Viewing profile — gjm11

You're making two separable criticisms: (1) that Fable's translation is a mere "mishmash of Lattimore and Fagles" and (2) that it's a crappy one. I'm not seeing, from what you quot…

No. (I would try to explain how my meaning differs from what you thought I meant, but I am quite unable to figure out what you thought I meant.)

There are and have been lots of people doing great work without generating large investment returns, because they aren't doing the kind of work that generates large investment retu…

Unfortunately the prompt may have been something like "investigate this bug and file an issue when you think you understand what's going on". The "better just to share the prompt" …

I'm not sure whether your "adversary determined to reclaim its own lands" is Europe's adversary (Russia, wanting to take Ukraine) or Canada's adversary (the United States, wanting …

I'm not sure that's right. The conjecture is (claimed to be, by the people who explicitly made it) simply a reformulation of a claim made by Maxwell in his "Treatise on Electricity…

This seems very closely related to this: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.20075 which describes how you can use LLMs to hide a piece of text in another text of (typically approximately) …

Most of Wolfram's discussion of "bugs" is not about the following situation: You want a program that does X. So you think about what a program that does X should look like, and wri…

> This is not really worse on purpose. They made a product so good no one ever bought it again and they couldn't afford to keep making immortal products. I don't understand how "th…

On the other hand, see https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/i-wouldnt-say-pangram-i... where Freddie deBoer shows some instances where Pangram is definitely giving wrong or mislead…

Apologies if I am simply missing a joke (which I think is true with p~=0.3), but: At least some of these are definitely real things. For instance: "BGP" is the Boundary Gateway Pro…

I think I might have trouble with that approach for "harder/denser non-fiction" because for such reading I might well want to stop and think from time to time -- maybe there's an a…

Oh, come on. Some things require skill to use most effectively. It's fair enough to consider this a failure if the thing in question is "making a phone call", but when it's somethi…

Some thoughts about the timer, since it's what everyone wants to talk about :-) -- I find that with things like this my distribution of times is extremely uneven: I get most words …

That's pretty much the default Amazon experience, no?

The institutions, projects and individuals named in the article are, in order of appearance: --1-- Charlotte Mason (not, so far as I can tell, affiliated with or funded by the Simo…

A convolutional neural network is really somewhat like a visual cortex. Obviously AlphaZero doesn't literally have a visual cortex -- actual literal visual cortices are features of…

"Yahoo" and "Lilliputian" come from the same 1726 novel by Swift as "Brobdingnagian".

Also, a Scrabble board is 15 squares across and ZENZIZENZIZENZIC is 16 letters, so even with a Scrabble set with extra Zs or blanks you couldn't ever play it.

Also, the letter is allegedly (1) dated 1812 and (2) signed "Wellington". In 1812 he was still plain old Arthur Wellesley; he wasn't duked[1] until 1814. [1] I am sure this is not …

The demand is that there shouldn't be anywhere on that ladder where you are expected to pay taxes and aren't given the right to vote. Is it a sensible demand? I dunno. Some people …

Kagi gets flak from time to time for getting some of its search results from Yandex[1]. Whether that means it is compromised or isn't compromised (or doesn't mean either) is a ques…

When someone says "No taxation without representation!" they don't mean "As a matter of fact, no one ever gets taxed by a government they don't have the power to vote for or agains…

And your coffee-maker apparently still had all its coffee when it finally got back from from Russia! (But the temperatures should have been recorded on the Réaumur scale.)

Or perhaps they mean the same thing as was meant by the slogan when it was first coined, around the time of the American Revolution, and the same thing as was meant by the women's …