Yes, black-box testing of the values of a smarter mind you don’t understand is just straightforwardly not able to reveal its values. This is a reason to do something else.

the old post was kind of oral history and more entertaining than me, ah well

of course there is some information in the file length itself, we just normally don't bother to account for that (unless we're doing algorithmic information theory or filesystem metadata coding or some such wizardry)

In some old OS (DOS? CP/M?) a 0-byte file could be executable, and running it had some handy effect of resetting some OS state just as part of the standard OS loading, something like that

the blog post is gone along with my memory, but I found the tweet version on this Talk page en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Ze...

I posted an HN link once about a useful program, 0 bytes long

I regret that I had but one subscription to cancel (after the board fight)

a pretty reasonable informal way is an odds ratio with whole numbers. I guess it risks getting taken as a bet offer with no opportunity to flesh it out first.

I was misremembering this thread: x.com/ALupsasca/st... and the next one x.com/ALupsasca/st... detail the bot contribution. (Just updating here in case it's helpful.)

Tried a couple ways to search for the tweet I saw, failed. This OpenAI tweet contradicts it: x.com/OpenAI/statu...

The first author sounds most like it to my meathead memory, but xdotcom is not responding rn

<groan> splashback for teeing up a soup of metaphor

to first order they failed by not shipping, and didn't ship anything because Autodesk pulled the plug sooner than expected.
Failed in the sense that our media are a disaster they could hope to improve on with a different seed than the early web.

you'd feel such a struggle: both "omg such a treasure to learn from" and "oh shit we must ship *now*"

(PDF) The Open Society and Its Media PDF | Electronic media present tremendous opportunities for improving the nature of society. This chapter addresses how discourse affects society, and... | Find, read and cite all the research you nee...

ye olden Xanadu people wrote about this sort of thing as one of the pathologies of legacy media, e.g. 16.6 in www.researchgate.net/publication/...

I don't even know all the notation here but it seems to say there was a lemma generally relied on which was wrong ("the power-counting argument that single-minus amplitudes vanish"). On twitter one of the authors said iirc that it was GPT that noticed that. (sorry, I didn't save the tweet.)

Disable Sequoia Bloatware Disable Sequoia Bloatware. GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

For future ref, script that claims to debloat OSX26's daemons. I haven't yet resorted to it. h/t Zooko for naming one of the daemons. gist.github.com/b0gdanw/b349...

Ahh, good to know.
btw this machine was the one I bought on the day of the tariffs to beat the price rise I expected (bsky.app/profile/abec...) but apparently Apple finessed that issue with some kind of bribe to Trump. Well, it's good hardware anyway.

The hangup might've been Apple Intelligence turned back on by the upgrade. Dunno if I inadvertently accepted that change or they just snuck it in: but I just found that my iPad had also been Intelligenced without my realizing it.

OSX 26 on an M4 with ample memory seems shockingly slow. Yesterday I was like "well, it's indexing again" but today it's more of the same. (Upgraded a week or two ago, workload of web, Preview, dev tools like clang, Claude Code.)

I should dig up my 2021 comment I guess

like my mom was a Julia Child fan converted to the church of Weight Watchers in the 80s

counterclaim, American beef eating peaked around the 1950s or 60s and is way down (and quality seems down since mid-pandemic). Seed oils way up, both directly and by proxy in chicken/pork. I don't think it's that the replacement is more delicious or healthier, it's mainly bad epistemics. TBD though

well, s/poem/play

itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archive... -- he used the word in a poem thinking it meant some kind of headgear, and maybe nobody told him otherwise for years

it is easier, noninteractively, to be like Browning bringing up twats -- though yes in the limit we're all stuck in our skulls/datacenters

fun fact, the hypertext system Xanadu used 'enfilades', like this SumTree scheme, in the 80s

Trurl and Klapaucius - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trurl_a...
the translation by Michael Kandel is extraordinary.
May be thinking of "Trurl's electronic bard" in particular.

atheist studying sources on the resurrection, concluding it really happened, and converting to satanism. I was wondering the other day if a conversion memoir ever went that way

sorry, been sick. *looks suspiciously at "low temperature pasteurized cream"*
This was ~a couple years later: web.archive.org/web/20001212...
I could elaborate on my first reaction but, like, the principal component is I'm a lot more with him than his haters