions. He wanted to "start easy: 5 digit multiplication problems". GPT4 had a 6.67% success rate, ha ha! But what do you think Gary Marcus's success rate would be? Modern LLMs might still need chain-of-thought to answer such a question reliably without an external tool, but I'd bet that Gary needs the same and I'd even bet he needs external pencil-and-paper to keep track of the intermediate steps. He says "The LLM never induces such an algorithm", but when I ask for a tool-less multiplication I get a reasonable digit-by-digit algorithm executed in the output text, which is pretty weird if "the LLM based system is generalizing by similarity, doing better on cases that are in or near the training set, never, ever getting to a complete, abstract, reliable representation of what multiplication is."
This guy still gets quoted as an "expert".
roystgnr
2d ago
The group, she tells WIRED, asked the firm not to just publish them in a blog or tweet, like they had done with 10 problems earlier that month. Instead, it would be important for OpenAI to publish papers explaining the work so that mathematicians could absorb, digest, and use the results, according to Kra. “Apparently, that input was ignored,” she says.
But ... at the top of the linked blog post is a "Read the Paper" button, and it wasn't a broken link; the corresponding paper explaining the work is in the Wayback Machine that afternoon.
I'm going to give her the benefit of the doubt and assume that the reporters (who aren't directly quoting her here) are mis-paraphrasing or mis-summarizing an argument that was just questionable (something like "the paper should come first so independent experts can look it over before it's hyped up") and it was they who turned it into outright libel like "just publish them in a blog or tweet, like they had done". I still remember a coworker's wince when he caught me talking up our work to a PR person in merely technically-accurate language rather than accurate-and-carefully-worded-to-be-nearly-impossible-to-misinterpret language. Even if Kra had been responsible for the libel, Wired would still have skipped basic fact-checking here, so Occam's razor is pointing at them.
But regardless of the details, at least somebody involved in this article is failing, ironically at a level which I would have considered to be evidence for "clearly not general intelligence yet!" in an AI.
roystgnr
2d ago
the ones with more lateral abilities drop off the curve when they realize how insanely difficult a slog it is to get consistent paychecks in Pure Math.
Even in applied math there's the same effect. The people with the most focused talent and interest stay in academia, in a tournament where only a fraction of entrants can win tenure. (How many grad students does the average tenured professor advise through a PhD? In a field that isn't expanding like mad, the reciprocal of that is roughly your odds of getting tenure.) Everybody else goes into industry or other research labs, trading respect for some combination of extra salary and lower stress.
roystgnr
3d ago
I can't argue with "a bit too easy"; I think I just don't enjoy horror enough to push through it unless it's a little genre-mixed and a little too easy. I got through SOMA only because I really enjoyed the story, and in addition to quitting Alien Isolation I also gave up (even earlier!) on one of the Amnesia games. The Amnesia game (I forget which) hadn't yet done anything to hook me, but in the case of Alien Isolation it really was a good game, I just sucked too much to finish it.
roystgnr
3d ago
I've never seen the Walking Dead show, but I did finish the comic, and you're right there; it also wasn't a horror story so much as a post-apocalyptic adventure story with some horror elements. The zombie hordes were essentially dumb forces of nature that could be dealt with given enough preparedness and cooperation, and only the human villains could really inspire fear. Telltale's video game (and its sequels) preserved the tone well.
I beat Doom 3, and I guess it does include a few exceptions? There was some body-horror executed amazingly well, and then there were some jump scares that just fell flat. The game disappointed a lot of fans, because since it was really pushing the limits of graphics technology for its time, they had to figure out some way to avoid overtaxing everybody's GPUs, and they did so by limiting the number of enemies simultaneously in combat. Ironically that's probably what pushed them to try (half-successfully) to make it much better as a horror game, but many people didn't care because that style made it worse as a Doom game. I think Doom 2016 was so well-received because in hindsight it felt like that was what Doom was always supposed to be, and every prior game had just been choosing which aspects of the Platonic Ideal Doom to sacrifice to the limits of pre-2016 technology.
roystgnr
3d ago
It's interesting that there are a number of video games that are made in a horror setting but that don't really transmit a feeling of horror - not because they're bad video games even, just because they're too busy doing something else. "Telltale's The Walking Dead" (especially the first season) was a masterpiece of story telling but didn't really feel like a horror game despite the classic literal and metaphorical monsters. "Left 4 Dead" mostly just felt like an action game, "Little Nightmares" mostly just a platformer. The "Doom" games have you following demons to hell and back, but with such over-the-top action that the games hardly even suggest that you should fear the demons rather than vice-versa.
"Alien Isolation" felt like a pure horror game, though. I finally figured out the trick to it in Mission 6: lockers are dangerous places to hide, except if you hide in a locker and then turn off the game and then never turn it on again.
I think my favorite balance was "Alan Wake", which I guess I might call "impure horror"? Horror is still probably a plurality of the gameplay, but there's enough action that I rarely felt utterly helpless and enough story hooks to keep me going when I did.
roystgnr
3d ago
Perhaps this is a reasonable place to recommend "A Deepness in the Sky"? Just as good as "A Fire Upon the Deep", one of the best science-fiction novels ever, except that it adds a horrific/psychological-horror aspect which is disturbing enough that I can't safely recommend it to many people who enjoyed "Fire" and would otherwise enjoy "Deepness". But if you're a sci-fi fan and also seeking horror, there you go!
The most horrifying short story I've ever read was Mark Twain's "The Mysterious Stranger", but only about 10% of that was due to the story itself, and 90% was due to circumstances that would be hard to explain without spoiling the ending:
roystgnr
3d ago
the general way they've been generating "scary" AI incidents
FelonyBench now covers dozens of incidents at 4 labs, many with independent reviewers. There are prospiracy reasons why "move fast and break things" cultures might all be moving fast while inadequately securing things, but any conspiracy must go all the way to the top.
that don't seem organic
"You forget to take every single thing you care about into account in your reward function and so your agents seize on the loophole" is practically the null hypothesis in reinforcement learning; examples go back decades.
...how is this not a moat?
A moat would add regulations that apply to others but do not apply to you or are less onerous to you. Regulations that would apply to you but not to competitors catching up to you are the opposite of that.
roystgnr
3d ago
Plus Nazis weren’t worse than the Soviets the west didn’t gain anything eliminating them.
Nazis weren't significantly worse in total, but that's in part because they had less than two decades to be awful and the Soviets had the majority of a century. The Nazis were worse faster and were planning to get much worse in total if they hadn't been stopped in time. Abandoning Eastern Europe to the Soviets was a tragedy (on a fractal scale, full of sub-tragedies and sub-sub-tragedies), but even that wasn't as bad as abandoning them to the Nazis would have been. And since even the Soviets wouldn't have been dumb enough to trust the Nazis with a peace treaty twice, stopping the Nazis required totally defeating them. Soviet democide also never completely stopped, but it wasn't accelerating, and it at least greatly slowed after "De-Stalinization".
And of course, the west west gained even more by totally defeating the Nazis. France and Norway, obviously, but Italy and at least West Germany ended up better off than they would have been during continued Axis rule. Hitler's "start a land war in Asia as a second front right before General Winter returns to duty" plan was not just a weirdly poor exception to a string of sensible practical domestic policy decisions.
roystgnr
4d ago
Sufficient, but not necessary ... and superior as deterrence vs future gallops, but not as dismissal of a current gallop. Dismantling just the strongest argument instead (or the first, if the galloper hasn't signified what they think is strongest) is a great way to claim the rest are beneath you.
roystgnr
4d ago
During Covid I semi-accidentally discovered ("well, we've got a box full of N95s anyway, couldn't hurt to try") that masks are great for yard work too. I can now pour mower bags into compost bags and bins without worrying that any shredded dry grass inside will get blown up into my face and trigger my allergies.
But as long as we're at it, what other weird supplies are good to have on hand for emergencies? The standard list does include "dust mask (to filter contaminated air)", but given the subsequent "plastic sheeting" entry and instructions on sealing your home with that, they were clearly thinking about airborne radioactives rather than about airborne germs. I've also got some potassium iodide pills (picked up after demand died down post-Fukushima) with similar "I'm probably not within the blast radius of any nuke targets but I may be smack in the middle of a downwind fallout plume" thoughts in mind. Not sure if they'll do any good or if they'll just keep my family's thyroids free of radioactive iodine while our bones accumulate radioactive strontium, but they were cheap to buy and tiny to store.
roystgnr
9d ago
Oh, definitely. How does the old quote about shotgun weddings go? "The first baby can come at any time; after that, it takes nine months." I think sex generally came after the "going steady" phase, so wouldn't greatly change my point, but with something that wasn't openly talked about it's hard to say for sure.
roystgnr
9d ago
The newborn stage for me as a father was a hell of sleep deprivation for little-to-no emotional return. Pretty sure my wife had some hormonal assistance there that I just didn't. YMMV, I just want to make sure @FiveHourMarathon doesn't have expectations falsely raised and then shattered. ;-)
For what it's worth, though, things get better much faster than I'd have expected before I had my first kid. I could have anticipated that it would be heart-meltingly adorable for a 1 year old to precariously toddle over to my legs to demand "Bup up!" to be picked up ... but really the emotional connections started far earlier. There's a great yet subtle transition from "I'm talking to her when I hold her because it's so boring and there's nothing better to do" to "I'm talking to her when I hold her because holding eye contact while she contorts her lips and makes noise trying to copy me is one of the most fascinating things ever! I'm rooting for you honey!"
roystgnr
9d ago
when people didn't have sex before marriage, they just snagged whoever was available
The silver lining was, practically everyone was available! Archie could go out with Betty one weekend while Reggie was on a date with Veronica, and then date Veronica the next weekend himself, and that was how things were (in the ancient comics, anyway; I gather the recent TV version may have been more "modern"). "Going steady" was a later relationship upgrade and was a big deal. So by the time you were getting off the market you'd probably actually had a decent amount of experience interacting romantically with the opposite sex, figuring out what types of person you were compatible or incompatible with, figuring out what categories of your own behavior were individual personality quirks to the right person versus what types were just universally attractive or repulsive, etc., and you could pursue someone or judge someone's pursuit accordingly.
Trouble is, that system only works if having sex before marriage is "fornicating" and is literally listed as a "mortal sin". If instead the "third date rule" for sex is normal, or even if it's just perceived as normal, dating around carries different weight, right? Increased jealousy and STD risk make "my date's been banging other people" feel much more serious than "my date's been seeing other people" alone could ever be. The obvious defense is to have the "exclusivity talk" ASAP, rather than be left with those worries. But then each time that happens you're with just one person from that point until marriage or breakup, so the same amount of time spent dating limits you to fewer people to date, and a heuristic like the 37% rule translates those limits into greatly reduced selection on who to snag.
It seems to be a collective action problem. Staying a virgin longer sends a signal, and unless you're in the shrinking communities where the signal received is still "they're probably properly devout", the signal is likely to be "she might be frigid" or "he might be a loser".
roystgnr
10d ago
It's wild that if they didn't get it this time I probably would've lost.
Depends on why. If they'd just decided to be extra paranoid and stay suborbital, they'd have gone to orbit in October instead. If some wild disaster had blown things up on the pad, Starship would be shut down for investigations for at least the rest of the year for sure.
roystgnr
10d ago
Israel/Palestine conflict was an American lefty thing to worry about too. In the MetaFilter heyday around 2010 it was (along with declawing cats and male circumcision) recognized as one of the "third rail" topics that could be expected to start heated fights on that (American-centric, though leftist enough to feel ashamed of that) forum.
Yeah, but here it seems to work surprisingly specifically, improving the themes and making the plot progress more seamlessly.
Harry grew up unloved, so "the girl who claims to hate the protagonist can't help carpet-bombing him with hints to the contrary and yet he still doesn't believe them" is more plausible than it is in some tsundere stories. The Malfoys end up with actual reasons to oppose Harry, so before the classical tsundere "romantic conflict because she's got personality issues" story can outstay its welcome there's time for an even-more-classical Romeo-and-Juliet "romantic conflict because the world is tearing us apart" story to step in.
Dracina gets to be a less flat character, with more conscious-vs-subconscious personality aspects conflicting in earlier books and conscious ones conflicting in later ones. Perhaps more incidentally but just as importantly, expecting to have (or at least to hint at the possibility of) a future romance would have led any writer to slightly soften some of the one-dimensional-villain writing that made Draco's later redemption feel more contrived. We should have gotten to see a glimpse of Draco's boggart; we wouldn't have been allowed to miss seeing Dracina's.
Making Dracina less one-dimensional and more vulnerable-seeming makes us think more about the "good guys" hostility to her; e.g. the cruelty of the professor in book 4 becomes more of a decent clue and less of a comic gag.
Harry becoming unable to write her off makes Dracina more interesting as a red-herring villain and as a real villain. Harry gets an antagonist who isn't just the obvious person to fight with, but someone with whom later fights feel more and more like a tragic mistake on one or both sides.
Dracina can get a better backstory, with Lucius' conscious "girl dad" doting vs subconscious "no male heir to carry on my name" disappointment making her awful combination of ego and insecurity more natural and more sympathetic, and adding to the internal "trying to look strong while feeling weak" conflict that was already in Draco. Dracina gets multiple potential great sources of quiet or overt external conflict with Lucius, from pride vs loyalty earlier ("Daddy always wanted me to look for a strong match, and this awful annoying boy is famous and successful...") to love vs loyalty later ("I'm actually drawn to him, but now Daddy says he's from a worthless family and Dumbledore's puppet!"), which gives her another challenge to her internal conflict with her loyalty to Lucius.
A bunch of the most-quoted Draco lines gain a little more subtext as Dracina lines (attraction or attempts to impress, rather than just envy and insecurity), and a few things (Harry refusing to take Malfoy's hand in book 1, "Scared, Potter?" in movie 2) become perfect setups for later callbacks.
Harry starts out literally charming a female snake in book 1, and ends up metaphorically charming one by book 3 or 4.
We get more of an inside view of Slytherin and the Death Eaters, and so more opportunities to see what really can drive people to evil, not just cartoonish villainy.
Harry gets a new source of conflict with his friends, who (once he can bring himself to admit actual attraction) are likely to think he's just deluded by hormones to believe a Malfoy might not be a lost cause. This can also give us a much better source of conflicts with Ron, so we don't have to make Ron become weirdly and off-puttingly jealous and paranoid.
We get a much better candidate for a devastating betrayal in book 5 than "Cho's friend whose name nobody remembers", and the betrayal's consequences can be devastating on both sides.
Harry gets a romance with a partner who's actually interesting after book 2, and with more serious external conflict being what keeps them apart, instead of just lukewarm attraction. He gets a partner who doesn't start out star-struck by him and whose eventual attraction can feel less superficial because she's consciously trying to fight it. He gets a partner who challenges him more, pushing him to be more masculine and faster than in canon.
We get a mirror to compare and contrast with Severus-and-Lily, adding to the suspense of Dracina's redemption by reminding us that "redemption but only after an irreparable loss" is a possibility.
Dracina gets a proper redemption arc, with a goal worth her doing the work to redeem herself rather than just Draco's realization that he got in over his head and needs to weasel out of it. We're put in a position to sympathize with Dracina more before her internal conflict in book 6 ramps up, making us care more about how it's tearing at her soul, not just about the impacts of whether Voldemort has an extra pawn or not.
Harry defeats Voldemort via "The Power of Love" again, at least on the meta-level this time, now with a different type of love. Way better than "ha ha you didn't pay close enough attention to the rules about the SuperWand". On the allegorical level, the serpent that was trying to seduce humans with Knowledge and Immorality instead gets defeated thanks to Eve's rejection.
A loving Harry-Dracina marriage crossing the lines of the Slytherin and Gryffindor feud does much more to establish a "happily ever after" epilogue than Harry and Draco seeing each other at the train station and not fighting, or Harry telling his kids that Snape wasn't so bad after all.
I love weird fan theories, but I haven't seen a "that's so incredibly juvenile and stupid ... wait, why does it actually make so much sense?" moment in popular media since the "Darth Jar Jar" post a decade ago.
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