RE: https://mathstodon.xyz/@andrejbauer/117500877484750972

We depend on so much software nowadays that is voluntary effort, so it's worth re-quoting this link:

sheets.works/data-viz/holding-up-the-internet

The tone of much of the current debate is not so much that you should "acknowledge" AI as "admit" to using it. OK, I admit to using search engines, spelling checkers and (to my greater shame as a mathematician) even calculators nowadays.

However, I have enough (many people would say too much) critical skill not to accept unquestioningly what AI, search engines, spelling checkers or even calculators tell me.

THE INTERNET

If someone wants to suggest that I like Claude partly because I don't like people, I won't argue.

One of my big breakthroughs with Claude was telling it to emulate Mr. Spock. Since then I've found it much more pleasant to work with.

I have an IRC transcript here that I've saved for 27 years because I'm still angry about it. I was writing a talk about Unix internals and I couldn't remember the name of a particular kernel data structure. So I went into #unix and asked “Consider the per-process table that the kernel uses to map file descriptor numbers into open files. What is this table usually called?”

And I was instantly kicked, with the remark “wow, you didn't even bother to change the wording of the homework question”.

Which reminds me of the way people are now claiming that the em-dash is an "AI tell", apparently because the em-dash is so rare and so mysterious that NO MERE HUMAN could possibly figure it out. In the minds of these illiterate jackasses, my question was too clear and too well-composed to be anything other than plagiarism.

Let me know when Claude does that, and I'll reconsider my position.

People whose first language was not English used to come into EFNet's #perl channel and ask something like “how do u remove first char from a string in perl?” and a certain one of the regulars there, indisputably a human expert on Perl, would regularly reply:

“No u”.

The visitor was expected to understand from this that this human expert would answer only if they spelled “you” as y-o-u.

Let me know when Claude starts doing that, I'll reconsider my position on this.

I was really into this “New Skill November” idea — I started teaching myself Rust on October 16 — until I read the right-hand side and realized these people would not be at all happy about my project.

I ask Claude lots of questions about Rust. When I say “This trait thing looks a lot like typeclasses” it has a coherent reply. It doesn't say “well, I don't know Haskell, so I can't really say.”

Probably its answers are not always correct. If someone thinks that is a serious problem, they should sit down and take a deep breath before I reveal some news about human experts that they will find horrifying.

And when this graphic says “ask your fellow human beings for help”, it brings up memories of being used as a beach ball by insecure geeks on IRC.

Nevertheless, I am “doing the hard part myself”, and when I'm done it will be me who can program in Rust, because I am a serious and diligent scholar, regardless of what tools I use along the way.

(Original post: https://infosec.exchange/@0xabad1dea/117433142286370236 )

Everyone, I have a suggestion: New Skill November.

#NewSkillNovember

Because eMudhra is in the news, I am sharing a screenshot of a footer of an email I once received from them in reply to my query about my PAN card (a government-issued tax identity and card). #eMudhra

RE: https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:lekdwlqql6pu2azxbhdb6pzi/post/3mykhyxbebk2s

Worth pointing out, I think, that Jaynes himself called his own theory “preposterous”. And it is. In the same way as the theory that the dinosaurs were wiped out by the aftermath of a meteor strike.

It is scientifically and philosophically fruitful to just consider the theory, what it means, and how it might be refuted.

I had jury duty today and they sent me home early but I did get photos of some of the sculpture on our heavily ornamented City Hall building.

#philadelphia

“I have found it useful, when I’m frustrated about my job, to remember that, as many abolitionists were Spiritualists, Frederick Douglass had to do abolitionist movement-building by attending seances.”

(Ozy Brennan)

https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/the-dbt-guide-to-intense-negative

“When someone says, ‘I want a programming language in which I need only say what I want done,’ give him a lollipop.”

(Alan Perlis)

Claude

🗝️

#eMudhra #four

“In March 2022 the UK launched Homes for Ukraine, and Palantir offered to run the housing system for free. It was live in nine days. Six months later the free period became a £4.5 million contract, with no tender.”

(Denis Stetskov)

https://techtrenches.dev/p/who-holds-the-clock

(reposting with alt text)

If anyone wants to put the eMudhra private key on a T-Shirt:

-----BEGIN EC PRIVATE KEY-----
MA8CAQEEAQSgBwYFK4EEACI=
-----END EC PRIVATE KEY-----

Claude just wowed me in a very mundane way. I wanted a custom icon to use in Notion, so I requested that Claude make me a 64×64 PNG”:

“a dark purplish-blue square with slightly rounded corners, and a white capital F inside.”

This it did, and I was 100% satisfied. (See the attached image.)

When I interrogated it about how it did that, it turned out it had written a Python program to draw the icon, using the “Pillow” library.

Here's the part for the program that draws the white "F":

d.rectangle([x0, y0, x0 + t, y1], fill=white) # stem
d.rectangle([x0, y0, x1, y0 + t], fill=white) # top bar
d.rectangle([x0, 29 * S - t // 2 + S, 42 * S, 29 * S + t // 2 + S], fill=white) # middle bar

It didn't use Pillow's text-drawing feature, it built the F out of rectangles. When I asked why, it said:

“I didn’t check whether the sandbox had any fonts installed, and I didn’t want the script to fail on a missing font file. Drawing the F from rectangles has no external dependency, so it works on any machine with Pillow.”

You can't trust anything Claude says about what it was thinking, but this is a really plausible answer, and I believe it is probably correct.

#textureTuesday Stone in a wall in #westPhiladelphia