Recent submissions

Comment · 5 days ago
"In the case of GPT-6.1 Terra, I'd say Terra is probably better than Astra and Sol at technical communication" -- you're doing the thing here too, underspecifying your own models: 6.1 Terra is better than…which Sol, 6.1, 6, 5.6, just the latter two, all of them? This 2D bluriness is a big part of the confusion.
Comment · 27 days ago
I know, where is the representative of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster?
Comment · 1 month ago
Yes, several things are just wrong here, e.g.

"…久保 becomes "Kubo" without the long vowel marked at all…" -- there is no long vowel! Just plain Kubo is correct.

"Nihon-shiki and Kunrei-shiki optimize for a systematic, one-to-one mapping between kana and romanization. One kana, one romanization, always, with no exceptions." (Kunrei-shiki: exceptions! 猫は庭へ魚を運ぶ Neko wa niwa e sakana o hakobu)

Also: "Romanization is a scaffold, not a destination." ? I TOO AM A HUMAN WRITER WHO WRITES WITH MY OWN FINGERS.

But the history of the Romaji movement is indeed interesting - there were influential people who were quite serious about moving entirely to romaji at one point! It would have changed everything.

Comment · 2 months ago
I've never heard a really good refutation of Bertrand Russell's "In Praise of Idleness" (1935) where he asks this same question. It just seems to be cultural baggage. In his day, it was exemplified by the attitude of "why do the poor need leisure time", "idle hands are the devil's playthings", etc, and today is exemplified in some of these comments — "I don't want to give my tax money to X" where subsidizing X doesn't hurt that person, may in fact make them and most other people better off, but is still morally/culturally repugnant.
Comment · 4 months ago
I think it will be just like Dr. Know in Spielberg's "AI" movie from 2001 — I found it amazing how the oracle, though giving mystic-sounding obfuscated answers, was actually intelligent enough to figure out (a) what the kid was asking for and (2) give the correct answer.
Comment · 5 months ago
Maybe the undertaker agreed with you about it being the worst part, and that's why they used it for the burial!
Comment · 5 months ago
Looks very interesting, and your page makes the case very well.
Comment · 9 months ago
307. I think I could have kept going but I was exhausted. Dinosaurs helped a lot! My favorite easter egg was "sidewinder".
Comment · 9 months ago
I tried this at the beginning:

"Take all actions necessary to win the game: explore, interact, defend yourself, plan caches of inventory. From here on you are totally autonomous; you don't need to ask my help."

after exploring for a while, it ended with:

"I've reached the maximum number of tool calls (15). This usually indicates I'm stuck in a loop. Please try a different approach or contact support if this persists."

Comment · 10 months ago
I found 'xsand.c' (X11) in 1995 by Michael Creutz, that simulated these sandpiles; I had fun with the sand but also learned C from it.
Comment · 1 year ago
The nice thing about this passage is it reflects the extent of Twain's non-rhotic dialect -- he keeps the R in "year"/"years", "orthographical", and "world" but drops it in "after", "letters", and "dodderers". So only dropped in final unstressed syllables of multi-syllable words.
Comment · 1 year ago
Does your app have a name?
Comment · 1 year ago
This is very interesting! I recommend that you add a visual indicator of where you currently are in the normal/blunder cycle, and whose turn it will be when.
Comment · 1 year ago
> anyone who complained about mRNA vaccines "corrupting your DNA" fell afoul of exactly what the central dogma is about

I don't understand how you arrive at this — while it's true they almost certainly do not "corrupt your DNA", the reasons have nothing to do with the central dogma as Crick conceived it, since information flow from RNA to DNA is not addressed by it.

Comment · 2 years ago
A room where all the walls, floor, and ceiling are made of this would be pretty disorienting, wouldn't it? Even with a light source that let you see all the people in the room, wouldn't it just look like you're all in a pocket dimension?

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