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Reminds me of "Eats, shoots, and leaves" Or is it "Eats shoots and leaves"? ;) Book "Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eats,_Shoots_&_Leaves
or the hilarious "help your uncle jack off a horse" vs "help your uncle, Jack, off a horse" example. although it does also involve caps.
Time to eat grandma
Vs
Time to eat, grandma
I think we can expect sophisticated criminals to start using AI to rewrite their correspondence.
That is by itself a linguistic choice that can be analyzed. "Hey, that guy only communicates using cutouts from magazines, what a strange choice" LLMs introduce all kinds of linguistic choices, and you can focus on those choices.
Popular crime shows like CSI (and arguably detective novels even before that) have created a false impression that forensics are an exact science that can perfectly narrow down the list of suspects to the exact person who did it. But of course in reality it is much more complex. All forms of forensic evidence are vulnerable to noise: sure, that one interesting artifact may be evidence but it also may not be, and the…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It does make more sense to me though: of course I can have my cake and then eat it. But I can't eat it and still have it afterwards. So the order implies the temporality of the actions.
^ unabomber posts on hackernews. Joking aside, the key word which is sometimes implied rather than included is “too”. The order isn’t important. The saying is both things can’t simultaneously be true.
I would argue that it is, given the semantic shift that "to have" has undergone.
“To have” historically has had a more tangible sense of holding or owning something in a lasting, physical way. For example, in medieval and early modern English documents, “to have” frequently referred to holding physical property or goods in a manner implying true, ongoing possession. For instance, the formula “to have and to hold,” found in English property grants and other legal charters dating back to at least the 13th century, specifies that the grantee possesses the land not just in theory, but in continuing, tangible stewardship. This phrase does not simply mean ownership on paper—it affirms the right to keep and maintain the property indefinitely.
Today, "to have" is more abstract, and implies enjoying a condition or availability. In modern English we often use “to have” for intangible states, experiences, or conditions, rather than strictly physical possession. We say we “have time” or “have a headache,” meaning we experience or hold a certain condition, not that we own a concrete object. Saying “I have an idea” frames “idea” as something you possess, but it’s more about the existence of that thought rather than controlling a physical thing. We “have a meeting,” which implies an event scheduled for us to attend, not an object we keep. Over time, “to have” evolved to mark various states—emotional, temporal, conceptual—thus shedding some of its older, property-focused sense and becoming a flexible verb denoting conditions or availability.
So, because we interpret “to have” as less tied tangible possession, the original logic—that once you eat the cake, you cannot still "have it"— doesn’t strike the ear as sharply when we switch the word order.
I would suggest adding a time marker like “then” (e.g., “You cannot eat your cake and then have it, too.”) emphasizes the sequence and delineates that the action of eating precedes the attempt at possession.
I wonder if distros like Tails [0] are going to start shipping lightweight LLMs specifically to reword messages. Though I’m also not sure how low of a spec you can go and still run an LLM decent enough to not be excruciatingly slow. [0]: https://tails.net/
You don’t need a special distro to run a local llm and something like ollama running llama3 7b would be just fine to reword a message on a normal laptop. Inference (ie actually using a model) is much much less compute intensive than training or finetuning. I strongly suggest people try ollama - it takes a few minutes to set up, download a local model and you’re up and running. https://ollama.com/
My specific mention of Tails was because it's designed as an ephemeral OS for the paranoid / extremely security conscious, so it would make sense that they would consider something that allows further obfuscation of a user's identity.
Here's your clew (sic) that the article may not be so reliable: It credits the FBI's linguistic analysis for locating the Unabomber, when in reality, it was his own brother who said “hey, it sounds like Ted.”