Pro tip. If you’re creating a code, make it look like something that’s not a code so your code breaker concludes there’s no code there and gives up.
My mom left behind some number code
91–100 of 103 posts
Re: My mom left behind some number code
#92Re: My mom left behind some number code
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's BS good enough for the humanities, but not the sciences.
Actually, so far I've seen humanities people discard chatGPT output faster than sciences. In the humanties there is lots of well-written text of no useful depth, so academics in the humanities get good at filtering it quickly. In the sciences, it seems "this is well written and well structured" is treated as a filter to assume the text probably contains something worth reading -- of course eventually it is found to b…
> In the humanties there is lots of well-written text of no useful depth
This is already par for the course
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/12/chatg...
> ...a professor in the U.K., used GPT-3, a large language model from OpenAI that automatically generates text from a prompt, to write it. (The whole essay, which Sharples considered graduate-level, is available, complete with references, here.) Personally, I lean toward a B+. The passage reads like filler, but so do most student essays.
Re: My mom left behind some number code
#94It's a funny reminder of humans that this random info in a notebook made the person jump to "she was into numerology and left us a puzzle" rather than "oh these are just some things she wrote down"
Remember, humans are pattern matching machines and will torture a pattern out of ANYTHING. Think horses not zebras, and it's never the compilers fault.
Re: My mom left behind some number code
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe you grew up after the age of the newspaper and the magazine, but this sort of ephemeral content was quite common in disposable media.
Sure, but my point is that mitigating the higher difficulty of finding the answer (as compared to " search the internet "), the possibilities were fewer too. " What had she read recently? Check her library records, magazine subscriptions and viewing habits. Did she spend time in a doctor's waiting room? " Not many more possibilities outside of those. One of your respondents said that finding the answer would have bee…
Having been in the 1980s a person who has taken calls like that at a library, I think you are vastly underestimating the difficulty of finding things without search engines. E.g., my dad had subscribed to the Grand Rapids Press for something like 40 years when he died. That's 14600 individual issues that would need to be searched, not counting the many magazines he subscribed to at different times. Indexes would give you article topics, but would not do much to help find articles that might have long strings of random numbers. So what we're talking about is paging through thousands to hundreds of thousands of pages of paper and/or microfiche looking to see if those random numbers appear somewhere.
Re: My mom left behind some number code
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sigh. I am going to spend too much of the rest of my life squinting at glib, confident prose and trying to figure out whether it makes any sense at all. “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.”
It's that intersection of confident and so on its face, even at first glance, wildly incorrect that it just makes you feel like you're the stupid one who's missing something obvious
Right? I have spent a long time building up an ability to measure quality of thought via quality of prose as a proxy. This breaks that almost entirely, because they decided to train it for glibness with little regard for correctness.
Re: My mom left behind some number code
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, but my point is that mitigating the higher difficulty of finding the answer (as compared to " search the internet "), the possibilities were fewer too. " What had she read recently? Check her library records, magazine subscriptions and viewing habits. Did she spend time in a doctor's waiting room? " Not many more possibilities outside of those. One of your respondents said that finding the answer would have bee…
Having been in the 1980s a person who has taken calls like that at a library, I think you are vastly underestimating the difficulty of finding things without search engines. E.g., my dad had subscribed to the Grand Rapids Press for something like 40 years when he died. That's 14600 individual issues that would need to be searched, not counting the many magazines he subscribed to at different times. Indexes would give…
The numbers IIRC were in a journal. Presumably the possible dates of the entry are pretty circumscribed.
Re: My mom left behind some number code
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Essentials of Psychology" Douglas A. Bernstein, Peggy W. Nash which is on the net has it (spaced out - "9 2 5") They reference Howard which doesn't seem to be 'available' Here is a test of your immediate memory span (Howard, 1983). Ask someone to read to you the numbers in the top row at the rate of about one per second; then try to repeat them back in the same order. Then try the next row, and the one after that, u…
[can't edit above] Just a confirmation it's in Howard 1983 through Google Books. But you have to search on the first number of each line "9836014289" because it's a table. This is why the books don't come up directly in search. Also you can't 'see' it, you just know it's there - https://books.google.com/books?redir_esc=y&id=ho8QAQAAIAAJ&f...
Happy to report the full book can be borrowed on the Internet Archive. This can be found on page 92, as indicated in your link.
Re: My mom left behind some number code
#99Just for fun, it would be cool if each of us remembers to take the time to leave at least 1 or 2 little puzzles for our descendants to figure out, as a way to have happier feelings again one last time with you, in a way. My grandpa would totally have done something like this. I remember he showed me a big book of unsolved lost locations of buried treasure, and a related story he read me about a golden key hidden behi…
> Just for fun, it would be cool if each of us remembers to take the time to leave at least 1 or 2 little puzzles for our descendants to figure out, as a way to have happier feelings again one last time with you, in a way. If you and your loved ones like puzzles, sure, but it’s a stretch to say each of us should do it. For many (I’d bet “most”) it’d just be frustrating to come up with or try to decrypt the puzzle. Do…
Aww that is incredibly heartwarming to hear about that Mario Kart story. It would be interesting for video gamers of today to leave video recordings for their descendants of their best ever runs on certain games that they love, because the idea of racing against one's grandpa's ghost to learn all his old tricks from seeing him do them is beautiful.
Re: My mom left behind some number code
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having been in the 1980s a person who has taken calls like that at a library, I think you are vastly underestimating the difficulty of finding things without search engines. E.g., my dad had subscribed to the Grand Rapids Press for something like 40 years when he died. That's 14600 individual issues that would need to be searched, not counting the many magazines he subscribed to at different times. Indexes would give…
The numbers IIRC were in a journal. Presumably the possible dates of the entry are pretty circumscribed.
He said both notebook and journal, but the page was undated, so who knows. Some people are pretty chaotic. Plus periodicals can indefinitely hang around in whole or in part, so a search that would give you some confidence could still be quite extensive.