brlewis

I agree with the central thesis, but disagree with some details. I wrote a blog response: https://writing.brlewis.com/posts/2026/llm-copyeditor/

It's exceedingly charitable of you to try to infer a good reason for what they're proposing. I say "exceedingly" because in their proposal they had the opportunity to present a good reason, and they chose not to use that opportunity.

>This effect would disappear almost completely if they instead of estimating their rank they estimated their score

In the article, in the section "The effect is in the noise", just before the graphs, it says they estimated their score. Where did you get that they estimated their rank?

The key claim: "Random data actually mimics the effect really well."

This makes some sense. If people are asked to guess a number between 1 and 6 and then roll a die, the people who roll low are more likely to overestimate and the people who roll high are more likely to underestimate. But the key is precisely how well random data mimics the effect.

Have you tried putting those explanations into your repo?

Yes, that is interesting. It sounds like he was aware of the theoretical possibility of a book being regurgitated verbatim. Do you know if he was aware it had been done? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49000742

If he was not aware, I wonder if he still would have described the process as "exceedingly transformative" had he been aware.

Making reasoning easy to scrutinize:

https://gitlab.com/brlewis/solve-debate

The article gives anecdotal evidence that combining personal stories with advice in a book is more effective than delivering distilled information.

I thought the explanation for podcasts was people who drive to and from work, and don't care for current radio shows.

Accept-Language headers aren't used in a particularly good way by browsers and servers. If used better, they would be a particularly good solution.

The idea you mentioned of browsers allowing the header to be set on a per-site basis would be particularly good.

Another very good solution would be for servers to assign weight to the languages they support, and to combine their weights with the Accept-Language weights to choose the best language in common.

But even as they're implemented and used now, Accept-Language headers are already a way better approach than geo-ip.

My hunch is that Accept-Language became the best way to determine a user's language about the time it became common to bring a laptop while traveling. People use arguments today against Accept-Language that have been wrong for decades.

EDIT: Best initial way to determine a user's language. MDN is right that overrides should be possible. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Content_ne...

I think your information about lack of notifications is outdated.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/usernotifications/...

I once insisted with an optometrist that they only take my insurance number and not my SSN. They contacted my insurance and the insurance sent them my SSN.

I can't avoid medical insurance having my SSN because of tax reporting requirements.

That's distinguishing the String class from primitive string. I don't think that would still work with another `extends String` the same shape as Hash.

For example: https://www.typescriptlang.org/play/?#code/GYVwdgxgLglg9mABO...

  class Animal {
    isJaguar: boolean = false;
  }

  class Automobile {
    isJaguar: boolean = false;
  }

  function engineSound(car: Automobile) {
    return car.isJaguar ? "vroom" : "put put";
  }

  console.log(engineSound(42)); // TypeScript complains
  console.log(engineSound(new Animal())); // TypeScript does not complain

This seems like a great idea, nicely implemented.

Minor bug report: the pronunciation button pronounced Spanish "adaptar" as "ajaptar".

Deep sleep is not improved by consistent sleep/wake times, and adjustments to noise/temperature/light conditions? If not, which sleep phases are?

(I don't have an answer to the overlap question; I'm squarely in Hard Fact.)

From the article,

In fact, the lawsuits claim that RealPage shares "peer lists" with clients that tell them exactly who else is providing data to the company within a specific distance of their property.

This sounds like reassurance to a landlord that peers will mimic the same price moves. If true, I would call that price fixing.

See my answer "what's cool about deno" https://gitlab.com/brlewis/brlewis-aoc/-/blob/main/README.md...

Don't give up on your network. For applying cold, have you tuned your resume for Applicant Tracking Systems?

I am starting a new job in April with a company that contacted me via LinkedIn in December.

Isn't that assuming that Orange's legal costs would have been the same whether or not they settled?

>It is also bizarre that someone could take BSD code, make trivial modifications, and now such cannot be sent upstream or used under the original license.

No it is not bizarre. That is precisely how the BSD license is intended to work. If you want to ensure that changes fall under the original license, then you want GPL.

> especially blind players

Isn't accessibility for a web-based MUD just a matter of adding `aria-live="polite"` as an attribute to the incoming text? Five years ago I did this on https://evolvingstory.juliablewis.com/ and it seemed to work with OSX screen reading.

That's missing the point. The article isn't about an advantage for large production projects.

This article would have worked a lot better without the second paragraph. The writer's simple pleasure of typing "go run ..." should not be predicated on believing that deno doesn't exist.

>functions are global so you now need to name them uniquely to avoid collisions

I hear this here, and elsewhere I hear that PHP has evolved into a decent language. Both can't be true.

The survey methodology is biased toward old technologies, from the era where you sent HTTP headers that advertised the stack you were using. Modern stacks often hide that info. (It's also biased toward techs used in blogs, since when it detects a tech used on blog.example.com, that tech is counted for example.com)

It's possible that most commenters here are right, that the writer just has inferior reasoning capabilities compared to us, and that there's no way any of us could possibly fall for such a scam.

But I think it's more likely that there are techniques scammers can use to incrementally build trust, and that the rest of us would be wise to watch out for such techniques being used against us.

Quote: If it was a scam, I couldn’t see the angle. It had occurred to me that the whole story might be made up or an elaborate mistake. But no one had asked me for money or told me to buy crypto; they’d only encouraged me not to share my banking information. They hadn’t asked for my personal details; they already knew them. I hadn’t been told to click on anything.

The writer had carried on entire conversations with Krista and Calvin which lacked a scam angle. This wore the writer down to where she was more receptive to the stories being told to her. This is a warning to the rest of us to keep our guard up even after such conversations.

When I posed this theory to Saul Kassin, a psychology professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who studies coerced confessions, he agreed. “If someone is trying to get you to be compliant, they do it incrementally, in a series of small steps that take you farther and farther from what you know to be true,” he said. “It’s not about breaking the will. They were altering the sense of reality.”

I definitely include linters, not just style formatters.

> It happens even in fairly rigid languages like Java, I can't imagine what you'd end up with Lisp.

I imagine it would be about the same, with human factors dominating. If Lisp's flexibility pushed in the direction of inconsistency, the ease with which you could write codemods for Lisp would push in the direction of consistency.

> Has there ever even been any Lisp-based company with a 20+ year old codebase where a cast of tens of thousands of developers have worked on it over the years? I can't think of any but maybe I haven't heard of it.

I haven't heard of any either. If you hear about one, LMK if they're hiring.

I didn't end up with ))))))))) in Scheme because it was easy to create smaller functions. I do see rust ending with

      }
    }
  }

In TypeScript I'll often find myself ending blocks of code with

        });
      }
    });
  }

I'm having fun with TS, but I do miss the parentheses. They were simpler.

With Rust do you close all your } manually? Do you have an example of Rust code where the equivalent Lisp code would be harder to parse, assuming equal familiarity with both languages?