xamuel

I did something similar in my paper "Meno II: A self-referential Socratic dialogue about memory and computer programming" [1] (published in The Reasoner). Every length-200 block of text is carefully chosen so as to steganographically encode one character of a computer program, and Socrates and Meno decode the program in real time by examining the words they've said.

I didn't do it entirely by hand, but I didn't just one-shot it with AI either (good luck). Instead, I wrote the whole dialogue in a special format specifying alternate words [like|similar to] [this|what I'm [currently doing here|doing right now]]. For each length-200 block, the number of variations grows exponentially in the number of "options" to thus choose from, so it becomes feasible to have a computer systematically choose options so as to hide the desired secrets.

The same method could be used for monospace alignment, though I suspect it would be harder the narrower the page be.

[1] http://philpapers.org/archive/ALEMIA-4.pdf

I don't know if it's OSX itself or one of the common GUI engines implementations on OSX, but I notice a lot of apps (including Firefox when you try to save a file which would overwrite another file) will have popup modals with multiple buttons and there's no way to click the non-default button with just keyboard.

For example, in Firefox, trying to save a file when a file by that name already exists, you get a "Cancel" or "Replace" prompt and you can "Cancel" by pressing return, but if you want to "Replace", you apparently HAVE to use mouse or trackpad!?!

The Beatles absolutely still exist! They published a new single in 2023 ("Now and Then") and they surgically injected slices from archive footage into new footage for the music video to make it look like young Lennon and Harrison perform alongside elder McCartney and Ringo.

And you can subvocalize (that is, think them in your mind) two different voices at once if you deliberately try to, and it's a skill that gets easier with practice. Though, no matter how much I practiced it, I was never able to get to where it would take place automatically without my forcing it.

The drug is called AD109, but the title seems misleading as the drug is apparently still under trial, though it has shown good results there so far

Before birth. ...Hey, don't point that pitchfork at me, point it at Socrates. In his defense, that kind of does describe when LLMs acquired their knowledge (if we consider "birth" to be the moment when the already-trained weights are sent to the GPU) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anamnesis_(philosophy)

Long before Erdös, we had Plato and Socrates develop the theory of anamnesis, that there is no such thing as learning, but rather, whatever we supposedly learn, we actually remember (we knew it already and had forgotten it). Presumably this should be understood only of universal facts (like mathematics), not contingent facts (like who was the president of the U.S. in 1950).

Before the discovery of the fundamental theorem of calculus, enormous ingenuity and whole careers were spent doing calculations which the fundamental theorem trivialized. To be clear, I'm not just saying that the people involved were doing lots of mechanical arithmetic (though they did that, too). I'm saying they did creative, inspired, nontrivial mathematics to calculate certain things, all of which was then trivialized and made obsolete by the fundamental theorem of calculus.

Mathematics is a bridge to what Neoplatonists call the intelligible world. Currently, mathematicians navigate that world on foot. It's exciting to think that soon we might have cars and trains in that world so we don't have to painstakingly walk everywhere.

I find that I don't necessarily mind when a book repeats itself, and a good helping of anecdotes can help a point get across. Ralph Waldo Emerson famously said, "I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me." Trying to distill a book down to the minimum logically equivalent length is like eating the smallest possible portion of a supplement one time and then wondering why it doesn't do anything for you.

It happens specifically when I wander out of network coverage. If I stay in my airbnb where I have coverage, then 0 spam

Agree. I do a lot of travel and in 3rd-world countries it is quite common to get 2g spam, it's really unacceptable that Apple doesn't offer a way to turn off 2g short of lockdown mode.

One place where the big i and small L look almost identical, and a pretty funny/annoying place for them to do so, is when you're typing a WiFi password in OSX (if you toggle "Show password"), at least as of MacOS Monterey 12.1. I also see them as almost identical in my browser's URL bar (Firefox 148.0.2 on aforesaid version of OSX) which isn't just an annoyance but might even be a security concern!

All-uppercase distorts the shapes, making them unfamiliar to ESL readers who have less practice. You must know that famous meme about how you can read English perfectly fine if the letters (besides first and last) of each word are scrambled: "Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy..."

Granted, I'm not an expert in this area. I'm actually just relaying what an ESL ex of mine told me. She hated whenever she had to read things like "Calvin and Hobbes" which use all-caps, for this exact reason. Come to think of it, she was Japanese, I wonder if it has to do with growing up with a logographic writing system.

I didn't read the OP but one pet peeve of mine is the uppercase I vs. lowercase L in sans-serif. Especially in contexts like randomly-generated passwords which you have to manually copy for whatever reason. Does the article address this in any way? Or is the context limited to "real" language where that's not as much of an issue?

Smallcaps hyperlinks is even worse than it might initially sound: many ESL speakers have difficulty with text written in all-caps, and it totally makes sense why, if you think about it.

On rare occasions where the other methods don't yield anything, I have friends in academia who have access and who are happy to help out. But yeah, it's totally medieval that this knowledge isn't freely available to the world.

I'm working on arranging talks and poster presentations at various conferences/seminars to spread knowledge of my latest academic paper, "Specieslike clusters based on identical ancestor points". In the paper, among other things, I argue that (we should define species in such a way that) for any organism in any species, either the species is made up almost entirely of descendants of that organism, or else the species is made up almost entirely of non-descendants of that organism. This is a funny property because most people who hear about it fall into one of two camps, those who say it is obviously true, and those who say it is obviously false!

The paper in question: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05274 (published in the Journal of Mathematical Biology)

Sorry for not seeing your message until now. Journals, at least in mathematics, generally don't require you to have a university affiliation, so as long as the paper is good on its merits, you can get it in, though I don't know to what extent it might be more of an uphill battle due to implicit peer reviewer bias etc. Re: reference products: one generally scraps what one can together through a combination of arxiv.org, Anna's archive, or emailing the authors.

This is a common misconception. People without academic affiliation (based on their email address) require someone to vouch for them before they can submit to arxiv. And papers submitted to arxiv (with or without affiliation) are reviewed, and many are rejected.

>Peer review has never really been blind and I suspect PIs will reject papers from "outsiders" even if they are higher quality.

I'm a complete outsider (not even in academia at all) and just got a paper accepted in the top math biology journal [1]. But granted, it took literally years to write it up and get it through. I do really worry that without academic affiliation it is going to get harder and harder for outsiders as gates are necessarily kept more and more securely because of all the slop.

[1] "Specieslike clusters based on identical ancestor points" https://philpapers.org/archive/ALESCB.pdf

J.S. Mill's autobiography is a fascinating read. He spends quite a lot of it discussing his early childhood, explaining that in his opinion he was not particularly special, rather, it was his father who pushed him to all those accomplishments. His father sheltered him from other kids so he was not aware that his accomplishments were unusual!

"The main axiom we introduce [...] states that for any organism in any species, either the species contains at most finitely many descendants of that organism, or else the species contains at most finitely many non-descendants of that organism."

That argument would apply to sets too, and yet frozenset is builtin.

This subject always seems to get bogged down in discussions about ordered vs. unordered keys, which to me seems totally irrelevant. No-one seems to mention the glaring shortcoming which is that, since dictionary keys are required to be hashable, Python has the bizarre situation where dicts cannot be dict keys, as in...

{{'foo': 'bar'}: 1, {3:4, 5:6}: 7}

...and there is no reasonable builtin way to get around this!

You may ask: "Why on earth would you ever want a dictionary with dictionaries for its keys?"

More generally, sometimes you have an array, and for whatever reason, it is convenient to use its members as keys. Sometimes, the array in question happens to be an array of dicts. Bang, suddenly it's impossible to use said array's elements as keys! I'm not sure what infuriates me more: said impossibility, or the python community's collective attitude that "that never happens or is needed, therefore no frozendict for you"

>I have zero idea how to make small talk with people I haven't known for years.

Here's a trick, it sounds stupid but it works like magic.

Just talk about mundane things that are physically present. Mention the color of the wallpaper. Mention the painting on the wall. Talk about how noisy the room is, or about the food on the plate in front of you. Literally act like you're an image classifier tasked with outputting a text summary of the scene you find yourself in...

If you're the cerebral type like I am, you'll feel afraid these topics will bore the other person. But surprisingly, they don't, if the other person is neurotypical.

Non-weird people are really weird.

>Imagine manipulating a romantic interest in to liking you, or vice versa. That’s not a very nice thing to do. It never ends well.

Someone better tell the makeup and fashion industries...

To me, the fact that a blog post would be used to train AI is a good thing. Hell yes I want my writing to inform the future zeitgeist! I guess it helps that the things I want to write about are novel things no-one has ever written about. I could see how AI would demoralize me if I were otherwise employed writing Generic Politics Blog #84773. But as someone who writes original unique content, I'm like, hell yes, the more readers the merrier, whether they be human or AI or some unholy combination!

Yep! If I knew someone IRL who was into this kind of stuff, I'd really love to experiment with this sort of thing and mirrors. Arrange so that you can stereogram your conversation partner's face with a mirror image of your own face (and that he can do the same with your face and a mirror image of his face). If anyone's in NYC and interested in these sorts of things, my email is in my HN profile "about".

Ear rumbling: https://www.reddit.com/r/earrumblersassemble/

Eye shaking: https://old.reddit.com/r/Eyeshakers/

Some of us are born with small frenula of the tongue (or we undergo tongue-tie surgery as kids) and can thus perform Khecari mudra without the traditional self-mutilation used by yoga-masters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khecar%C4%AB_mudr%C4%81 This can be useful for cleaning tonsil stones or post-nasal drip, but of course you must do so discretely since people would consider that absolutely disgusting

If you want to read out loud for long stretches of time and you hate taking breaks to catch your breath: you can read out loud while inhaling too! (It feels and sounds super weird though so this isn't very useful in practice.)

And here's a party trick related to OP's super power. Pick a distant object and cross your eyes so as to see it double, preferably with the two doubles distant from each other (i.e., cross your eyes significantly). Then, alternately switch between staring at the left double, and the right double. If you do it right, it will look like your eyes are moving in a bizarre alien way.