Viewing profile — mjd

One of my life goals is to fully understand Jean Gallier's paper about Kruskal's theorem and the Feferman-Schütte ordinal.

Ignore the title of the blog itself (“Funny AI Fails”). I confirmed with the author that he wasn't kidding: * He gave ChatGPT a single 300-word prompt describing an open problem in…

Something in the main game page runs my Firefox process up to 100% CPU.

I know your comment wasn't. What do you feel you're bringing to the conversation? Are HN readers going to see your comment and say “Good thing this anonymous rando spoke up or I wo…

The author is a mathematician, so when he says “it is not in general possible to find bugs by examining the code” he does not mean it is completely impossible to find bugs. He mean…

In “The Origin of Consciousness” Julian James argues that human consciousness substantially predates language and even writing. For example he contrasts the language in the Iliad (…

I've been having fun getting better at understanding where the letters begin and end. Something like this is easy for me now: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:-516170388361w…

I think you left out an important technical advance: A theory of parsing was developed, parsing was systematized, and automatic parser generators were developed. Parsing in 1992 wa…

One of the reasons I was so interesting to find this thing I had written was that things had (in some ways) changed so little in thirty years. Today I was re-reading Donald Knuth's…

Not from the chatbot. From me. I'm the one who sent the message. And it wasn't inauthentic. I wanted to be polite and inoffensive, but I didn't know how.

Perhaps I'm wrong, but yes, I believe there is. Your own personal preferences are not universal.

As I mentioned, I'm hard of hearing and phone calls are difficult for me.

Your use of the phrase “undeserved politeness” suggests to me that maybe you aren't someone I should look to for advice on how to behave.

Two sentences in recruiter register, yes. I'm really bad at it and I do need help.

I would never use AI for something where I need my own voice, say a blog post or a personal letter. But I'm not ashamed to say that I used it last week in a chat conversation with …

Better. But I think we still are much better at building tools than at using them.

You left out perhaps the most widespread and important example! Many western European cultures, going back I think to Charlemagne, had a monetary system in which a pound was divide…

Thanks for the callout to my Telugu fractions article! If you enjoy ৪ being four and ৭ seven you will probably enjoy the thousand-year-old magic square inscribed at the Parshvanath…

That's an interesting theory but I don't think I find it plausible. Say we're cutting bars like you said. With the obvious strategy I have to cut the three bars into a total of 9 p…

Thanks, I think they raised the limit in the last few years and I forgot. I have definitely gone over the limit for single documents in the past, although I've never been over the …

PACER fees are waived if they are under $15 per quarter. That's about 150 pages of material.

Best of luck with this. About twenty years ago there was a website that displayed play-by-play of games in progress with a much more minimal display than yours: just a scoreboard, …

I've added a short paragraph to the beginning to explain what is going on.

I didn't think about this before, but it must be hard to understand what's going on for someone not already familiar with Egyptian fraction notation.