BubbleRings

Using dBase3 then Clipper, I wrote this music recommending system, back in 1997.

Here it is again, reborn using Claude Code, using modern tech (Cloudflare, D1, Workers/TypeScript, Pages):

The Similarities Engine

https://SimilaritiesEngine.com

Cool. I just dropped the following prompt on the Claude iPhone app and got a nice report out of it:

Look at the part of the website at my first link, that describes how to do an audit using their guidelines, then after that, run such an audit on my website at the second link.

https://specification.website/

Www.my-personal-squarespace-site-not-a-real-url.com

I learned COBOL in college at UNC-W on punch cards in 1980.

Nevermind, I found this thing called Google that found it for me <g>

https://websites.umich.edu/~esrabkin/sf/HistoryOfSFVisualize...

Where can I find a full resolution version of that image?

I see everything twice!

Such a long article on sleep issues, anxiety, other issues, and not one mention of caffeine? I hope you have tried 6 months with 0 caffeine. Many people have the level of troubles you had, from just one or two cups of coffee a day.

If a competitor to your business discovers that you used a free online AI to help draft your patent 1.5 years ago, that competitor could then cause your patent to be invalidated, which could be greatly to their benefit of course.

The Terms of Service (ToS) for Open/Public AI (e.g., free consumer versions of ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude) often reserve the right to store your prompts and use them to train and refine the model.

Doing an enabling disclosure of your patent draft to another party that is not bound by a non-disclosure agreement is a big mistake, at least while the case law has not yet been settled.

My post was meant to be encouraging to people that might be considering local LLM for this specific use case, where protecting confidential information is of particular importance.

People do use SOTA LLM’s for other things besides computer programming.

For instance, if you are an independent inventor trying to write a patent while keeping your patent lawyer expenses to a minimum, you want to write as much of the first draft(s) of the patent as possible yourself. (You’ll save billable hours with your patent lawyer, and you’ll end up with a better patent because you’ll communicate your innovations more clearly to your lawyer.)

However, and this is the big thing, you absolutely do not want to be asking a SOTA LLM for help with the language in your patent application. This is because describing your invention to a web based LLM could be considered a public “disclosure” of your invention, which, (after a one year grace period goes by), could put your invention in the public domain, basically… and thereby prevent you (or anyone else) from being able to ever patent the invention. Plus, you know, a random unscrupulous employee at the SOTA company could be reviewing logs and notice your great idea, and file a patent on it before you do. Remember, the United States patent office went to “first inventor to file” in 2013.

Oh and don’t take legal advice from random people on the internet by the way.

Yeah no kidding. For instance, if you are an independent inventor trying to write a patent while keeping your patent lawyer expenses to a minimum, you want to write as much of the first draft(s) of the patent as you can yourself. (You’ll save billable hours with your patent lawyer, and you’ll end up with a better patent because you’ll communicate your innovations more clearly to your lawyer.)

However, and this is the big thing, you absolutely do not want to be asking a SOTA LLM for help with the language in your patent application. This is because describing your invention to a web based LLM could be considered a public “disclosure” of your invention, which, (after a one year grace period goes by), could put your invention in the public domain, basically—and thereby prevent you (or anyone else) from being able to ever patent the invention. Plus, you know, a random unscrupulous employer at the SOTA company could be reviewing logs and notice your great idea, and file a patent on it before you do, and remember, the United States patent office went to “first to file” in 2013.

Oh and don’t take legal advice from random people in the internet by the way.

As a guy paying $20 a month to Anthropic and OpenAI, my take-home message to myself about this is, “get busy with learning and doing this stuff!”

It’s like a $50 off coupon for Harbor Freight, only instead of it being a good thing that can only be used for one purchase, it is a life changing thing that will only be available (at almost-free prices) for 3 to 5 years.

I’m sorry, could you repeat that? I got distracted by the large animal with the tusk, over by the kitchen door.

Try zero caffeine for a while. It will not be easy, for the majority of people. After 3 months the worst of it will be over, and most people are withdrawal symptom free by 6 months.

Btw free means no decaf, no chocolate, no tea.

Yeah, no juggling in class. Unless you brought enough for everyone?

> But that idea is old enough to drink

Nice turn of a phrase! I was surprised it was a GoogleNope except for you, op.

This one you’ve maybe seen: https://xkcd.com/1732/

This next one I hadn’t seen. It is more “touchy-feely” and much more personal.

There’s a bit of a punch line at the end you have to look for. Spoiler alert: the punchline is: “Exxon knew” (and “here we go”):

https://xkcd.com/2500/

Somebody make a keyboard where every key is a molly guard, where only one will open at a time, then make a fun video about it. And credit me for this stupid idea. Even though it wasn’t my idea.

Every few years I find some need or excuse to install Brief somewhere. I miss that editor.

(I heard this in Homer Simpson’s voice.)

When Typora has an iPhone client as good as their other clients, I’ll give up using a mix of Typora and Obsidian and just do all Typora. Neither of them seem to do everything I need. I hope MS does Notepad right, that could be useful.

I wrote on my white board, "There goes today's hour." So if I'm walking by and I read it again, and I just spent some time on some mindless phone thing, I remember that I could find a better use of my free time tomorrow.

Hold on, registering www.0111001000101010.com before somebody else gets it...

funny. what's your site?

No numbers in Chrome on iPhone, fyi.

So is there a list of the most popular apps that made use of the infected lotusbail npm package?

If you like playing with old hardware, be aware that old CRTs have a gotcha that can getcha: they hold a charge that can shock you across the room, and they can hold that charge for weeks or more. Google how to discharge it before poking around in a CRT.

I filed my collaborative filtering patent in 1995, describing the core basic way that your “desert island 5 favorite albums”, and the 5 favorites list from many other people, could be used to recommend music you would like. The patent is a nice tutorial on how it is done, check it out here if you’d like:

https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/9d/f9/19/08ac5ef...

Here is part of the story on my website… I’ll write it up better one of these days:

https://www.whiteis.com/similarities-engine

Yeah yeah it was a software patent. If that bugs you, you can take solace in the fact that I blew it executing on monetizing it. Microsoft ended up owning it and I went on to other adventures.

Here’s a list of the 456 US Patents that cite the Similarities Engine patent as prior art: https://www.whiteis.com/cites-to-se-patent

It is not clear if using the ring requires you to wear a Pebble watch. Does it work with an Apple Watch instead? Maybe add that to your FAQ OP.

Are you saying I should have attributed, or ChatGPT should have? I suppose I would have but my spurving bearings were rusty.

First let’s have it create maybe 100 more entries, then have people vote on which are the best 30, THEN put all the effort into creating all the fake articles and discussions. As good as the current 30 are, maybe the set could still be made twice as good. And have a set of short “explain xkcd”-style entries somewhere so people can read up on what the joke is, when they miss a specific one. Then send it to The Onion and let them make a whole business around it or something.

Definitely one of the best HN posts ever. I mean come on!:

FDA approves over-the-counter CRISPR for lactose intolerance (fda.gov)

> …reused its embedding matrix as the weights for the linear layer that projects the context vectors from the last Transformers layer into vocab space to get the logits.

At first glance this claim sounds airtight, but it quietly collapses under its own techno-mythology. The so-called “reuse” of the embedding matrix assumes a fixed semantic congruence between representational space and output projection, an assumption that ignores well-known phase drift in post-transformer latent manifolds. In practice, the logits emerging from this setup tend to suffer from vector anisotropification and a mild but persistent case of vocab echoing, where probability mass sloshes toward high-frequency tokens regardless of contextual salience.

Just kidding, of course. The first paragraph above, from OP’s article, makes about as much sense to me as the second one, which I (hopefully fittingly in y’all’s view) had ChatGPT write. But I do want to express my appreciation for being able to “hang out in the back of the room” while you folks figure this stuff out It is fascinating, I’ve learned a lot (even got a local LLM running on a NUC), and very much fun. Thanks for letting me watch, I’ll keep my mouth shut from now on ha!