@bkuhn @seabass I am a beneficiary of this -- I was a total rando, 20 years old or so with no accomplishments, who approached Bradley at a conference. We ended up going to dinner, and somehow this led to him hiring me at FSF.

@bkuhn Fun fact: in the original novel, soylent wasn't people.

@jmac I have said it for years. Possibly my dad says it? (he does wear suspenders)

re: unspecified horror

@mjd @simontatham @robinhouston @gjm @pozorvlak I have seen that confusion in the wild -- they don't mean trash bags that are 1.9mm thick (which would be thicker than lightweight wetsuits). They mean .019 inches.

re: unspecified horror

@mjd Smart, mathematically people like you and @danluu often overestimate how much math other people can do.

Here's a bit that I recall finding tough:

This means that you can think of the powers of x as being vectors in a 4-dimensional vector space whose canonical basis is {1, √2, √3, √6}. Any four vectors in this space, such as {1, x, x2, x3}, are either linearly independent, and so can be combined to total up to any other vector, such as x4, or else they are linearly dependent and three of them can be combined to make the fourth. In the former case, we have found a fourth-degree polynomial of which x is a root, and proved that there is no simpler such polynomial; in the latter case, we've found a simpler polynomial of which x is a root.
To complete the example above, it is evident that {1, x, x2, x3} are linearly independent, but if you don't believe it you can use any of the usual mechanical tests.

I can't remember anything about vector spaces, and I don't know any of the usual mechanical tests. That one, I could probably get through by refreshing from Wikipedia, but a while back there was one about intuitionistic logic, which I had never even heard of (even though I read and enjoyed The Intuitionist).

@checkervest That's the moment the arrow went in.

(Note that the Kennis & Kennis reproduction above is missing his numerous tattoos)

@mjd Epoxy clay (I usually buy Apoxie Sculpt) for a permanent solution. It can be very permanent; I used to install a spindle in a homemade door handle and it hasn't had any problems despite 8 years of daily use.

@crystalvisits @crschmidt @somershade.bsky.social The double-stair thing long pre-dates ebike batteries. I mean, yes, this is one of FDNY's current reasons to oppose single-stair buildings, but firefighters also often opposed bike lanes for insane reasons. You also can't have large home batteries like FranklinWH. Well, I think you can, but only if you have them 25 feet away from your house, which in practice means you can't in the parts of the city where most people live.

@mjd @pozorvlak What was it called? I would read that.

@mjd @nikitonsky "I don't have any of those. Will an Ugaritic interpreter do?"

@mjd @nikitonsky Trying to register for a doctor's appointment, I got asked for my choice of language...

@mjd But have you read Beans by Ken Albala? Lupin is in there. I also learned about Lathyrus sativus, which I tried because of the hint of danger, but didn't love. They were fine, but nothing special.

Now I would like to eat some beans so my methanogenic archaea have something to chew on.

@attoparsec @planettimmy @rygorous Grand Theft Acer

@mjd @byorgey @shapr I would add City of Last Chances et seq (Adrian Tchaikovsky). Warning: the series is not finished, but (a) each book stands pretty well alone and (b) Tchaikovsky is an absolute writing machine and the only way he won't finish the series is if he dies suddenly.

@bkuhn @richardfontana So maybe the right solution is to rewrite cp, mv, and ln to take arguments in any order, and just look at the case of the filename arguments to determine which goes where.

@mjd @MicroSFF There's a bit of this in Dungeon Crawler Carl, where they need a certain number of troll hands, but they only have one troll...

@mjd I guess the pasted sqlite output with the vertical bars confused something. Anyway, doc/fresh. Its explanation is "file versioning slang: doc=an old saved document version; fresh=a new unsaved draft; test='he opened the [doc / fresh] on his desktop'".

(Claude found ant/dec but not the very apt ant/syn. But I don't think of Ant and Dec as opposites anyway, although I guess I've never seen their show, so maybe?)

There's the sort of typical LLM losing-the-thread stuff:
(loo/dry) Indian meteorology: loo=hot dry wind of the subcontinent; dry=... actually reconsidering — domain: card gameloo: loo=lose a hand and pay a forfeit; win=succeed in taking tricks without penalty; test='she managed to [loo / win] on the final hand

I think it might be worth reconsidering the antonym-of-a-saying model, because that's got a small enough surface that a human could review the individual decisions. But if you want to play with the cycles approach, (no need to let my tokens go to waste](https://novalis.org/antonym.tgz). This one was 100% vibecoded, so probably garbage.

@mjd It's definitely partly Claude -- it didn't find dry/Dutch, or pass/bogart or leg/car or leg/stac (admittedly, that should be "leg./stac.", but I still think it's valid). OED even offers leg/lose (that is, leg as a variant of "lag" meaning to catch or apprehend). And it has some funny ideas about slang -- or at least, I've never heard:

I can't really blame Claude here -- it's hard for humans to think of these. Claude's big advantage is that it can consider every word in the dictionary without getting bored.

re: unspecified horror

@mjd So far this producing only boring results, but I'll let Claude continue to churn for another mtok or two and we'll see. From Matt Levine today, I learned "fade", which is apparently the antonym of "chase" in the sense of following a market trend.

@karen When I play Patchwork with my friend with aphantasia, I let him test-fit pieces on his board before choosing. I guess nobody does as much lookahead in Patchwork as good chess players do; that could end up pretty confusing.

I also think good chess players consider so many moves so deep that just moving the pieces would get unwieldy -- and you would still need the memory, because you would need to remember what move started a given line. This paper says that visual working memory is different from visualization, which seems weird, but on reflection maybe isn't. There's that famous study about how good chess players do better at remembering chess positions that could occur in actual games but not better at remembering truly random positions. (Or at least that's the popular description of the study; the original seems to be in Dutch so I can't easily check). Which implies that what's going on isn't just visualization, but chunking.

@mjd @byorgey @shapr That one sentence is definitely enough to get me check the book out from the library with no further research.

re: unspecified horror

@mjd I agree, but I think that there are some useful exceptions. I would not want to use a LLM to solve a crossword puzzle or to write a letter to a lover or a subordinate, or a boss that I wanted to keep.

I have often thought about having an anonymous blog just for unpopular opinions. If anyone tried to associate me with it, I would deny it strenuously. But I am too lazy/cautious for that.

re: unspecified horror

@mjd I read all your articles (except the math ones that are above my level). But I am also really conscious that folks are (rightly) nervous about LLMs sucking the joy out of everything, so I want to be extra careful.

I think "square" vs "cat" is weak but plausible -- "square" is attested as a noun meaning a square person (aside: in Hungarian, the word "kocka" meaning "cube" is used to mean "nerd").

"Innocence is logarithm" is one Claude and I came up with together.

I think it might require a fair number of tokens to produce the antonym graph, but I'll see if it's doable.

@mjd "Square as a peach"? (Emoji anatomical connotations)

@danluu I would be curious to see your benchmarks on the the "Dan Luu" prompt vs others :)

re: The opposite of “full” is…

@mjd I had Claude come up with eight examples. The best, by far was "certainty bombed the square". (Claude agreed with this). The second-best is "poverty penalizes the italic", and the rest were, IMO, not clean (e.g. "patch" as the opposite of "worm", because code patches prevent malware worms).

(Let me know if you think using a LLM sucks the joy out of the game. I asked Claude in part because I wanted to see how well it would do, which is, better than I expected but requiring significant human curation. But I spend a lot of time thinking about that cartoon with the robots doing art while humans bike around delivering food.)

@bkuhn @wouter @mjw @collinfunk @pinche_compinche This is why man strstr gives the arguments as haystack and needle instead of trying to use the word target.

re: The opposite of “full” is…

@mjd If I get a card with "full" on one side and have to pick between "empty", "self", and "new", it's going to just be guess. But maybe if I had a sentence -- "the drop is self today", and had to be the first reverse it into "the moon is full tonight", maybe?

@mogul First of May, first of May, outdoor fucking starts today!

@mjd There's also Liberia, in Costa Rica. I was once very confused when I saw an airline offering flights to bunch of Central American locations and one African one, before I looked it up. Also, I think a Saturday Times Crossword once had a clue about where one would find Angola and Brazil.

re: The opposite of “full” is…

@mjd Or "new", if you're looking at the moon.

@mjd @christianp I heard a suggestion that the stops on the 6 train be used to remember degrees Celcius -- 33rd St is ~0 C, 42nd is ~5C, 50th is ~10C, etc.

@johns Make sure you photograph all of the identifying numbers on the packaging as well as your receipt before you notify the FTC.

@crystalvisits @jeridansky Orange is the new banana.

@lumi I frequently say that my wife and I are in a mixed marriage: I use emacs and she uses vi.

@bkuhn @zacchiro @cwebber @ossguy @richardfontana Actually, I just thought of one proprietary software company that would be much happier not to have LLMs around: Salesforce. Nobody's going to buy their overpriced shit when the alternative is to vibecode something that works exactly with your business process and that you can change, yourself, any time you want at the cost of a couple hundred bucks of Claude and a few hours of work.

@bkuhn @zacchiro @cwebber @ossguy @richardfontana I don't even know if I agree with my supporting arguments. But I don't even think that it has to be someone in the proprietary world that brings a lawsuit -- it could be anyone whose code or text is trained on.

@zacchiro @cwebber @bkuhn @ossguy @richardfontana I would say it's dramatically less safe. First, there's very little incentive to go after some OSS project over an unauthorized inbound=outbound contribution. Second, if someone did, the damage would likely be a small part of a single project. Third, only a small number of parties (the employer, or maybe some other single party whose code was copied) have the ability to sue.

With LLMs, it's different. When the authors sued Anthropic, they all sued. Is a shell script that Claude generated a derivative work of, say, the romantasy novel A Court of Thorns and Roses (to pick a random thing included in Anthropic's training set)? Well, it's hard to show that it's not, in the sense that that novel is one of the zillion things that went into generating the weights that generated the shell script.

Now it happens that the authors sued Anthropic (and settled). But I don't know if their settlement covers users of Claude (and even if it did, there are two other big models). And that's only the book authors -- there's still all of the code authors in the world.

So yes, I think the risk is high. I mean, in some sense -- in another sense, it seems unlikely that Congress would say, "sorry, LLMs as code generators are toast because of some century-old laws". At most, they would set up a statutory licensing scheme for LLM providers which covers LLM outputs. Of course, Europe might go a different way, but I think they would probably do the same. Under this hypothetical scheme, if your code were used to train Claude, you would get a buck or two in the mail every year. Authors got I think $3k per book as a one-time payment, but that was a funny case because of how Anthropic got access to the books.

Still, there's a risk that Congress wouldn't act (due to standard US government dysfunction).

It seems like most people are willing to take this risk, which I think says something interesting about most people's moral intuitions.