People who produce large documents with LLMs seem to frequently be under the impression that the recipient would like to receive a large document
They are pretty much always wrong
"Intro to Computer Science" implies "Outro from Computer Science"
The supply chain is so bad right now that the only RAM I could find came as a DIY kit.
I got telnet working with UNIX V4, multiplexed with my physical terminals so more Low Resource Computing attendees can play with it at once!
Early American Chinese restaurant menus were designed to be parsed as SQL.
The world's first Fedify book, Practical Fedify: Introduction to ActivityPub Microblog Development (実践Fedify——ActivityPubマイクロブログ開発入門), has been published in Japan. This is also the first book I have ever published, and it feels quite surreal that my first book is in Japanese rather than my native language, Korean. This book is an expanded version based on the official English Fedify tutorial, Creating your own federated microblog, with various additions. Yumetsuki Mama (ゆめつきママ) worked on the cute book cover illustration, which features the Fedify dinosaur mascot, Misskey's mascot Ai-chan, and the Mastodon mascot together. It is scheduled to be published in both e-book and print formats on the 22nd by Impress NextPublishing. See also the Amazon Japan.
I'm writing this in English.
Not because English is my first language—it isn't. I'm writing this in English because if I wrote it in Korean, the people I'm addressing would run it through an outdated translator, misread it, and respond to something I never said. The responsibility for that mistranslation would fall on me. It always does.
This is the thing Eugen Rochko's post misses, despite its good intentions.
@Gargron argues that LLMs are no substitute for human translators, and that people who think otherwise don't actually rely on translation. He's right about some of this. A machine-translated novel is not the same as one rendered by a skilled human translator. But the argument rests on a premise that only makes sense from a certain position: that translation is primarily about quality, about the aesthetic experience of reading literature in another language.
For many of us, translation is first about access.
The professional translation market doesn't scale to cover everything. It never has. What gets translated—and into which languages—follows the logic of cultural hegemony. Works from dominant Western languages flow outward, translated into everything. Works from East Asian languages trickle in, selectively, slowly, on someone else's schedule. The asymmetry isn't incidental; it's structural.
@Gargron notes, fairly, that machine translation existed decades before LLMs. But this is only half the story, and which half matters depends entirely on which languages you're talking about. European language pairs were reasonably serviceable with older tools. Korean–English, Japanese–English, Chinese–English? Genuinely usable translation for these pairs arrived with the LLM era. Treating “machine translation” as a monolithic technology with a uniform history erases the experience of everyone whose language sits far from the Indo-European center.
There's also something uncomfortable in the framing of the button-press thought experiment: “I would erase LLMs even if it took machine translation with it.” For someone whose language has always been peripheral, that button looks very different. It's not an abstract philosophical position; it's a statement about whose access to information is expendable.
I want to be clear: none of this is an argument that LLMs are good, or that the harms @Gargron describes aren't real. They are. But a critique of AI doesn't become more universal by ignoring whose languages have always been on the margins. If anything, a serious critique of AI's political economy should be more attentive to those asymmetries, not less.
The fact that I'm writing this in English, carefully, so it won't be misread—that's not incidental to my argument. That is my argument.
A fantastic, fast regular expression engine that supports intersection, complement, and lookarounds in linear time, combining Brzozowski derivatives and lazy DFA construction.
https://iev.ee/blog/resharp-how-we-built-the-fastest-regex-in-fsharp/
Two of the most important lessons I learned in grad school:
1) you can register anything you want as a fictitious business name and get an official looking logo and letterhead and credit card
2) if a conference rejects your paper, your business can book the next conference room over at the same hotel and hold your own workshop and present your paper anyway
Launching their new social network, W, a group in the EU posted a map of where other social networks are hosted. It showed nothing in Europe.
But their map is wrong.
Here's what Mastodon actually looks like, and what the Fediverse as a whole actually looks like.
Here's the document release you were waiting for today!
The UNIX V4 tape!
https://archive.org/details/utah_unix_v4_raw
Credits:
* Jay Lepreau for holding on to this tape
* Aleksander Maricq for finding it
* Jon Duerig for driving it to the Computer History Museum
* Thalia Archibald for doing a huge amount of research into the tape, its history, and file formats, and the upload
* Al Kossow for the tape-reading equipment and doing the actual read
* Len Shustek for the lab where the read was done and the software used to decode it
Proposal: Henceforth O(1) algorithms shall be known solely as S-Tier algorithms.
(side note: I can't believe the picture below didn't yet exist in a search result)
While cleaning a storage room, our staff found this tape containing #UNIX v4 from Bell Labs, circa 1973
Apparently no other complete copies are known to exist: https://gunkies.org/wiki/UNIX_Fourth_Edition
We have arranged to deliver it to the Computer History Museum
me: "longbool isn't real, it can't hurt me."
https://docwiki.embarcadero.com/Libraries/Sydney/en/System.LongBool
This is what it often feels like being a woman in tech. People telling you that you don’t belong here and that if they were you, they would leave. Then being forced out of spaces and erased.
This is happening at the UW Allen School right now. By the end of the year, they will likely have lost 8 women from the systems lab. They hope that no one will notice or care.
Don’t look away. It’s important to share stories like these even though they are painful.
https://www.space.com/space-exploration/nasa-celebrated-this-employees-story-of-resilience-then-tried-to-scrub-it-from-the-internet-then-fired-her
Nowadays, when a post goes viral and escapes the cozy confines of Academic Twitter, it starts making the rounds on Incel Twitter, a true hellhole.
Meanwhile, when a post goes viral and escapes Academic Mastodon, it circulates on Trans Catgirl Mastodon.
I know which one I prefer...
I’m super skeptical of the recent wave of natural-language-to-hardware research. Even if this approach succeeds, it will only result in more Verilog. Verilog is an absurd, untenable language that routinely hides problems even when humans write it. https://www.sigarch.org/ai-in-chip-design-from-basic-tools-to-llms-and-ai-agents/
@dan can I get this for your server
At last, some information from Google that students can really use!