https://mastodon.sdf.org posts 2022/11 ~ 2025/12

More recent post-RePOSSEssion observations at CommonPlace

@emptywheel

‘A reference point .. occurred to many people’

should be

‘It occurred to many people that the storming of the Winter Palace was an analogous event in history.’

‘That this historical event also occurred to Tarrio is unexceptional’

should be

‘That it also occurred to Tarrio that this was an analogous historical event is unsurprising.’

Reference points and historical events don’t occur to people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dummy_pronoun

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tough_movement

@emptywheel

Some advice from https://fedi.tips/

https://fedi.tips/how-to-use-mastodon-and-the-fediverse-basic-tips/#WhichServerShouldIJoin

After all in the past:

It looked like rain would prevent play, but it didn't rain *after all.*

In the present:

I'm giving up. *After all*, the grapes are probably sour.

Fox: I should continue to try, but I’m not going to, because the grapes are probably sour.

Forced to choose 1 of 2 undesirable alternatives, I choose the more undesirable +one. The reason is:

The meaning in both cases: Something expected does not happen.

Archived at http://drbean.sdf.org/AfterAll.html

@emptywheel By noting the time relationship between the dangle emails, the lack of reaction, and the deleting of emails and then going no further, we are given the opportunity to link the events, but the post hoc propter hoc logical fallacy is avoided.

I don’t see speculation at http://emptywheel.net about the link. I’m pretty sure the emails were an attempt to get support.

Mastodon posts are like a prophet crying in the wilderness.

Or the professorial voice. The students may or may not be listening. The prof doesn’t know.

Chat is like a conversation. Everyone has a voice and the floor is open. Domination of the conversation is not appreciated.

But chat builds a wall. Interacting with content is smoother from the fediverse. The Internet is a reading, not writing, experience.

Expanded at http://drbean.sdf.org/MastodonTwitterIRCChat.html

% belie: It’s not used that way

https://www.emptywheel.net/2022/12/13/witnessing-the-proud-boys/ reports prosecutors saying: ‘The transcript of Ms. DiCioccio’s first interview, which was produced to the defense in June 2022, belies any claim that the government only informed her of her potential criminal liability after..’

How about: ‘The transcript … belies the government only informing her ..’

or: ‘The transcript is inconsistent with any claim that the government only informed her ..’

https://www.emptywheel.net/2022/12/07/another-late-september-russian-influence- peddler-indictment/ reports prosecutors saying:

‘The conduct of this Kremlin asset .. has shown he is ready, willing, and capable of exploiting ..’

should be

‘The conduct of this Kremlin asset .. has shown he is not just ready, willing, and able, but also capable of exploiting ..’

The blend of the RWA idiom destroys its connotation.

Or:

‘[His] conduct .. has shown [him] capable of and intent on exploiting ..’

% Microsoft 10 update prevents Windows 10 start

An old Trend Micro Virus Buster Cloud driver tmcomm.sys message of a PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA was breaking install of KB5021089 Windows 10 Version 22H2 update.

https://www.4900.co.jp/content/41464/ was helpful, but tmcomm.sys was being hidden, and I didn’t realize.

I learned more about the Windows troubling shooting than I knew and cared to know and spent more time than I should.

But it will perhaps stand me in good stead in the future.

https://www.emptywheel.net/2022/12/20/the-thinness-of-the-january-6-committees-obstruction-referral/

The value of Congress Trump investigation vs prosecution

More inportant than Trump either in an oange jumpsuit or stewing in Marm-A-Lago is the consequences of the attack on the Republic for everyone else.

Politics trumps the law.

In the spirit of checks/balances, what trumps politics and is trumped by the law?

Politics > law Law > everyday life Life > politics Or is it morality?

http://drbean.sdf.org/pics/2013-08-18-105306.webm http://drbean.sdf.org/pics/2013-08-18-124035.webm

I regret not taking video of these 2 dogs barking at each other, one bark in turn. They only did it once or twice.

Momotaro never barked at intruders until the more vocal Yuhi arrived 3 years later.

Facing each other:

Y: Yap! M: Yap! Y: Yap! M: Yap! Y: Yap Yap! M: Yap! …

I didn’t know why they were barking at each other. I imagine Yuhi wanted Momotaro to cooperate in some activity.

The OriginOfLanguage is controversial but AnimalCommunication is not.

Conversation is the MissingLink.

Birds twitter but don’t converse.

Turn-taking is what distinguishes the two, but taking turns is not animals’ strong point.

ResponseSeeking is foundational to TurnTaking.

If language didn’t exist, it would have been invented. Voltaire’s argument for believing in God.

With wikipedia links at http://drbean.sdf.org/ConversationAnalysis.html

I am a teacher of English and an editor in Taiwan, Japan and Korea and a learner of Chinese, Japanese and Korean in those countries.

Teaching English to non-native speakers is very interesting. I can compare and contrast my relationships with my NNS students with my relationships with the people I an learning from.

These are relationships between relationships which are obvious to anyone who has taught their language abroad, but don’t figure in applied linguistics.

Category theory, anyone?

Pushing the distinction between ‘droll’ and ‘troll,’ 2 quotes

It was said a million monkeys on a million typewriters would eventually write the works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not so. –Robert Wilensky

Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding. –Milan Kundera

Funny and sad.

Listening is the better part of speaking. Lose an argument, not a friend.

https://nativecamp.net/blog/20221215-korian warns Japanese in Korea to add ‘for me’ to ‘Please X’. In a taxi, ‘Please go to A for me,’ not ‘Please go to A’.

That’s odd. Explicitness about power differentials, closeness and who benefits is baked into the ways Japanese has of doing things with words at all levels of formality.

How did ‘please’ in Japanese avoid this grammar program?

Koreans are more polite than Japanese?

I’m using mastodon as a rubber duck, a device (not person) to which you direct ideas, questions or issues which confuse you and as a result of which process you find you understand more.

Teaching does this too, says wikipedia.

However, this can be offensive to people in the environment who hear you and respond, if their advice, sympathy and concern is ignored.

Is that why teachers get a lot of disrespect?

On reading https://abhinavsarkar.net/posts/static-site-generator-using-shake/ about a static site generator using the #haskell #shake build system, I am tempted by the comparison of my drab home page and Abhinav Sarkar’s attractive site to play around with the code, https://abhinavsarkar.net/code/shake-blog.html

I shouldn’t be doing this. I should be trying to generate site traffic. If no-one is visiting my site, what it looks like doesn’t matter.

@emptywheel Finding fault with DOJ English, I don’t think, “relevant to Intervenor’s academic interest,” is idiomatic. The expression is, “only of academic interest,” and is deprecatory. They should have said, “relevant to intervenor’s research interests.”

https://experimentalhistory.substack.com/p/things-could-be-better thumbs its nose at the academic #IMRAD paper, reporting a finding, robust over various conditions, that people when asked how something could be different always say how it could be better.

What would have happened if people were asked how a narrow escape from a bad situation, like #Jan6, could have turned out differently?

People might say, Trump could have served an extra term.

Which would be bad (or good).

https://www.emptywheel.net/2023/01/20/the-primary-thing-eric-herschmann-remembers-from-january-6-is-that-cassidy-hutchinson-is-wrong/ reports #J6 reporting Cipollone saying Herschmann was not ‘formerly part of the White House Counsel Office.’

Hersch’s position is ambiguous, but #J6 dictation correctness not.

It could be. Eg, Ye, the rapper formerly/formally known as Kanye West.

Running with the fox and hunting with the hounds, anyone? Sitting on the fence is fun.

But not for the fox. The dogs are baying for blood.

Waking–the road to error

In a waking reverie, pioneering psychologist, William James, thought with

Higamus, Hogamus Woman are monogamous Hogamus, higamus Men are polygamous

he had discovered a great truth.

But later, in the light of day, reflecting on that opinion, he dismissed it.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/03/28/hogamous

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/03/28/hogamous/

I thought, due to reading a HJ Eysenck popular exposition of pysychology for a lay audience, that this was an experience of William James.

Mmh.

There may be something in claims that Eysenck’s scientific work was (also) a ‘figment of his imagination’ or the product of a fevered mind.

His teacher, Cyril Burt is also known as the serial perpetrator of scientific fraud.

But, is psychology (also) a scientific fraud?

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=feynman+cargo+cult+psychology&ia=web

@emptywheel emptywheel can take a victory lap on the basis of this tour de force.

emptywheel: running circles around the frothers, around the media, and around … mmh … the situation?

Nothing is necessary, but when you’re hungry, naked and homeless in a hostile environment, you have PressingNeeds.

If those PressingNeeds are satisfied, the survival of the individual is insured (at least until the problem of OldAge, SickNess and DeatH is encountered),

The survival of the human race is not insured, unless the need/want/desire of men for ejaculation (or is it, penetration) in a woman is satisfied.

Men (ie me) are confused about the relation of what they’re doing with intimacy.

Speaking for all men, I say we are confused about the relation of intercourse with intimacy.

We understand sex is impossible without physical entanglement.

We don’t understand the emotional entanglement, attachment, bonds that result from intercourse, and which I believe (but cannot prove) are baked in to intercourse.

Seeing it as an analogue to the physical tie that locks together copulating dogs helps me understand.

Q: How do I follow Socrates and examine myself.

A: Being a teacher, especially if self-consciousness is a problem to overcome, will do it. If teaching someone whose native language isn’t yours your own language won’t do it (why are these bozos having trouble with this, something that came naturally to me and that I neither remember not ever having known nor ever having learned), nothing will.

http://drbean.sdf.org/ActionResearch.html

Wearing the scientist hat taking on self

Your dog’s collar is blue. Mine’s is red.

Is that grammatical?

Or did I just invent a new grammatical category: the possessive form of a possessive pronoun?

Is there some connection with

a friend of John’s

I think it’s more likely to occur than

a friend of John

But it would be

the collar of my dog

rather than

the collar of my dog’s

Back to http://drbean.sdf.org/WobblyEnglish.html

Justin Lieber says:

Montaigne claims consciousness for spiders and ants. Singer and Clarke deny it to sponges. Singer draws the line between the shrimp and oyster. While accusing others, he slides by the case of insects, spiders and bacteria, who apparently and rather conveniently do not feel pain. But the intrepid Midgley is willing to speculate about the subjective experience of tapeworms. Nagel drew the line at flounders and wasps, but now speaks of the inner life of cockroaches.

@emptywheel identifies a poor WaPo DOJ Jan6 investigation report claiming that DOJ was ‘cautious’ because the investigation was political, at https://www.emptywheel.net/2023/06/25/wapos-first-amendment-blindness-when-exploiting-a-media-figures-phone-gets-reported-as-cautious/

Who’s cautious is WaPo, and they’re ascribing the motivation to DOJ that motivates them. ‘We’re reasonable. We suppose they’re reasonable. We’re cautious. It stands to reason they’re cautious. In a non-accusatory form of the pot calling the kettle black.’

I suppose the claim is made in good faith, unaware it’s projection.

I had 9 slices of bread and 6 (3x2) sandwich fillings. I wanted to find how many 2- and 1- slice sandwiches I would eat before starting to eat.

I guess I could have started to eat closed sandwiches and then switched to open ones when the number of slices equaled the number of fillings left. That, is, I could have done it arithmetically. But I wanted to do it algebraically.

I couldn’t’ express the relationship.

The answer;

3 closed sandwiches + 3 open sandwiches

Practice makes perfect, but The perfect is the enemy of the good.

The perfect is the enemy of the good, and Practice makes perfect.

The map is not the territory. —Alfred Korzybski It comes with the territory.

We have dirty dishwater and dirty dishcloths, but we still get the dishes clean—Niels Bohr

If the English navy discovered citrus fruit cured scurvy in the 18th century, why was Robert Scott, RN carrying no source of. Vitamin C to the South Pole in 1912?

I confused the arguably. non-crank General Semantics’ Alfred Korzybski with the arguably crank General System Theory’s Ludwig von Bertalanffy

Caution!

Slippery slope.

Kathleen Graves, tiring after a hike across Madrid, asked, Can’t we take the Metro, but shown a map, took heart. Her conclusion, as a language teacher: Courses should have a map.

The question for her was if the aim was to encourage disheartened learners, did it matter what the map was, and inaccurate Korean maps with the purported aim of fooling invading North Korean forces were cited.

Earl Stevick, one of the three wise men of language teaching, said language study is like studying a map of a maze that you have to run in the dark.

A Japanese student in New York couldn’t make himself understood at a subway ticket booth asking for the subway map.

“I wonder if I could get a copy of the subway map?”

The person behind him in the line shouted to the station worker, “The map! The map!”

Which did the trick and led the student to re-evaluate his views on the role of grammar in communication in a foreign language.

The perfect is the enemy of the good. Make a mistake. Try it you’ll like it.

Deciding to go to Korea after 6 years doing Japan I faced a choice between going native or shouldering the white man’s burden. Except I didn’t face that choice.

I wanted to learn Korean, teach English and learn the 단소, https://namu.wiki/w/%EB%8B%A8%EC%86%8C

I didn’t turn into a native Korean, but I had a lot of fun trying.

For the last 10 weeks I have been at Pusan Iinternational Ferry Terminal, bathing in Pusan Harbor, buying food at Kahn Mart in 수정 Market, watching TV at Pusan Station & camping out overnight in a public, but unfrequented, spot less than 1 kilometer from each of these 3 places. It’s been a great opportunity to experiment/think/develop camping/homelessness/lifestyle procedures, predicated on my equipment & acquisitions, which have been great, & of course, having money.

Pusan’s great.

Terry Riley http://www.terryriley.net/: No music, No life (2023)

No wonder.

Interviewing Joe Hisaishi on TV in Japan, 2023:

Hisaishi: A long time playing music, but still things not understood. A lot of things to do. I wonder how Terry feels.

Riley: No, you’ll never finish understanding music, because it’s the Universe itself. It’s just like the Universe. Music is the best example we have, I think, to understand our place in the whole cosmos. So we won’t understand it. We’ll just keep doing it.

Larry Cuban at https://larrycuban.wordpress.com/2023/11/18/how-my-thinking-about-school-reform-+has-changed-over-the-decades/

used a past-participle noun modifier, ‘returned’ rather than ‘returning.’

\[A\] belief in the power of schools .. took me to Washington .. to train returned Peace Corps volunteers ..

In ‘tiring/tired’, the difference is between the source and target of the modifier, expanding as active/passive phrases.

But not in ‘fallen soldiers’ and ’misbehaved students. http://drbean.sdf.org/WobblyEnglish.html

Foot Heads Arms Body

Michael Foot was a founder member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament

Simon Hoggart in https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2010/mar/05/footnotes-life-michael-foot says that the sub-editor responsible for the headline didn’t expect it to appear in the paper. ``` Me at http://drbean.sdf.org/WobblyEnglish.html

Every dog leaves its mark. But, if I did not see further, it was because of anklebiters.

I always assumed scholars with unisex, not clearly women’s, names, like Dell Hymes in sociolinguistics, were men.

How was the basis for these conclusions communicated to me?

github is conducting its final svn brownout now, with 5 more hours to go.

A 24 hour period beginning December 5, 2023 at 10:00 UTC and ending the same time on December 6

Trying to commit my working copy changes to github:

GitHub has temporarily disabled Subversion support as part of a planned brownout in order to give you advance notice of the upcoming permanent removal of Subversion support on 2024-01-08. Please see https://github.blog/2023-01-20-sunsetting-subversion-support/ for details.”

What to do?

‘git’ mistyped one key to the left spells ‘fur’.

Helping a friend with home improvement, he said:

I’d like you to pull out these pins and nails.

He should have said:

Can you pull out these pins and nails?

Or

Why don’t you pull out these pins and nails?

Or even,

I’ll let you pull out these pins and nails.

Talk the talk. Walk to work.

‘A stitch in time saves nine’

is the antithesis of

‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’

‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’

is the same idea as

‘The perfect is the enemy of the good.’

Does this mean

‘A stitch in time saves nine’

is also the antithesis of

‘The perfect is the enemy of the good’?

Just asking questions.

You have a problem which you can live with, because it’s not a real problem.

What do you do?

Pro-actively, ‘A stitch ..’ says fix it.

Re-actively, ‘If it ain’t broke ..’ says don’t fix it.

Assuming a problem you can live with is a ‘good’ state of affairs, ‘The perfect ..’ agrees you shouldn’t fix it, following Murphy’s Law, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy%27s_law

How do I reconcile the role of my parents in my learning language with my inability to remember anything they ever said, except for particular idiosyncratic turns of phrase, like my mother’s ‘By the same token,..’ and in hedged swearing, ‘Hells, bells and [unintelligible]’, and my father’s ‘Discretion is the better part of valor,’ and ‘Faint heart never won fair lady.’

The family has a lot to answer for. But the desire of men to support their families as husbands, though altruistic and admirable, has more to answer for than the need of women for support through their pregnancies and their outcomes, as wives.

The perfect is the enemy of the good. But, my enemy’s enemy is my friend.

The perfect is the enemy of the good, but my enemy’s enemy is my friend.

Mistakes and failures snatched from the jaws of success are your friend.

‘Snatch victory from the jaws of defeat’, but ‘snatch defeat from the jaws of victory’?

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/06/07/jaws-of-victory/

I thought,

‘Talk the talk, walk the walk’ was a riff off Gus Cannon’s ‘Everyone’s talking about a new way of walking’, but it’s first occurrence was in 1921, 8 years before ‘Walk Right In’ was recorded.

https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/walk-the-walk.html

What connection are we to make between the ‘talk’ of ‘talk the talk’ and the ‘walk’ of ‘walk the walk’?

Turks do talk. Walks do work.

Hate the great. Grate the hate.

Hair on fire. Fare for hire.

Cook one book. Book one cook/crook.

There are stylistic reasons to disprefer using the same word as verb and noun together.

Not ‘I dreamed a dream last night,’ but ‘I had a dream last night’.

But the song, ‘Dream a little dream..’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_a_Little_Dream_of_Me

Not, ‘Do you want to drink a drink?’, but ‘Do you want a drink?’

Not, ‘Fight a fight,’ but ‘Fight the good fight.’

Rules for leaders:

Talk the talk. Walk the walk.

Rules for followers:

Do as I say, don’t do as I do.

In theory, theory and practice are the same thing. In practice, they’re different.

Riffing off Samuel Beckett’s,

‘Vent the pent,’

Vent the vent. Pent the pent.

Rules for animal husbandry:

Pet the pet. Vet the vet.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. The perfect is the enemy of the good.

Follow not the weather of the day. But good luck with the climate of the times.

Aware of changes in the weather of the day, but not of changes in the climate of the times.

A: IEEE, it’s THE organization for people in the electric, electronic and computing fields. B: No, it’s A(N) organization for those people.

Quiz: Who supports (the) IEEE? a) A b) B c) Both d) Neither e) None of the above

Quiz: Who doesn’t support (the) IEEE? a) A b) B c) Both d) Neither e) None of the above

And, on its website it’s consistently without ‘the’. On its wikipedia page, ‘the IEEE’ predominates.

Quiz: Does this inconsistency help answer the above quizzes? a) Yes b) No c) Neither

By intention, action follows intention, as night follows day.

In actuality, intention follows action as long day’s journey into night.

Or as day follows night?

Using toot CLI to post to mastodon from the command line!01b[D01b[D01b[D01b[D01b[D01b[D01b[D01b[D01b[D01b[D01b[D01b[D01b[Da cygwin command line! https://toot.bezdomni.net/

Using STDIN to post to mastodon from a cygwin command line

@birb https://taiwantrailsandtales.com

@birb https://bsky.app/profile/emptywheel.bsky.social

What is the shortest google search string returning no results, and thus the fishing devil gif

https://mastodon.sdf.org/users/drbean/statuses/112199055125647568 | published: 2024-04-02T01:35:15Z

fjween” was returning no results, but now (unhelpfully) it is finding 730 for me

The fishing devil pole moves up-n-down and the float moves to-and-fro, but the float does not go up-n-down at https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=fjhweenxxx Thus, the fishing line appears to stretch

git and svn are careful not to step on each other’s feet.

You can maintain code in a directory that is working directories/copies checked out from two git and svn repos.

They play well together.

PayPal withdrawal status notification: ‘Your 0,000 is on it’s [sic] way.’ ‘it’s’ should be ‘its’. That’s just the way it’s.

Victory Court.

These 2 example sentences from a Korean website https://www.enago.co.kr/academy/whentousee-g-andi-e-whitewritingyourpaper/ explaining the difference between ‘eg’ and ‘ie’ suggests the distinction also explains the difference between ‘a’ and ‘the’.

If you continue browsing this website, you agree to our policies

If you continue to read a website, you agree with its views

Continue to browse our website and agree with our policies

Agree with our policies and continue browsing this website

Is the idea that, “If you have a hammer, eveything looks like a nail” the same as the solution in search of a problem?

Dr Bean, it’s, “If your ONLY tool is a hammer..”

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/05/08/hammer-nail/

If I had a hammer I’d hammer in the morning I’d hammer in the evening All over this land”–Seeger and Hayes

It’s more like the universal panacea, the go-to solution you reach for, because one size fits all.

People make fun of the frog not noticing it’s being boiled alive, but less of the old person noting it’s hot today, then falling over and dying

I want to write about how humans are not immune from the same temperature insensitivity issues frogs are and draw conclusions about what this means for doing something about global warming.

Actually, apparently humans are able to distinguish room temperature differences of less than one degree Celsius.

Humans: sensitive to the weather of the day, but insensitive to the climate of the times.

Humans are well aware of whether the weather today is hotter or colder than the weather yesterday, but not aware, because they’ve forgotten, whether the weather yesterday was hotter or colder than the day before.

‘Spring is in the air’, but the seasons creep up on you. The discomfort of winter seems like just yesterday, and suddenly it’s spring.

Follow not the weather of the day, but good luck with the climate of the times.

‘There is this quote by – I forgot who, that programming in Coq is like doing brain surgery over the telephone.’ https://haskell.foundation/podcast/46/

That’s just how talking is.

Many a slip between cup and lip.

I wanted to find that quote which I read recently, but I forgot where I came across it.

I suddenly read something which brought the connection with coq to mind, at which point I realized where I had read it.

But now I can’t remember what I was reading 5-10 minutes ago, which led me to think of coq.

How are then and now?

Now and then.

The flip side of dreaming I am a butterfly is the fear, on waking up in the morning and relieving myself, that I am about to wet the bed.

No strings attached” (read: On the take)

Mark Jason Dominus leads off a post revealing his inconsistent beliefs about K2 being in Africa, and Kilimanjaro being the highest mountain in Africa, with a discussion of inconsistency-tolerant logic and the principle of explosion, at https://blog.plover.com/math/logic/k2.html

The principle of explosion is the idea, as he explains, that, in logic, if you can prove both some statement and its opposite, then you can prove every statement. he concludes he guesses he believes everything now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/paraconsistent_logic

I think he probably linked K2 with Kilimanjaro becuse they both start with ‘K’.

My inconsistency is a belief about inconsistency.

With Emerson, I believe inconsistency is the foolish goblin of small minds.

But I also believe, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.

Dr Bean, there’s so much wrong with your beliefs that I don’t know where to start.

time-consuming”. but no “consuming time”, https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=time-consuming%2Cconsume_INF+time

Led by https://www.emptywheel.net/2024/05/02/background-for-a-new-book/ to read https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/protagoras/ about Protagoras, I was surprised how easy and interesting it was, for a philosophy article, even with the scholarly apparatus. A page turner. Protagoras and the Pragmatists, anyone?

Stackholders: Stakeholders who are stockholders, so named because they have a stack of the money

I’m thinking about the relationship between my belief that family members lack insight into the motivations of others in the family and my lack of candor with my family about my own motivations. My conclusion is I am making a mistake or the family plays its cards well.

npm” mistyped one key to the left spells “bon”. Well, that is certainly better than “git,” which spells “fur”.

You can say ‘an audio player having a user interface similar to midnight commander’ and ‘an audio player having the user interface of midnight commander’ to mean the same thing, ie, the interfaces could be exactly the same.

But ‘an audio player having the user interface similar to midnight commander’ is not OK.

Supposing an audio player with 2 interfaces, so like 2 different audio players, after introducing it, ‘the audio player having the user interface similar to midnight commander.’ is OK.

According to wikipedia, “Pierre Bourdieu was born in Denguin (Pyrénées-Atlantiques), in southern France, to a postal worker and his wife. The household spoke Béarnese, a Gascon dialect. In 1962, Bourdieu married Marie-Claire Brizard, and the couple would go on to have three sons, Jérôme, Emmanuel, and Laurent.”

Ha! ha! (Is this how it is said in French?)

The fog of war, given the equivalence with love of “All is fair in love and war”, implies confusion, ignorance and uncertainty about those we love, and by extension, all social intercourse

The occasional unconventionality of the English spelling in imagemagick docs makes me wonder if the magick in ImageMagick is not an archaism but a spelling mistake.

Custardian: The Keeper of Just Desserts

How did Lancelot Andrewes’ ‘double-edged sword cutting sin both right and left’ become the two-edged sword of the gun which you use to shoot yourself in the foot?

If #Pandoc could convert markdown into #Anki slide decks, it would be Anky-Panky.

Wait. Someone did that: https://github.com/kamalsacranie/anki-panky.

https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/hanky-panky.html

It stands to reason that a term originally denoting ‘a secret, illicit but/and titillating (while innocent) activity’ would gain sexual connotations, but I think it can still be used without them.

Stakeholder (to examination team): ‘No hanky-panky with the exam results.’

Getting aro.undo.it, a new domain name, I will do something with it when I get a round tuit.

Italian and Spanish apparently have the 2 words, “gusto” and “disgusto”. I thought “disgusto” would be a nice word to have in English, or at least as a domain name, “dis.g.us.to”.

’Tis the season made for treason. ’Tis the reason to be jolly.

Who put the ‘rude’ ‘prude’ practicing ‘prudence’ in ‘jurisprudence’?

A good name for a named pipe function would evoke the “this is not a pipe” painting image

And mash that image with “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet”

‘The issue is moot’. and ‘Muted disagreement to that.’ What is the connection between ‘moot’ and ‘mute’?

Homophones for some.

I am confused by the 2 Cloudflare and Crowdstrike names

Those who laugh last longest.

But the last laugh is on those who have lasted longest.

As the saying goes, those who laugh last laugh longest.

‘help’ typed one key to the left by the right hand spells ‘geko’

Kyoto U’s English name for its language and literature faculty of ‘Faculty of Letters’ didn’t seem right. Googling it shows its a Japanese neologism. ‘Man of letters’ does sound right, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/man_of_letters

The calligraphic style imposed by the brush in old Japanese documents written before introduction of the pen makes them unreadable (?) nowadays by ordinary Japanese people. Compare 1830 Welsh document, http://history.powys.org.uk/history/newt/01evid2.html with ..

With the right hand one key to the left, ‘man’ spells ‘nab’.

Flipping the medical prof pictures from white coats to off-duty snaps or from suits to operating room scrubs at http://www.urology.kuhp.kyoto-u.ac.jp/general/about/staff.html

The orthopedic surgeons caught on a stressful day at https://www.seikei.kuhp.kyoto-u.ac.jp/?

The cancer surgeons stand tall at https://oncology.kuhp.kyoto-u.ac.jp/, put in a good mood for their ID photos at https://oncology.kuhp.kyoto-u.ac.jp/about/staff/

I can never remember the name of Joey Hess’s unix moreutils’ ‘sponge’, which allows you to soak up standard input and write it to the file it originally came from, action which will fail otherwise. The command which always comes to mind is perl’s ‘slurp’, which reads input to the end of the file, rather than line by line. Both start with ‘s’ and are CCVCC words.

The Kyoto-U faculty heads appear to have tasked labs with producing the thumbnails for lab links on department pages themselves. Some profs appear to have a better grasp of design principles than others. https://www.t.kyoto-u.ac.jp/ja/divisions/departments/es

Kyoto-U epidemiologists dress up for historically-themed cosplay at https://biostatistics.wixsite.com/biostatistics

Another of Hess’s moreutils is ‘vipe’ which I use all the time.

I sometimes forget and type ‘view’ which appears to be a ‘vim’ alias. And then my pipe gets broken, as ‘vim’ won’t take standard input.

I like the ‘vipe’ name. I think of vipers.

Kyoto-U materials science profs display their thumbnail assignment results at https://www.t.kyoto-u.ac.jp/ja/divisions/departments/mc, with 10 thumbnails showing varying degrees of visual design principle appreciation

The more I use /usr/sbin/alternatives, the less I see the need for it, remembering the quirks (and names!) of the various programs for which it creates symlinks

The contrast between #dorothyparker ’s poetry and her witticisms could not be more stark. @dorothyparker

sober is an adjective, but sober up is a verb.

Other examples?

-en is more productive.

sicken lessen, but not more-en. weaken, but strengthen not strongen. shorten, but lengthen not longen. Lower, but no lowen, and heighten not highen.

widen, but narrow is already a verb. freshen, and the opposite of fresh? quicken is in common use? No slowen.

enlarge, but largen and enlargen?

-ize is more productive.

http://drbean.sdf.org/AdjectiveParticleVerb.html

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=made+NOUN+become&year_start=1700&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3 shows ‘made NOUN become’ having limited use from 1800, after swings in popularity in the previous 100 years, before enjoying something of a comeback in the last 70 years.

I feel resistance to the expression. It’s splitting up one event into an unnecessary 2.

Better is a SVOO or SVOA construction. ‘make NOUN do’ or ‘make NOUN be’ (?) is OK.

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread, but Zuckerberg advises moving fast and breaking things. No fool he! (I’m sure I’ve heard/seen that expression but it’s not turning up in https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=no+fool+he+END

Napoleon replaced Laplace as minister with his brother after 6 weeks, later saying Laplace made of ‘every issue the problem of a calculus’ (literally, ‘introduced the spirit of the infinitesimally small into government’ https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Laplace/

grammarly does well with the past tense of ‘lead’ at https://www.grammarly.com/blog/led-lead/ but ddging it, AI summarizes it as ‘Learn the difference between led and lead, and how to spell the past tense of lead correctly. Led is the correct spelling, while lead is a common misspelling and also a metal or a verb.’ A verb? Which one? AI lost track of the argument there!

I’m confusing cybersecurity prof, Jim Dempsey with Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, (is he related to swing’s Dorsey brothers), and the latter with politican, Thomas Dorsey (no, he was the bandleader) Dewey! (not to be confused with other famous Deweys), who I confused with ncurses developer, Thomas D (I couldn’t remember his family name, the same as that of a friend, Rob D) Dickey! What they have in common, J. or T D. initials and 2 syllable family names D(ick|emps|ors|ew)ey.

I read recently about someone in the public eye who committed suicide after being charged with some crime unjustly (?) (I can’t remember their name)and remembered Swartz downloading JSTOR articles in an MIT closet. I wondered if prosecutors regretted their actions which resulted in those suicides. Probably not. But, probably they regretted Epstein’s act of suicide which resulted in their inability to try him. ‘We wanted to get that son of a bitch.’

The prof got the students to climb up the mountain https://www.saitolab.gsais.kyoto-u.ac.jp/about-us/

‘A marched up to G’ and ‘A waltzed into G’s space’ say less about A’s gait but more about how G viewed A’s action. In both cases G did not expect, invite or want A to approach. But is this reading dependent on the existing relationship between A and G? What about, ‘The police waltzed into the room and marched up to the speaker at the front’?

In vim, I don’t see a digraph for ＠ U+FF20

‘AT’ is good, because ‘At’ is the digraph for 0x40 COMMERCIAL AT

:digraphs AT 65312

And now ‘ga’ on ‘＠’ in my text shows the digraph is ‘AT’!

w3m is better than lynx in a pipeline because it formats tables and the columns can be copy-and-pasted.

But you need to specify MIME type: w3m -T text/html

Thanks to the literature geeks at Merriam-Webster for https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/retcon-history-and-meaning, their run-down on ‘retcon’. It appears we can’t even rely on novelists to get their facts straight.

Wouldn’t a better term be a ‘paint-over’ or ‘do-over’. ‘Conan Doyle doovered (did-over?) Sherlock Holmes’ death in a later novel.’

I wonder what was being painted over in the theological context, according to the originator of the term.

If the first day of the month is a Sunday, then the 15th, 14 days after, is also a Sunday. And the Friday, 2 days before that, is a Friday the 13th. That’s as far as I’ve gotten in creating an algorithm for determining the day any date is.

It’s more like a warning on the first day of the month that a Friday the 13th is coming up.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determination_of_the_day_of_the_week

‘redden’, ‘whiten’ and ‘blacken’, but not ‘bluen’, ‘greenen’ and ‘yellowen’ See https://www.google.com/books/edition/Introduction_to_English_Morphology/NmiDDwAAQBAJ?hl=zh-TW&gbpv=1&dq=%22&pg=PA61&printsec=frontcover

‘We have taken/followed your advice to fix it’, but not ‘We have taken/followed your suggestion to fix it’. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=taken+your+suggestion+to%2Cfollowed+your+suggestion+to%2Ctaken+your+advice+to%2Cfollowed+your+advice+to

But, ‘Your suggestion is well-taken’ to mean, ‘We agree with your suggestion,’ is good.

Getting up to end an unproductive train of thought.

The spirit is weak, but the flesh is willing.

A meditation on mediation

‘just,’ typed with left hand one key to the right spells ‘judy’

Education reformers saying how teachers should teach on the basis of their own experience as students is like having gone to many concerts and seeing how music is played, you believe you know how to play an instrument.

Students have little interest in what teachers are doing outside ‘show time’, because their performances are less than compelling

So I guess it’s not surprising that students have no more insight into their teachers’ work, taking place before their eyes, than they do of their parents’ work lives, usually hidden from view.

The photographer got all the Japanese researchers to pose and to smile for webpage photos. How did they do it? https://www.icems.kyoto-u.ac.jp/people/

What DO students learn from teachers, other than the subject (haha), (and from parents, other than how to speak the language)?

As with education reformers who have opinions about how to teach having just been students in classrooms, anything I say about parenting, not having been a parent, is the result of having had parents.

When asked about it, I say, Kids take over their parents’ lives, but that can’t be really true. They did have lives outside parenting.

Not having been one, I don’t have actionable ideas of how to be a parent. I might think I would be influenced by my experience as a child.

Management is doing things right; Leadership is doing the right things. –Peter Drucker

There’s a disconnect between thought and action. Not the ‘the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak’, ie, the hot head with cold feet kind, but the ‘spirit is weak, it’s the flesh which is willing’ kind. That is, action is in the front-seat driver’s seat, intention is in the backseat driver’s seat, believing it’s in control.

Whereof we cannot speak, we must remain silent. –Ludwig Wittgenstein We know more than we can say. –Michael Polanyi

That’s my story, anyway, and I’m sticking with it. It helps explain why my sense of self-efficacy is unaffected by my failure to achieve anything.

Teaching: The last refuge of the manipulative. –Dr Bean

Rather than go down the #zettelkasten route, I will rely on the command line, my files and my webpage, http://drbean.sdf.org to find sense in my thoughts.

Cory Doctorow at https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/19/gander-sauce cites his friend’s, ‘Just because you’re on their side doesn’t mean they’re on your side’ in his discussion of the 3-corner relationship between authors, publishers and AI. I’d assign it a name, the corollary of ‘My enemy’s enemy is my friend’: ‘When my friend’s friend is my enemy, whose side is my friend on?’ Doctorow’s friend’s phrasing has more bite, but neither of those 2 is my friend.

The friend’s formulation is close to, ‘Just because you’re paranoic doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you,’ but the opposite of that.

A conversation could go,

A: I thought you were my friend. Whose side are you on?’ B: Just because you’re on my side doesn’t mean I’m on your side!

The take-home? In the end, all relationships are transactional, made up of a mixture of cooperation and conflict aided by mututal misunderstanding and wishful thinking.

https://bitemyapp.com/blog/family-routines/ helped me understand the work that being a parent entails. I can’t say it was eye-opening, but it made me realize that developing appropriate routines myself would be work and it would involve learning more than I knew just by having been a kid with parents. Similarly, learning how to cope/survive as a teacher was not helped by what I had learned about teaching as a student.

I’m composing my toots on the command line, like this, ‘echo “I’m composing my toots on the command line” | toot post’

The ultimate goal is to do all computing on the command line.

Japanese graduation photo: All 14 women in kimono, but only 2 of the 6 men

I think computing and the Internet is great. And I think making private data about me available to all who want it is OK. I think it’s a natural extension of the free/open source philosophy. But I want to speak out against AI. I resolve not to use it. I use ddg search and I hear it uses MS Bing search results. That’s also OK with me. But the AI-massaged (?) search results are not OK

I don’t like, ‘Learn about the life and achievements of René Descartes, a French mathematician, scientist, and philosopher who is considered the founder of modern philosophy.’ the way the Descartes entry at https://duckduckgo.com/?q=descartes+site:www.britannica.com is summarized.

I guess it’s AI responsible for the good job extracting the important parts from the 1st paragraph this way, but I find ‘Learn about ..’, used here and elsewhere, condescending when it could just be ‘Discusses ..’. Tell me what the article says, but don’t tell me what I should do with it! I can read the article and don’t need to be told who Descartes was! Search is great, but ’the closest approach to the original sound (QUAD loudspeaker slogan), please.

A believer in #POSSE, I am motivated by https://twocanoes.com/knowledge-base/owning-it/, boosted by molly0xfff, to write scripts to post to my own site from the command line, making it as easy to do as posting a mastodon toot from the command line, and to do it at the same time.

#POSSE (Publish Own Site Syndicate Everywhere) motivated the developer at https://twocanoes.com/knowledge-base/owning-it/ to cease embedding their youtube videos on their website and instead embed them from their storage on the cloud and then also publish them on youtube independently of their website. I don’t think this was #vendor_lockin by youtube, but the lack of #vendorlockin needs to be considered another of the virtues of #POSSE

I need to be careful of who I accuse of #vendor_lockin here, but my failure to export my mastodon toots as plain text, giving up on an attempt to extract them with jq (a great tool) from the JSON glob exported by ActivityPub a couple of months ago, contributes to my support for #POSSE. It doesn’t t lessen my appreciation for mastodon and ActivityPub as vendors/brands of the FOSS software I’m grateful for.

Searching for an explanation of the chemistry of family emotional bonds that relies on #imprinting events rather than on more general causes identified with the bonds’ effects, we need look no further than intercourse (even just courtship, perhaps) and childbirth, events which are powerful enough to flip any number of switches and push any number of buttons.

But given these emotional relationships between husband and wives, and mothers and children, how do we explain the bonds between fathers and children and between siblings? Given father -> mother, and mother -> child, perhaps the relation is transitive, so we have father -> children, in the spirit of ‘Love me, love my dog.’

But observation of the difference in the behavior of women and men around small dogs shows no triggering event is needed to explain the mothering by women of small cute living things.

POSSE (Publish on Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere) is great. The issue is control. Not control of other people, but having what I do work or not work. On my own site, I don’t need Big Tech to have a voice. And I really feel a sense of achievement getting the machine to do what I want, which contributes to the image I have of myself, my feelings of self-efficacy, which are not supported in my interactions with people, because they don’t do what I want.

CUSP stands for Control, Uncertainty, Support and Pressure, a recipe for stress. The framework of some Scottish psychologists, it helps understand its causes. Lack of Control is whatever you do not working. Uncertainty is not knowing how things are going to work out from this point on. Lack of Support is when you don’t have anyone to turn to and the people around you aren’t helping. Pressure is the demands made of you by others or yourself.

DIY (Do It Yourself) is a second initialism after CUSP relevant for POSSE. Rather than being a consumer of a vendor’s work, relying on them to give you a voice on the Internet, following the DIY philosophy you become a producer and build the means to do that yourself. Building a platform gives you a sense of achievement and is satisfying. Open source/free software gives you the material and the tools to build the platform, and building it is half the fun of having an Internet presence.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/ finds more instances of ‘Frankenstein’ than ‘Albert Einstein’ and ‘Sherlock Holmes’ in books since 1990. Removing the latter 2’s first names from its search, there is a much greater number for ‘Holmes’ and then ‘Einstein’ than for ‘Frankenstein’. ’Holmes’s percentages had been going up before 1880 before Sherlock Holmes appeared and have been going down since 1900 after his presence was established, so they must be the result of other people having the same name

I wrote a script, post.sh to publish a post on my homepage, http://drbean.sdf.org, for use in a pipeline that then posted the content, composed on the command line, using toot to https://mastodon.sdf.org. It just marshalled various pandoc, svn and lftp operations from the command line I was already using to post to my homepage, but getting it to do this unattended required some tightening up. I committed it to my github curriculum repo in the pages dir, but it is of limited use to anyone else.

I’m not a python person, so I had to try some things to install the python toot mastodon cli tool. To make it easier next time:

1. pull from the upstream ihabunet/toot github repo,
2. make clean, to remove previous build config,
3. make, to build the wheel,
4. run ‘python -n pip install dist/toot-0.45.1.dev4+g89ea460.d20241105-py3-none-any.whl’, because pip isn’t installed.

‘The following notations are defined’ doesn’t seem an idiomatic way to introduce a list of symbols for the entities in a model

drbean, see ?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_notation

Walking is falling forward #fallingforward one step at a time

In Japan, 1980-1986, visiting 2004-2020, and resident 2023-

An apocryphal Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times! https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/12/18/live/, quoting a British diplomat: The Chinese have lived so much in peace, they have an uncommon horror of political disorder. Better a dog in peace than a man in war, is their maxim. Their rule is that the worst are fondest of change and commotion, hoping that they will benefit. By adherence to a steady, quiet system, affairs proceed without confusion and bad men have nothing to gain.

I don’t have any interest in good/bad design (I’m graphically challenged), but I know it when I see it. The entities responsible for the ‘look and feel’ of CJK university web pages range from outside contractors where either designers or computer nerds are in control to the prof in a lab, who will also probably be graphically challenged, and not a web developer.

The entities responsible for the ‘look and feel’ of CJK university web pages range from outside contractors where either designers or computer nerds are in control to the prof in a lab, who will probably be graphically challenged, and not a web developer.

Smiles, but apparently not completely at ease, at https://iryouyakuzai.amebaownd.com/ Front row: 6 women, 5 in colorful kimonos, with prof in formal suit. Behind: 5 women, 7 men dressed casually.

Turned off by the morbidity, if not titillation, of her vision and the conventionality of her poetry, I yearn for the wholesomeness of her ‘Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker’ and ‘Better a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy’

Professional portrait photographer got subjects to smile while composing the shots and working with the camera for https://www.ritsumei.ac.jp/ise/teacher/

I don’t understand what a gene is. Is it a physical thing or is it information encoded in DNA which is then ‘expressed’ in some physical thing where ‘transcription’ is also involved? Compare and contrast with language and thought. The image I have of this ‘expression’ is breast milk expression, rather than impression/expression.

Is ‘expression’ an expression without meaning? No need is felt for a concept to explain the relation of software and hardware or the role of information in computation. What was Francis Crick thinking when he, apparently, introduced the expression, ‘expression’?

I have a broad understanding of the sciences and liberal arts

I go the extra mile, not just to get the English right, but to ’dot the i’s and cross the t’s.

Aargh! Missed the final closing quotation mark, marking the end of the ‘dot the i’s and cross the t’s’ quotation.

http://hackeducation.com @birb

https://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/ @birb

https://quoteinvestigator.com @birb

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/ @birb

Apparently because of Descartes’ delicate health, at school he was allowed to stay in bed until 11am, a practice which he continued all his life. But was this possible on becoming a gentleman-soldier after graduating from law school? Anyway, he died of pneumonia in Sweden after Queen Christina wanted him to give her geometry lessons at 5am in the morning.

A portal for my understanding of the implications of Artificial Intelligence developments

Clever Hans, the horse which understood German and answered questions with numerical answers by tapping its foot, has been used to warn of the dangersof relying on the unexplained, possibly illegitimate, features found by machine learning to understand things.

While I think machine learning apps, and chatbots in particular, are CleverHanses, I think interaction with them is why Clever Hans is important. We get the impression we are in the presence of mind, although we know we aren’t. Recognizing they are not agents raises doubt, then, when interacting with real people, about their (and our own) agency.

‘Hey! Who are you calling mindless?!’

Constitution law prof on AI role in court cases: ‘the plausibility and attractiveness of using AI to generate clear legal answers .. is significantly greater and less controversial outside the rarefied realm of the Supreme Court. But, ’AI sycophancy [tailoring output to match user preferences] .. suggests that the use of LLMs for constitutional interpretation will implicate substantially the same theoretical issues that today confront human constitutional interpreters.’

@birb https://simonwillison.net/

@birb https://simonwillison.net/

Descartes could have thought of cartesian coordinates in bed in the morning looking at the ceiling. Perhaps there were geometrical designs there. At least, the ceiling would have been rectangular. However, the real story is he wasn’t trying to algebraise geometry, apparently, but rather analyze arbitrary 3-line geometry problems by adding 2 oblique lines with determinable relations with the original 3 lines, solvable using ruler and compass. And the rest is history.

Changing a light bulb, and facing up toward the light, I wondered if this would lead me to doing something as great as Descartes.

For the photos in https://www.ritsumei.ac.jp/gsls/education/faculty/ the photographer must have caught the profs around the department in a good mood.

https://note.com/kataha_comjo/ @birb

https://kisokuseikan.seesaa.net/ @birb

The prof with students each year from 2016 under cherry blossoms, but no kimonos on lab members page (scroll down) https://www.ritsumei.ac.jp/pharmacy/analchem/member.html

https://www.freepublicapis.com/ @birb

https://publicapis.io/ @birb

The teacher wearing a researcher hat

https://substack.com/@timmiller15 @birb

https://www.thebulwark.com/ @birb

@birt@rss-parrot.net https://www.techdirt.com/

@birb https://www.techdirt.com/

I’m following https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@zarfeblong even though I have no intention of playing any of his work (Interactive fiction, narrative in games, and so on) because his story is so interesting. See https://www.filfre.net/2024/12/a-conversation-with-andrew-plotkin/

My http://drbean.sdf.org/toeflic TOEFL/TOEIC Test site has two fake personas, besides myself.

One for the admin login is ‘Ed Min’, a homophone of ‘admin’ for merry/marry/Mary merger speakers. ‘Min’ is the US’s 5026th most common surname.

The other for using it without making an id, is ‘Tess Staker’ for the ‘test’ id, password ‘Testing123’. ‘Tess Staker’ is a homophone of ‘test taker’ in normal speech. ‘Staker’ is the 18,849th most common one.

Invite ‘Ed Min’ and ‘Tess Staker’ onto your site.

誰かに NTT Flets ADSL Web Caster 3100SV をあげたい。詳細は http://drbean.sdf.org/WebCaster3100SV.html

https://blog.orange.tw/posts/2025-01-worstfit-unveiling-hidden-transformers-in-windows-ansi/ Easy-to-read explanation of how ‘just-trying-to-be-helpful’ Best-Fit Unicode equivalents in MS code pages are attack surface for injection of naughty characters in code-page-handling apps. Eg, Yen (¥), and Won (₩) map to ‘\’ on JK code pages. (＂ U+FF02) maps to ‘“’. The map of (√π⁷≤∞) to ‘vp7=8’ makes sense, is nice, but what were they thinking\!?

I don’t get the feeling AI-generated texts are on top of the argument. There aren’t explicit signals showing the argument hangs together. They aren’t producing incoherent text, but they aren’t convincing me they understand that coherence is a significant feature of text.

What would convince me is evidence grammatical and lexical devices that give texts cohesion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cohesion_(linguistics)) are handled well.

Last year ChatGPT summarized a Grammarly explanation of lead/led.

’Learn the difference between led and lead, and how to spell the past tense of lead correctly.

Led is the correct spelling, while lead is a common misspelling and also a metal or a verb.’

‘A verb’? Which one? AI lost track of the argument there, with a cohesion mistake!

‘A verb’? Not ‘the verb’?

Try,

Led is the correct spelling, while lead is a common misspelling and also the name of the/a metal as well as a/the verb.

I just realized Christopher Cross is ‘Chris Cross’ (crisscross). Is that his real name?

On seeing the name ‘Chris Voss’, the negotiations guy

If you can get the legs through the arms, you can wear an undershirt as pants.

And you don’t have to take them off to use the toilet.

But the only way to wear pants is as a hat.

Flip the script: The goodies are the baddies. And the baddies are the goodies. And the ugly are the bad goodies, rather than the good baddies.

@birb https://danieldrezner.substack.com/

@birb https://danieldrezner.substack.com/

https://electoral-vote.com/ @birb

The cognitive dissonance I experience when touchie-feelie, ex-FBI negotiator Chris Voss says, ‘When you stop seeing people as wrong, and start seeing them as human, something incredible happens.’

bsky.app.profile.rparloff.bsky.social @birb

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu @birb

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?feed=rss2 @birb

@birb ! According to W3C, at https://validator.w3.org/feed/check.cgi, https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu @birb is a valid RSS feed, but ‘but interoperability with the widest range of feed readers could be improved by implementing the following recommendations ..’ What say you?

https://retractionwatch.com/ @birb

https://pubpeer.com @birb

I unfollowed dorothyparker@mas.to. They should let NAACP profit from people who want to read her poetry by buying her books. No, the real reason is reading her is titillating at the same time as being depressing, a combination of emotions I don’t want.

How does trial and error align with Lewin’s Action Research. One of his principles was, ‘There’s nothing as practical as a good theory’. What is trial and error anyway? It seems like it can be used with negative connotations, ‘Trial and error isn’t working.let’s try Response Surface Methodology’

A: After a lot of trial and error, we gave up. It probably wasn’t going to work, anyway. B: Sour grapes! 1/2 #trialanderror #actionresearch

Trial and error’s the repeated doing of something despite not being successful, in search of success. It’s bottom-up rather than top-down. Which doesn’t align with, ‘There’s nothing as practical as a good theory.’ 2/2 #trialanderror #actionresearch

@birb https://languagelog.ldc.penn.edu

@birb https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?feed=rss2

Putting my sock with a faint line down the middle on in the dark, and looking at the sock, trying to put it on straight, I saw the line. I said, ‘That’s it there.’ 1/2

Unexpectedly finding under a piece of paper a faucet washer that was ours, thinking that I had probably put it in a can of washers a friend had loaned us, I said, ‘Look’ 2/2

YAML doesn’t like pandoc’s fenced divs, :::

It’s hard to distinguish Deja Sans Mono font’s comma and period ( ‘,’ & ‘.’ ) at smaller point sizes

I like one-upping Google AI Overview when I ask for hits on ‘HCM conceptual framework’ (when I mean Hybrid Choice Model) and I get returned something about Human Capital Management

It’s hard to distinguish DejaVu Sans Mono font’s bold zero and eight numeral glyphs ( ‘0’ & ‘8’ ) even at larger point sizes

‘Another self-imagined opponent of fascism doing precisely what the fascist wants them to do.’ https://www.emptywheel.net asking you not to laugh at the Insult Comedian

It’s amazing what one, toxic low-IQ, low-EQ (?) Bad Actor achieved. Drawing a cadre of bad actors out of the woodwork. And bringing a once Mighty Nation to its knees.

The people let him get his hands on the levers of power. And the powerful have a lot to answer for condoning bad behavior. Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, anyone?

Trump: stress crack? No doubt it is stressful being Trump. A CUSP anlysis, ie Control, Uncertainty, Support, Pressure Control: He has hands on the levers of power, and has Congress under control, so less stress, Uncertainty: The known unknowns, eg economy, foreign/domestic affairs are unpredictable. He is not worried about the unknown unknowns, I think, but much stress Support: The cadre’s existence lessens stress Pressure: From opposition outrage, but also self-imposed by fear of jail,

I needed to wrap ‘toot activate ACCOUNT && toot tui’ to avoid a race condition opening multiple accounts. I named the script ‘active_tooter’

https://mastodon.sdf.org/users/drbean/statuses/114180583319097744 | published: 2025-03-18T00:23:55Z

What does development of the Fosbury Flop high jump tell us about the way the creative process works? 1/2

And why does this mean summarizing AI is not going to do more than regurgitate knowledge that is already known? 2/2

drbean, it might, however, bring to light knowledge that is little known.

Converting unix timestamp to relatable date

date -d @1742345286

‘date +%s’ returns secs since 1970 ‘date -d today’ returns today’s date ‘@’ is needed before timestamps

March 18 was Global Recycling Day. But before recycling try repairing! s/Reduce Reuse Recycle/Reduce Reuse Repair Recycle/ s/減らすこと再使用資源化/減らすこと再使用修理資源化/ s/ 감소 재사용 재활용/ 감소 재사용 수리 재활용/ s/減用重用再利用/減用重用修理再利用/

‘agent’ is an autoantonym or contronym, meaning either a doer or actor with some sort of free will or control over events, or alternatively an entity controlled by a principal, but with some independence. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/agent doesn’t recognize any tension between the meanings.

A Mail User Agent is your email app. A Mail Transfer Agent is what moves the email between mail servers. In which sense is ‘agent’ being used? The first sense, rather than the second, perhaps? Or, both?

@birb https://bsky.app/profile/emptywheel.bsky.social

How good is the picture I form of ‘you’? Because ‘you’ is out there, but in the mind, behind the bone curtain, a confusion of complicated impulses and motivations, represented by language (a blunt weapon), lack of candor and kayfabe poses, and my drawing of the picture ‘you’ present is limited by my prejudices and lack of EQ. Compare and contrast with the picture I have of you on the Internet and me represented to me by my self-image 1/2

Thinks more about my picture of ‘you’: The Johari Window breaks down one’s self-image into what others and oneself know/don’t know about the self. How to interface that window with a window on ‘you’? Also, knowledge is correct/justified belief. Rebreaking the window’s non-/knowledge distinction into 1. no idea 2. false/contested belief/understanding 3. true belief/understanding. The join between the 2 windows is joint mis-/understanding of each other? 2/2

I think my choice of high jump development for the vehicle of my attack on AI may have been prompted by my own need to get a heavy object to a high position.

Every morning, it requires some physical effort to lift a heavy, foldable mattress and put it into a waist-level shelf, stack blankets and quilt on top of that, and stuff a bulky air quilt in the space left below the top of the closet.

I like to think of the best way to accomplish that.

After the fact, I see parallels with high jumpers thinking of new ways to lift themselves up into a high position. At the time, I only chose the high jump because I thought the creative process involved in its development would be impossible for AI.

I too could have developed the Fosbury Flop!

Views on self | As viewed by self | +————+————–+ |unknown | known |

Others view| unknown| Unconscious| Private self | +———–+————+————–+ | known | Blind spot | Public (open)|

Array of 4 10s with perl, bash

perl

drbean@ESPRIMO ~/dot $ perl -e “@x=(10)x4; $,= ; print @x” 10 10 10 10

bash

drbean@ESPRIMO ~/dot $ x=($(printf “10 %.0s” {0..3}))

drbean@ESPRIMO ~/dot $ echo ${x[*]} 10 10 10 10

Why despite never knowing, did I never think Dell Hymes, Hilary Putnam, and one other linguist or philosopher with a name I associated with being a woman but can’t remember at the moment, were not men?

@birb https://hildabastian.wordpress.com/

@birb https://www.electoral-vote.com/

@birb https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/

I’m trying to think of another way of expressing the ‘slippery slope’ idea. I had it in mind, but have now forgotten. 1/2

No, what I think I had in mind was an equivalence of the principal-agent problem and double agents. 2/2

What is the principal-agent problem and double agents an example of. 3/2

@birb https://kisokuseikan.seesaa.net/

First sentence of Pride and Prejudice

IT is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of +a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

This, as first sentence, can only be an indication that Jane Austen the 18-th century lady writing Pride and Prejudice intended it to be a novel about sex and mating rituals.

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/taming-the-dogs-of-war—u.s.-efforts-to-control-proxy-forces is a review of book on control of US proxy forces explained either by principal-agent theory or bureaucratic politics. Trying to remember what I read which led me to the principal-agent conflict-of-interest problem. May have been a books.google.com search for some phrase. Think it’s important when taking note of information to also note its provenance (eg, with the referrer in an HTML link. 1/2)

Searching in qutebrowser’s history cache, I find a link to https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/principal-agent-problem.asp. The link before that is to https://www.schneier.com. Yes! https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/04/rational-astrologies-and-security.html. Schneier portrays it as developer as meat in the sandwich between user and employer. A reader corrects him. The canonical form is the double, duplicitous agent. I may have seen another prompt, but probably not https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=goals+of+a+tool%2Cthe+purpose+of+a+tool 2/2

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=68761 draws attention to a study by Japanese researchers of children’s understanding of deixis, using ‘今の見た?’, which translates as ‘Did you see that?’ though google translates it as ‘Did you see it now?’ Deixis as explained by Halliday and Hasan’s 「Cohesion in English」doesn’t work the same way in East-Asian languages.

So a way to counter AI on their own territory with their embrace of agency is to bring up the principal-agent problem, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_problem and double agents, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_agent

I’m thinking of writing a messager bot that sends mastodon toots to multiple-instance servers from one master copy.

I will name it ‘masto_master_messter’.

It would be worth acquiring the marry-merry-Mary merger and non-rhoticism (well, I already have non-rhoticism), to be able to pronounce this as,

‘mɛstə_mɛstə_mɛstə’

@birb https://jazztokyo.org

@birb https://www.logicmatters.net

@birb https://www.logicmatters.net/feed

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Vonnegut, ‘On May 14, 1944, Vonnegut returned home on leave for Mother’s Day weekend to discover that his mother had committed suicide the previous night by overdosing on sleeping pills.’

‘ghq’ is a great name for ghq, https://github.com/x-motemen/ghq, a repo clone organizer because GHQ, or General HeadQuarters, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/GHQ, can also be read as Git headquarters, it putting all your (git) repo cloning in one localized place

Many of the truths we cling to depend greatly upon our own point of view. –Obi Wan Kenobi

If your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/05/08/hammer-nail/

Compare and contrast.

https://mastodon.sdf.org/users/drbean/statuses/114398592014836382 | published: 2025-04-25T12:26:24Z

Reblogging a status on one instance you are on on a different instance not possible?

ID numbers aren’t shared between servers. you need to use the LOCAL status IDs,

A workaround:

• Follow the account with the status you want to reblog on the instance you want it to be reblogged on.
• Reblog the status now appearing in the timeline.
• Unfollow the account. It will disappear from your home timeline but it appears the ID is still valid.

This may or may not work.

@birb https:howtogeek.com

@birb https://howtogeek.com

@birb https://www.howtogeek.com/feed/

@birb https://www.logicmatters.net/feed/

@birb https://www.logicmatters.net

I changed my cygwin terminal font from DejaVu Sans Mono, https://dejavu-fonts.github.io/ to Hack https://sourcefoundry.org/hack/, apparently both Vera fonts. The most noticeable difference is the vertical bar inside the zero (0) in Hack versus the horizontal bar in DejaVu Sans Mono.

The Windows cmd terminal has a forward slash in zero (0). PowerShell doesn’t have anything.

I’m going to stay with Hack, because ‘rm’ looks like an extra-wide glyph in DejaVu Sans Mono. There’s no space between the ‘r’ and the ‘m’. It looks like a 3-legged elephant with a trunk. It’s also hard to distinguish the eight (8) and zero (0) at small sizes. 2/2

https://bsky.app.profile.mattglassman.bsky.social @birb

https://bsky.app/profile/mattglassman312.bsky.social @birb

It became a lot easier to understand Quotient groups when I found out there were 2 different definitions of ‘quotient’!

@birb https://www.logicmatters.net

I got a phishing email to my freeshell email address. I was curious because it claimed to come from un.org. The English is native-speaker English, but although spaces come after commas, they don’t after periods.Like this.Investigating the IP address on the web, one site provides a location for it in Iran. Mail servers can do reverse DNS lookup and report inconsistencies, but I guess mx.sdf.org is not doing it?

@birb https://languagehat.com

@birb https://codemanship.wordpress.com

@birb https://www.logicmatters.net

https://bsky.app/profile/DavidASuper.bsky.social @birb

‘sed’ mistyped one key to the right spells ‘drf’.

Researchers not happy with being photographed Lab was slow to provide a photo? So the dean sent the faculty secretary in with a camera? 7 researchers and technical staff (?) fail to say ‘cheese’, if not scowl, for the group photo on the lab web page, http://www.protein.osaka-u.ac.jp/biophys/en_member.html

Saving us from being boiled like a frog by global warming, the US destruction of the global economy.

Global warming–a steamroller on the slippery slope of Mutually Assured Destruction

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69144 comments on the resurrection of the long-debunked ‘many Inuit words for snow’ controversy, but I knew it was true coming across the many North American English words for snow I was not familiar with, mush, sleet, slush, powder (really?), searching for ‘snow synonyms’, just now

Rogers & Hammerstein: Sound of music John Cage: Sound as music Pythagoras: Music of the spheres ZhuangZi: Music of natural sounding columns, men, Universe

#zhuangzi #pythagoras #johncage #soundofmusic

ZhuangZi: Music of air columns, men, Universe Pythagoras: Music of the spheres John Cage: Sound as music Rogers & Hammerstein: Sound of music

https://ctext.org @birb

The 40 facial sketches of students and a prof on this Space Science department page at http://www-ir.ess.sci.osaka-u.ac.jp/member.html stopped after 2019. And the large number compared to present student enrolment of 15 suggests they were done by a staff member no longer in the department. A student would not have been there long enough to draw so many.

@birb https://www.logicmatters.net

The difference between #microbiology and #biochemistry?

A #biochemistry study of a #microbiology organism, but probably not a #microbiology study of a #biochemistry result?

A better question, leaving aside #microbiology, the difference between #biochemistry and #chemicalbiology?

@birb https://eurekalert.org

https://mastodon.sdf.org/users/drbean/statuses/114537167889167218 | published: 2025-05-19T23:48:04Z

I didn’t know about the APS, a break-away from the practitioner-dominated, guild-orientating (?) APA by academic psychology researchers, mirroring the split of AERA from the teacher-prioritizingr NEA.

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69166 introduces a new LLM grammaticality nativeness study out of Hong Kong published by Nature. I think I might have come across this in an earlier version. https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.11116, pehaps.

A Language Log commenters thinks it odd they didn’t cite two top search results and the year of the ChatGPT results. Probably they wrote most of the paper 1,2, more years .

Odder is ‘This preregistered study (link concealed to ensure anonymity)’, is revealed in the earlier paper to be https://osf.io/t5nes.

Where do these memories pop up from? Some seem completely unmotivated by what I’m doing at the moment. Others are surprising by their relevance to a present train of thought, but the obscurity of their source.

The Mechanical-Turk-like prowess of AI shown recently is not just a distillation of all the data collected off web pages published in the last 30 years. It’s also the stream of data you have provided the search services by asking them questions about that published data. That data of yours is not on the Internet, but just as it bears a relation to what your search was, it models what you do when you interact with some AI service. See intelligence in your question, not in the AI response.

AI as agents is what we don’t want. Simon Willison agrees at https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/22/tools-in-a-loop/#atom-everything ? Or is he just looking for a definition of ‘agent.’ Read my http://drbean.sdf.org/AgainstAgency.html

‘Agents’ are the thin edge of the wedge, the slippery slope leading to [insert evocative, dystopian image here, later]

NVIDIA’s ‘Chevy Nova naming mistake in Latin America, anyone’ moment? (‘Invidia’ in Italian is ‘envy’ in English). Except that that it was a naming mistake is an urban legend, according to https://www.thoughtco.com/chevy-nova-that-wouldnt-go-3078090

https://www.thoughtco.com @birb

I just realized that google has more data than that grabbed from your web page. It also has all that from the books it took from libraries and published at books . google . ocm. I thought it just went through libraries without ulterior purpose.

Radiologists Versus AI-Based Software: Predicting Lymph Node Metastasis and Prognosis in Lung Adenocarcinoma From CT Under Various Image Display Conditions

Sato Junya, Yanagawa Masahiro, Nishigaki Daiki, Hata Akinori, Sakao Yukinori, Sakakura Noriaki, Yatabe Yasushi, Shintani Yasushi, Kido Shoji, Tomiyama Noriyuki

Clinical Lung Cancer　Vol. 26　No. 1　p. 58-71　2025年1月1日

And the winner is ..??!!

Trying to find a mastodon post in my timeline about an article with references to profs skeptical of AI abilities (ie, academic research rather than unsupported opinion), I just realized it wasn’t there I saw it, but in Larry Cuban’s blog, https://larrycuban.wordpress.com/2025/05/22/dont-get-carried-away-by-the-hype-on-ai-christopher-mims/, a cross-post of https://davidlabaree.com/2025/05/05/christopher-mims-we-now-know-how-ai-thinks-and-its-barely-thinking-at-all/, a cross-post from WSJ.

‘mechanistic interpretability’ seems to be the name for attempts to understand how LLM black boxes work achieving human mind verismilitude, but it was coined by Anthropic co-founder, Chris Olah, so the field is coming at it from the position of AI believers, rather than skeptics, and appears bottom-up, rather than top-down (ie requires me to understand more than I want to know).

https://mastodon.sdf.org/users/drbean/statuses/114614132198632652 | published: 2025-06-02T14:01:06Z

Living like kings, but working like slaves.

I thought Kenton Varda, a developer at Cloudflare, might be Keyon Vafa, an AI researcher at Harvard!

Let your fingers do the walking; let your fingers do the talking. Talk the talk; walk the walk. Walk the talk; talk the walk. Walkie-talkie; walk to work.

https://randomfoo.net @birb

https://shisa.ai/ @birb

How to keep track of all the (more or less useful) websites with #geek in their name? Including geeksforgeeks.org, howtogeek.com

Simon Willison collects agent definition, ‘LLM wrecking environment in loop’ at https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/5/wrecking-its-environment-in-a-loop/#atom-everything

The ‘agent as principal’ definition I came across first (and found useful) in the linguistics theory of ‘semantic roles/thematic relations’, did I? After internalizing the ‘agent as stand-in for principal’ definition? See http://drbean.sdf.org/AgainstAgency.html

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backtick, the backtick/opening quote/backquote found its way into ASCII to accomodate grave accent (`) users with dead key typing capabilities, and not, NOT, as a pair to the single quote (’) though some peripherals tried to make use of it that way, designing their rendering of it. What??!! Why didnt they put that on the tin??!!

https://bsky.app/profile/melaniemitchell.bsky.social @birb

https://mastodon.sdf.org/users/drbean/statuses/114652590179964571 | published: 2025-06-09T09:01:29Z

Trying to remember what I read leading to a recent interest in Hofstadter, unevoked by descriptions of 1979 「Gödel, Escher, Bach」. Probably a footnote linking an “analogy is the answer” paper of his in a blog article describing mechanistic interpretability study into his and Melanie Mitchell’s Copycat, “abc is to abb as xyz is to ???”. The blog being https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fjcL3XqmcJNn8AzuA/mechanistic-interpretability-of-llm-analogy-making YES!! (Refound with ‘mechanistic interpretability copycat !g’ but not a vanilla ddg search.

@mjd has been posting on poor Claude Copycat analogy insight.

https://mathstodon.xyz/@mjd/114646741079861607

‪Anna Ciaunica‬ @annaciaunica.bsky.social‬ says something distinguishes AI from people. ‘For living systems, there is an end (death), and so an end, a finality, a goal.’ No. That kind of talk is going to end up confusing us more about the agency (read, goals) of so-called ‘agents.’

What is it I want to achieve before I die, or for my death to achieve when I die? I/You may have goals, but they are not the system’s goals. The system (read, life) just keeps rolling along.

An example of my dredging up old memories, making me wonder if there is nothing that happened to me that I don’t remember. The other day I was fastening the buttons of a a shirt and having a little difficulty. The buttons were bigger than usual. I suddenly remembered 50 years ago acquiring a compositors print tray with Times Roman 14 point type, 2 points bigger than the usual 12 point.

vibe coding is to do-it-yourself coding as having a robot doing your pushups is to doing pushups yourself

Asked by Melanie Mitchell to name ‘tough-minded & rigorous’ and ‘friendly & kind’ AI experts, ChatGPT exhibited gender fairness in its name lists with a 22-8 male-to-female split in the first category and a 22-8 split also, but of females to males, in the second.

She was named a ‘friendly and kind’ expert, but ChatGPT needs a new ‘tricky and unkind’ category for her.

Cynthia Rudin was a ‘tough-minded & rigorous’ woman because of her work in criminology & medicine?

https://bsky.app/profile/melaniemitchell.bsky.social/post/3lrjlmrveus2x

‘Without emergence, the only way to make sense of and influence the world would be through … a scientific monoculture described using quantum field theory …’

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.11135

And, ‘In the scientific literature, emergence is a term with a more rigorous underpinning than merely colloquial reference to either the discontinuous development of capability, or the unexpectedness of capacities from the point of view of a human observer.’

‘In software: all engineered systems .. possess causally emergent capabilities .. to screen off irrelevant microscopic details. However, engineered systems are rarely described as “emergent” because they arise by design—they are designed or trained to produce a target macroscopic behavior.’

OK, use emergence to explain a difference between microscopic and macroscopic views, but remember micro/macro exists by design in software and engineering. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.11135

Because coding is, can, or should be a form of gaming, we can say, ‘Vibe coding instead of do-it-yourself-coding is paying someone to play your game instead of playing it yourself.’

Not to be read as a criticism of searching the Internet and cargo-cult coding

We can say, ‘Vibe coding is to do-it-yourself-coding as paying someone to play your game is to playing it yourself.’ We don’t have to worry if coding is or isn’t a form of gaming,

Must find ‘Thank you for your SOMETHING suggestion’ in a paper author response to a reviewer comment which I saw. Can’t find where I saw it in qutebrowser history. A page showing an author response to reviewer comment is not something you expect to see on the Internet. I know! I’ll try a google search!

Now I have 2 problems

I searched on ‘thank you for your suggestion paper author response reviewer comment’

All the hits are links to paper editing or author advice sites, not to real author responses.

Eg ‘We appreciate you and the reviewers for your precious time in reviewing our paper and providing valuable comments. It was your valuable and insightful comments that led to ..’

I guess that’s a real non-native-speaker response. But it sounds insincere.

I wanted adjecitves an NS would use.

Psychologists studying animals say ‘teaching’ behavior requires that teachers know something about their pupils’ knowledge or lack of knowledge! No wonder I was not a ‘teacher’. I only knew that I did not know.

‘Putting Descartes before the horse’: a paper title which I wish I had written, but which was written by McGonigle & Chalmers and by Briggle.

neoliberalism is capitalism saying publically to the Third World, ‘We have a win-win proposition for you’, but thinking privately, ‘Heads, we win. Tails, you lose.’

https://bsky.app/profile/gregsargent.bsky.social @birb

Surprised no-one was following greg sargent’s bluesky account on mastodon via https://rss-parrot.net rss feeds:

https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:2amnkge5a6hplfwyesmxqkfl/rss [visit] Parroting since June 22, 2025 as @bsky.app.profile.gregsargent.bsky.social

Last posted: June 22, 2025

@gregsargent.bsky.social on Bluesky

This paper on https://openreview.net about what animal cognition research teaches us about AI, https://openreview.net/pdf?id=gCPJFcHskT

openreview.net? Is that related to https://pubpeer.com or https://retractionwatch.com? 1/?

Starting https://openreview.net/pdf?id=gCPJFcHskT, an approach to AI through the paradigm of animal cognition research with the story of Clever Hans, what is there not to like?

http://drbean.sdf.org/CleverHansMind.html 2/

Comparative psychologists studying animal cognition appear to have become wary of endorsing dramatic claims for the ability ofanimals, eg for parrots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_(parrot), and philosophical speculation about animal sentience in the case of insects and other organisms has been questioned. See http://drbean.sdf.org/AnimalSentience.html 3/?

https://openreview.net/pdf?id=gCPJFcHskT extracts 5 principles from animal cognition research:

1. design control conditions with an adversarial attitude
2. establish robustness to variation in stimuli
3. analyze failure types, moving beyond success/failure dichotomy
4. clarify differences between mechanism and behavior
5. meet the organism where it is, while noting systemic limitations 4/?

https://bsky.app/profile/jessicavalenti.bsky.social @birb

https://bsky.app/profile/bradmossesq.bsky.social @birb

Again, looks like I’m the first to follow bradmossesq and jessicavalenti’s bluesky accounts on mastodon via https:rss-parrot.net rss feeds: https://rss-parrot.net/web/feeds/bsky.app.profile.bradmossesq.bsky.social and https://rss-parrot.net/web/feeds/bsky.app.profile.jessicavalenti.bsky.social

https://mastodon.sdf.org/users/drbean/statuses/114758102304155129 | published: 2025-06-28T00:14:36Z

The CIA triad of information security policy is not that CIA. It’s Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/06/the-age-of-integrity.html#comments

‘A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?’ would be better re-written ‘A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of tic-tac-toe?’

https://www.thoughtco.com @birb

‘just’, typed with the left hand one key to the right spells ‘judy’.

https://www.marshallmemo.com @birb

The free-thinking of Bertrand Russell and his brother ran in the family, their father countenancing an affair of the biologist Douglas Spalding, their tutor, with their mother, that was not eradicated with their grandparents’ taking them away from Spalding’s guardianship on their mother and father’s early deaths, at the age of 4 and 11. The marriage was apparently a happy one.

https://mastodon.sdf.org/users/drbean/statuses/114848865339611228 | published: 2025-07-14T00:56:50Z

What does ‘agent’ mean in Multi-Agent Transport Simulation, https://matsim.org/gallery/sioux-falls/, is it good or bad, and does it suggest a source for use of the agent concept in AI, which is not good

I couldn’t understand why ‘export -f which’ in .bashrc was erroring, with ‘bash: export: ‐f: not a valid identifier’. I had copied and pasted from ‘man which’. I finally checked the byte value of ‘-’ without really thinking, or expecting that What You See Is Not What You Get, though I’ve had that before. Turns out ‘man which’ was giving me, <‐> 8208, Hex 2010, Oct 20020, Digr -1, not <-> 45, Hex 2d, Octal 055. Syntax highlighting changed with the change, showing that was my answer.

Trying to remember the term ‘mechanistic interpretability’, which seeks to reverse-engineer LLM, introduced to it by a Melanie Mitchell post probably, but failing to remember websites, or by searching my timeline or lawfaremedia.org, I googled, ‘anthropic ceo explanation LLM behavior study,’ ‘understand LLM process name conceptualize’, ‘hofstadter mitchell letter string analogy’, after browsing an MM paper, and ‘copycat llm analogy’ which returned a site I had visted with the term.

Yay. I can pipe ‘screen’s paste buffer into the clipboard with ’putclip’. ‘screen’s copy mode allows yanking rectangular blocks of text between columns, with ’c’ and ‘C’. I think you can’t do that with a mouse. You have to take full lines between the start and end of the highlighted text.

The 5 principles of 258_Position_Principles_of_Ani.pdf, a paper applying animal cognition research methodology to AI cognition research. They are 1. adversarial thinking (the subject is tricky), 2. the simplest possible explanation (isn’t that the Einstein aphorism?), 3. only results over a range of specific phenomena justifies claims of an abstract ability, 4. ‘functional ability,’ when a claim can’t be made, 5. meeting the subject where it is, because it can’t ‘speak the language.’

I got the 5 principles mixed up. Principle 2, ‘Establish robustness to variation in stimuli’ I had as Principle 3. The actual Principle 3 is my Principle 2, but my statement of it as ‘the simplest explanation’ mischaracterizes it. It actually is ‘3. Analyze failure types, moving beyond success/failure dichotomy’

My dot files have gone dotty. In particular, my ‘dot’ function/alias starting a ‘screen’ session is creating a socket and then hanging. Through ‘compare and contrast’ I can see it is a problem in the dot rc file, particularly in it sourcing another vim rc file. OK Not something I did, but a screen bug: https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?67008. I read that, but it did not register. OK, I can source it with an absolute path.

Hoping the Cochrane controversy spreads to Evidence-Based Medicine itself, which sounds to me like the authorities saying, “Good question. We don’t have the answer. So, we’re going to throw it open to scholars with agendas, wrap up their votes and say that is our answer.” Feynman ‘Cargo cult science’ pathogen, having infected psychology, education, now attacks medicine, anyone?

put more oil into the fire” is not attested at https://books.google.com/ngrams/, and a google search on the idiom returning many hits in the last couple of days returns only one at an earlier date, on–checks notes–an EU Russian disinformation analysis site, https://euvsdisinfo.eu/report/the-us-did-not-support-the-accusations-against-russia-about-the-missile-incident-in-poland/

Which adds fuel to @emptywheel’s fire at https://www.emptywheel.net/2025/08/02/days-after-the-fbi-announced-an-investigation-russian-spies-deliberately-put-more-oil-into-the-fire/

@gregcasar.bsky.social @birb

@birb https://www.aiweirdness.net

@birb https://www.aiweirdness.com

@nirik They’re very interesting (and your boosts of the other guy) and I’m not even running a fedora system.

Another indication this email, in https://www.grassley.senate.gov/download/declassified-durham-annex-released-by-chairman-grassley was not written by a native speaker.

‘I have been a bit surprised that nobody has mentioned this 18-month-long story yet in their analysis ..’, should be ‘I am a bit surprised ..’

But this phrase appears in an actual email by a real US expert with [March story] instead of [18-month-long story].

Mm. Native speaker grammatical intuitions unreliable.

Note to self: Delete toots with ‘toot delete status’ in the shell rather than toot’s TUI, so I have a record of what I did in the shell’s history.

Lost in translation

Copy and paste via the clipboard from the browser to a screen cygwin terminal session, non-breaking spaces, (U+00A0) were turning into ASCII spaces (U+0020). (But also pasted to Windows ‘cmd’, too). I couldn’t see. Not hiding in plain sight, but not quacking like a duck, either. ‘curl’ spoke the truth.

Apparently this is a 15-year known browser bug. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47135608/no-break-spaces-are-turned-into-normal-spaces-after-copy-paste

‘echo -ne \xa0\x20 | hexdump -X’ is your friend.

#knownbug

Psychologist, angry at mistaken Elsevier AI slop definition of Domain-General Cognitive Ability”, as comparative psychology’s animal cognition program, rather than cognitive psychology’s unitary intelligence hypothesis, writes Elsevier an angry anti-AI slop letter. https://irisvanrooijcogsci.com/2025/08/12/ai-slop-and-the-destruction-of-knowledge/. There is more to say, but it will not fit in the 500 char toot limit.

Apparently Brin and Page were digitizing books for the Stanford Digital Library Technologies Project while still grad students, I learned from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books. But there is no discussion there of Google goals other than making printed books more available. I thought https://books.google.com/ngrams/ was motivated by philological interests. I now think its goals were less altruistic. It wamted more text for its AI program. I may be wrong. Its digitization work has slowed.

I vowed not to use google’s AI Assist or MS’s AI searches, but I think I broke my vow.

@cwarzel.bsky.social @birb

https://bsky.app/profile/cwarzel.bsky.social @birb

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/08/ai-mass-delusion-event/683909/?gift=bQgJMMVzeo8RHHcE1_KM0Yxw_pOVM_AK6Q1K5aHOCSs by https://bsky.app/profile/cwarzel.bsky.social/post/3jxgrdcyk5g2v is worth saving because it emphasizes convincingly the puzzling nature/social effects of AI

I’m the first to get The Atlantic writer, Charlie Warzel’s bluesky RSS feed bridged to my mastodon.sdf.org timeline by https:/rss-parrot.net at https://rss-parrot.net/web/feeds/bsky.app.profile.cwarzel.bsky.social

time” typed with the right hand one key to the left spells “tune”

Got git? Gut Gott!

Got git? Good God!

Going to try to commonplace book my mastodon posts first #POSSE \n

Alerted by https://bsky.app/profile/melaniemitchell.bsky.social/post/3lxcsdxrv5c26 to Eliza chatbot creator, Weizenbaum’s mixed feelings about AI, I challenge his disingenousness in being disturbed by his secretary’s being sucked in (?) by the bot, and asking him to leave the room. That is what he was trying to achieve with it! Perhaps she was only using it to say something about him, or to adjust her dress!

That is, we don’t know why she asked him to leave the room. It may have had nothing to do with her interaction with the chatbot. We never hear the other side’s story.

That said, @melaniemitchell‘s bringing in Weizenbaum, a chatbot creator’s misgivings, like Frankenstein’s horror, about what they’ve done, is refreshing, the other AI bros going, ’La-la-la I can’t hear you.’

The Weizenbaum wikipedia article, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Weizenbaum, explains his ambivalence on AI with his distinction between deciding and choosing, a distinction I had not recognized. Deciding, being calculating, could be calculated, but choosing, could not be. Being based on values, ie, non-rationality, choice, on the basis of tasks and criteria, can only be creative human acts with consequences. Deciding and choosing, a distinction without a difference?

https://www.baeldung.com/linux/sed-with-string

was helpful explaining how to pipe string to sed without using ‘echo’ and how pipes and process substitution play roles.

title="$(sed -nE "1s/^(([[:graph:]]+[[:blank:]]+){4}).*$/\\1/p" <<< $story )" html="$(pandoc -f markdown -t html <<< $story )"

http://counterbean.blogspot.com/2025/08/httpssimonwillisonnet2025aug29lossy.html https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/29/lossy-encyclopedia/: An encyclopedia metaphor for LLM. Mine is a bag of statements, cut up into phrases, nouns, verbs, all linked in one big tree, with all the google search keywords ever used to find the statements. We’re used to google finding things on the Internet with the right search terms. This is just a step-up from that. LLM are mixing and matching statements & pushing one out. The surprising thing is that the statement is native-speaker-like text.

https://mastodon.sdf.org/users/drbean/statuses/115126286061306234 | published: 2025-09-01T00:48:34Z

@jensorensen envisages reading AI summaries resulting in the death of the Internet. I’m not guilty of this, though out of the corner of my eye I can see google’s AI overview has the answer to “input string sed” that the hits below only tease with intros like “Read ..”, “Learn ..”, The lesser sin I’m guilty of is scrolling through google hits to find the answer to my question, “Use a <<< here string” without having to visit sites, which may or may not have that answer.

http://counterbean.blogspot.com/2025/09/look-at-this-google.html Look at this Google Books comparison of frequency of “time-consuming” vs all other permutations of “time” and “consume_INF”, https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=time%3D%3Econsume_INF%2Cconsume_INF%3D%3Etime&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3

sdf.org is down, https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/sdf.org, but mastodon.sdf.org is not down, https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/mastodon.sdf.org?

Man should think. Machines should work–https://quoteinvestigator.com/2025/09/01/people-think/

The real question is not whether machines think but whether man does–https://quoteinvestigator.com/2025/09/04/machines-think/

I just saw this, but can’t recall where,

Distinguishing characteristics of language:

• compositionality, Basically, the whole is the sum of the parts,
• substitutability, ‘Dog bites man and man bites dog’ ‘我愛她和她愛我’ https://chineseedge.com/how-to-say-and-in-chinese/,
• productivity, You can say anything with language.

They forgot grammaticality? Or did they.

賈惠京(가혜경) 의 『한일 유사 속담 관용구사전』 527

일 오른 귀에소 왼 귀 한 귓구멍에 마늘쪽 박았나

2025-09-08T00:09:27Z” “id: https://mastodon.sdf.org/users/drbean/statuses/115165972255042737 | published: 2025-09-08T01:01:17Z

qutebrowser history to the rescue! I read the characterization of language as compositional, systematic, productive in https://aiguide.substack.com/p/an-ai-breakthrough-on-systematic that I probly found in https://aiguide.substack.com/p/do-half-of-ai-researchers-believe. But where I had ‘subsitutability’, https://melaniemitchell.me/ had ‘systematicity’. I stand by my choice.

she, where I had had ‘had had’, had had ‘had’. ‘Had had’ had been advised, but ‘had’ had been chosen.

I had had my breakfast when she woke up. She became angry that I had had my breakfast.vsI had my breakfast when she woke up. She became mad that I had my breakfast.In the first she is mad because he already ate while she was still sleeping (she now has to eat by herself). In the second she is mad because he is now eating (maybe they agreed on a diet the night before).’had had’ by https://www.reddit.com/user/Causative/

Halliday’s ‘had’ + past participle as ‘past in past’, as opposed to ‘have’ + past participle, which is ‘past in present’.

https://mastodon.sdf.org/users/drbean/statuses/115182668769450206 | published: 2025-09-10T23:47:26Z

Strange ways of becoming a father on wikipedia

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_R._Michaelis After World War II Michaelis .. married Ann Aikman, with whom he was to have three children.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Bourdieu In 1962, Bourdieu married Marie-Claire Brizard, and the couple would go on to have three sons ..

Instead of saying, “was to have 3 children,” and “would go on to have 3 sons,” they should just say, “and they had 3 children”

sponge(1) is counterintuitive. The man page says, sponge reads standard input and writes it out to the specified file. Unlike a shell redirect, sponge soaks up all its input before writing the output file. This allows constructing pipelines that read from and write to the same file.

But this code,

< file.txt sponge | tac > file.txt

truncates the file. This code,

< file.txt tac | sponge file.txt

works. I don’t understand. At the end doesn’t seem like the right place for it.

Painting yourself into a corner.Walking on air, anyone?Walking on water, anyone?Walking on paint, anyone?Watching paint dry, anyone?

I was distressed that version control was not seeing changes I made to my blog. Then I couldn’t understand why the changes were appearing in the repo. Then I remembered my blogging script commits changes I make to the blog to the repo. The feeling was like wandering around, lost, for a time, and then coming across a place that seems familiar, because I’ve already been here. LLM hallucinations, anyone?

An LLM is designed to generate statistically likely responses to the question “Whatwould an answer to this query sound like?” This is not the same thing asanswering the question. It might produce what you are looking for, or it mightnot. This is one reason why output from an LLM will sound authoritative evenwhen it is wrong, and apologetic when mistakes are pointed out. It is notauthoritative or apologetic, and it is not “thinking” about the question, says @mcnees

My analogy for this AI hair on fire moment was Clever Hans, because people were amazed at the horse’s ability to do arithmetic in German. Ny new analogy is #ventriloquism and people’s amazement a dummy could be a living breathing doll.

Living breathing doll” is a song title, a later rendering of the earlier song title, “Living doll”. ddg returns “breathing doll” doll hits, but google doesn’t on the first page. The first seems to be a title for a NY Post article about a Japanese robot in 2005, a second a quote from a book in 2017, and the third the song title in 2019. Given this, I suspect the google AI overview of the phrase is “extrapolating”, or playing fast and loose with the facts.

On 09-15, google AI overview said,

Living breathing doll” is a figurative phrase or idiom that describes a person who is exceptionally beautiful, charming, or endearing, often to the point of seeming unreal or like a perfectly crafted doll come to life. It can also refer to the “Living Doll” aesthetic, a beauty trend characterized by a hyper-feminine, doll-like appearance, and in a broader sense, can refer to life-sized, lifelike mannequins or dolls, such as the historical Japan iki-ningyo.

Ha. gmail is putting notifications from me as an administrator of my google blogger.com blog to me (under another id) inviting me to be a poster in my spam folder.

There’s much wrong with this changing AI Assist. The 2 sentences are 2 bites at the apple, failing because they are saying essentially the same thing twice. The verbs in the 2 sentences, “describe”, “seem”, “refer,” possess”, “be”, “have”, “seem”, “come to life”, “refer” again, characterize” are weak verbs. Without meaningful verbs, the effect is of having a series of noun phrases hanging together grammatically, but failing to communicate semantically anything more than they would as a list.

The reference to iki-ningyo (生人形) or ikiki-ningyo (行き来人形) is completely gratuitous, I assume included because the literal translation is “living doll”. (Though, I’m wondering if the Japan reference is because google knows I’m in Japan from my IP address.). They were exhibited waxwork figures and are not in the Japanese wikipedia doll page, but at https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%94%9F%E4%BA%BA%E5%BD%A2 The English wikipedia page is more gory.

I don’t think Melanie Mitchell’s magical thinking (https://aiguide.substack.com/p/magical-thinking-on-ai) and Murray Shanahan’s roleplaying (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06647-8) bring much to the table, explaining the reaction to or the nature of LLM, but Alison Gopnik’s stone soup story (https://simons.berkeley.edu/news/stone-soup-ai) is illuminating, inspirational because it takes LLM apart candidate.tmpl FerdinanddeLesseps.md pandoc-templates gives them respect.

‘Living breathing doll’ AI Assist: “‘Living breathing doll’ .. in a broader sense, can refer to life-sized, lifelike mannequins or dolls, such as the historical Japan iki-ningyo.” ‘in a broader sense’? I don’t think it means what you think it means.

Googling “bash digraphs like vim” the first line of the AI Assist answer says something about creating aliases. I want to resist reading further but the hits are unhelpful, being all about vim, not bash. I will change the search string to “bash unicode”. ‘man bash’ only offers ‘\uHHHH’. Ugh

bash unicode typing” wasn’t much use, but “mintty cygwin terminal unicode” led me to the mintty manual, where I found I didn’t have the Ctrl+Shift+letter shortcut option enabled

I might make a bash alias for a Unicode right arrow. I can find the code point in vim digraphs, though there are a lot to scroll through. It’s probably just ‘->’.

alias arrow=“echo -n →”

$ arrow hey howdy ha → hey howdy ha

drbean@ESPRIMO ~ $ echo -n hey ; arrow howdy ha hey→ howdy ha

drbean@ESPRIMO ~ $ echo -n $(arrow howdy hey) ha → howdy hey ha

drbean@ESPRIMO ~ $

I guess this is marginally useful for something

09-17 8:22 I need to learn how to use readline better. It has almost 800 lines in ‘man bash’, around a sixth of the total 4452 lines

language as a general cognitive function

3 keywords:

• memory
• imagination
• analogy

The nouns, ‘thesis’, ‘hypothesis’ and ‘crisis’ (?) capitalize to ‘theses’, ‘hypotheses’ and ‘crises’(?), respectively. So I suggest ‘anubES’

Scene: A car at the bottom of a cliff, with blood splattered everywhere

Agent definitions collected at https://simonwillison.net/tags/agent-definitions/ I’m unhappy about term, ‘agents’. http://drbean.sdf.org/AgainstAgency.html They never discuss the double meaning, http://drbean.sdf.org/DuplicitousAgent.html I’m afraid of the technical AI meaning tail wagging the established, real-world meaning dog.

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?feed=rss2&p=71138 @birb

09-20 23:07 I’m going to try to use “in a broader sense” properly and show that AI Assist was not using it properly. I may have misunderstood the point of the sentence in which it occurs. I took it to be a statement about Japanese 生人形, but actually it was probably saying life-like store window mannequins might be called “living breathing dolls”.

Checking google AI’s response to “living breathing doll” again to see if it had a different Japanese reference this time. (It did a second time), it said:

It sounds like you’re interested in the idea of a “living breathing doll.” To give you a more specific answer, I can help you find products, people, or media related to this topic. Would you like me to find out more about interactive plush toys, lifelike reborn dolls, or something else entirely?

That’s unsettling. I am being stalked.

09-21 9:54 My attempt to use “in a broader sense”:“car” is a sedan or similar-styled vehicle, but in a broader sense the term may be used to include a wider range of vehicles, eg buses and other vehicles with more than 4 wheels, but probably not motor cycles or bicycles, as in the statement, “Many cars on the road today”

How did I do? The phrase, in a broader sense is used to indicate some form of hypernym/hyponym relationship and synecdoche (?), I think. It is not used to introduce a different thing which is also an exemplar of the category being discussed. There are probably animal and plant terms used this way, Eg, “cats”, “big cats” and, in a broader sense, “the cat family”?

Google book hits for ‘in a broader sense’: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=in+a+broader+sense&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3 impressively monotonically increasing.

“dir” and “mkdir” typed with the left hand one key to the right spell “fit” and “mkfit”

Alerted by https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=71138 I need to read https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/2395C24EB472B60B2514F7D5F93EB9A8/S0140525X2510112Xa.pdf/how_linguistics_learned_to_stop_worrying_and_love_the_language_models.pdf about the implications for linguistics of LLM language user verisimilitude.starts with an allegory of disagreement between Norm (ie Chomsky) and Claudette (Claude, I guess), and is easy to read.

https://bsky.app/profile/joshbarro.bsky.social @birb

https://bsky.app/profile/JOSHBARRO.bsky.social @birb

https://social-epistemology.com/ @birb

OrvarLog@mathstodon.xyz said:too much emphasis on ‘novelty’ researchers are pushed intowork prior to theirs as lacking or flawed.so we are not building our science on the shoulders of giants, but on aof strawmen.is, “When novelty is king, the ‘shoulders of giants’ are threshed into aof strawmen”

Does men’s use of “tool” to refer to their genitals suggest they think sex is agentic?

No, they use it as a joke. It means that they think it could be that sex is a means to an end, but that they don’t think that it is. Were we also supposed to laugh when Socrates said, “Others live to eat, but I eat to live.”?

I dreamed someone asked me to talk about my beliefs. I took the opportunity to talk about Laozi (老子), who probably did not exist, Zhuangzi (莊子), who may not have existed, and someone who did exist, but whom I may not have identifed by name or what they did.

I’m trying to remember Jack Balkin’s 4 causes for the US’s problems. They were inequality, polarization, something and what was the fourth: a breakdown in trust, as laid out at https://balkin.blogspot.com sometime at the start of 2025. Findable with keyword, which was? Was response to NYT request.

As @OrvarLog said: When novelty is king, we are standing not on the “shoulders of giants”, but on a pile of strawmen

Typing “balkin.blogspot.com” into the address bar in qutebrowser to read current posts there, I see down toward the bottom of the alternatives. “The Big Picture”, so I guess that’s the keyword or title I was looking for

https://aka-gabor.xyz/ @birb

git apparently breaks hard links. https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/231955/why-are-hard-links-are-not-updated-when-modified-with-an-editor

I think now I remember reading that somewhere, but it didn’t register trying to understand why stow wasn’t updating linked files after I edited and committed them

https://aka-gabor.xyz/ @birb

w32 neovim not finding modules installed by cygwin python3 (actually python3.9 as set by alternatives command). To find them, it requires python to be invoked as python3.9, not python3.

I wonder if I should try linking perlbrew virtual environment’s perl to system perl, ie /usr/bin/perl via alternatives. I guess it should be a link to pl.

More strange ways to become a father on wikipedia

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Ross_Margold

Felix Frankfurter ‘Happy Hotdogger’ and 1930’s contributor to NAACP’s legal strategy, “In 1927 Margold married Gertrude Weiner (the couple would go on to have a son)”, “Margold is [also] remembered as the father of adult film pioneer William Margold.” Is it just me, or is “go on to have children” an unidiomatic way of describe becoming a father consequent on marriage?

From Microsoft: An account from 10,000 meters and coming in slowly of the development of UTF-8 support for the Windows Console, https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/windows-command-line-unicode-and-utf-8-output-text-buffer/ But did I leave it too late to update ‘cmd’ for it now with the ending of support for Windows 10? 1/2

Mmmh? A file opened in ‘cmd’ shows only tofu glyphs for the Chinese/Japanese (漢字) characters and Korean 한글. Opened in ‘powershell’ it shows the 漢字 but nothing is shown for the 한글. 2/2

https://philipball86.substack.com/p/can-we-find-a-good-definition-of in opinionated take-down of AGI paper, linked by bsky.app/profile/melaniemitchell.bsky.social/post/3m3plzv2bsc2a notes that AI developers’ aim was to mimic human cognition works against their claim that AI does more than (checks notes) mimic human cognition. But it also puts psychometric testing in a hard place because inferences we make about humans from test results are not justified when the testee .. might not be human.

Then https://philipball86.substack.com/p/what-does-the-turing-test-test suggests we may have gotten the Turing test wrong, based on English prof, Sarah Dillon’s observation Turing was kidding a lot of the time.

Two observations from https://philipball86.substack.com/p/what-does-the-turing-test-test : 1. Alan Kay’s metaphor for the surprise of AI is Daniel Kahneman’s fast and slow thinking: The slow mind sees the marionette/puppet as blocks of wood. The fast mind is moved by its gestures. 2. ChatGPT is life-like, but even in 1996 some humans mistook ELIZA for a human.

@philipcball.bsky.social @birb

https://bsky.app/profile/philipcball.bsky.social @birb

The opaqueness of a dog’s texts on the Internet is mirrored and matched by the opaqueness in real life of thoughts and actions of people we think we understand.

But what is this fast and slow mind of which Daniel Kahneman speaks?

Invention suborning intention.

Intention subverted by invention.

A beautiful intention slain by an ugly invention.

• https://quoteinvestigator.com/2020/12/26/ugly-fact/

Allowing invention to subordinate intention

• https://larrycuban.wordpress.com/2025/10/25/what-the-history-of-supermarkets-teaches-us-about-ai-in-schools-andrew-cantarutti/#comment-95761

Interesting analogizing of Adam Smith’s invisible hand in commerce and the Tao’s 無為 (=take no action, let nature take its course, adopt a laissez-faire approach, accomplish nothing, peaceful, detachment, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%84%A1%E7%82%BA ) by https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/10/how-the-tao-explains-our-economies.html

I looked at Google AIAssist’s answer to “joint theory planned behavior” against my better instincts, and it has a helpful explanation I cannot see in the hits below, showing I need to use “a” rather than “the”. Aaargh. I need to develop more self control!

“Not a bug, but a feature”: the thinking which gives us a seamstress mistake as a fashion innovation

“fling”, “sling” and “swing”. #phonestheme, #soundsymbolism and #iconicity, anyone? All describe movement in an arc. Is there any difference between “sling” and “fling”? The difference of being directed at a target, or not?

In college, in response to a questionnaire about high school subjects, my placing of English high on the list, while at high school I had not had that feeling, rather the opposite, about it, made me skeptical of the value of surveys.

Helping a prof with the English of a Theory of Planned Behavior paper, I wrote about ways of referring to future action in English:

will” is used to make a public commitment, like when making a decision and telling someone about it, ie a Rubicon moment.

A: Don’t you think you should use public transport? B: I will use it next week.

going to” is different.

A: Don’t you think you should use public transport? B: I’m going to use it next week (but I disagree it’s important to use it.) 1/2

Present continuous with future reference is used to show a planning and action mindset.

A: Don’t you think you should use public transport? B: I’m using it next week (I already use it and/or I agree it’s important to use public transport).

On the other hand, “want” is a wishy-washy way of showing intention.

A: Don’t you think you should use public transport? B: I want to (but won’t/cannot).

Pnin didn’t presume to approach the lofty halls of modernlinguistics, that ascetic fraternity of phonemes, that temple wherein youngare taught not the language itself, but the method of teaching others to teachmethod, like a waterfall splashing from rock to rock which ceases toa medium of rational navigation but perhaps in some fabulous future mayinstrumental in evolving esoteric dialects like Basicspoken only by elaborate machines 1/2

Nabokov mocks linguistics, applied linguistics, machine translation, AI. (quoted in https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/2395C24EB472B60B2514F7D5F93EB9A8/S0140525X2510112Xa.pdf/how_linguistics_learned_to_stop_worrying_and_love_the_language_models.pdf) 2/2

• Daniel Dennett The dude flicking the towel in the philosophy locker room 1942-2024

• https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/ChomskyContraDarwin.pdf

• https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=69401

Matt Glassman, political gaming thinker with https://mattglassman.substack.com/p/ten-thoughts-on-sports-betting and https://mattglassman.substack.com/p/book-review-on-the-edge-nate-silver as an “inveterate gambling degenerate” made me realize my understanding of insurance as gambling with positive expected value for the insurer, but negative expected value for the insuree, missed the importance of the variance in possible value outcomes.

I think I now understand the difference between bash’s login, interactive, and non-interactive shell. Non-interactive shells are not connected to stdin or stdout, whereas interactive shells are, but with limited functionality, eg /etc/profile is not read. Login shells get all the functionality bash can provide. Non-interactive shells are for scripts, interactive shells are for sub-shells and login shells are not sub-shells, but the shell you want when you login. The name’s just confusing.

Looking for instances of “controls the decision” on https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=controls+the+decision I came across https://www.google.co.jp/books/edition/Free_Will_as_an_Open_Scientific_Problem Interesting. Mark Balaguer is a philosopher

The problem reading this paper by authors whose first language doesn’t have ‘a’, ‘the’ and plural nouns is knowing whether ‘the reformulation/linearization technique’ refers to one technique or a class of techniques. I don’t know what a/the reformulation/linearization technique is. https://optimization.cbe.cornell.edu/index.php?title=Mixed-integer_linear_fractional_programming_(MILFP)#Reformulation-Linearization_Method suggests it is a specific method, but grammatical errors in the exposition there mean it might not be.

“some” and “any” discussed at https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/19364/difference-between-somewhere-and-anywhere/19371#19371

The prepositions, “like” and “such as” discussed at https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/19370/formal-alternative-for-like-and-such-as

“It may be anywhere in this room,” means it is somewhere in the room. But, “It may be somewhere in this room,” means it may also not be in the room, ie, not anywhere in the room.

“The program was executed on a computer equipped with an Intel(R) Core (TM) i7-10700 processor, and a Windows 11 operating system.” Why should it be “the Windows 11 operating system”, but not “the Intel(R) Core (TM) i7-10700 processor?” The processor is the named instance of a class that has the same nameas the instance? With the OS, an instance of a class is not the relationship involved? There are not many Windows 11 OS of which this one? See the “a Ford → Ford Company” relationship.

What’s the relationship between price stickiness and price elasticity in economics? The first is result of operators’ unwillingness to cut prices if it means making less money? The second is users’ willingness to accept that unwillingness even if it means they have less money?

The explanation at https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2025/Items/Nov18-1.html of the idiom, “Can’t see the forest for the trees,” is that in a forest, you only see individual trees, not the whole forest from an aerial view. I think it stems from a conversation with someone who doesn’t understand forests.: See that forest over there?: I only see trees. It’s behind the trees?: Oh, you can’t see the forest for the trees?idiom captures a problematic failure to understand a problem.

It’s used when the means to understand the problem lie under your nose, but you fail to put 2 & 2 together. Googling shows more literal interpretations, ‘trapped by details,’ ‘too involved in a situation,’ ‘deep in granular details, failing to get the big picture.’ Perhaps they’re better. But the idea is that you have a grasp of a problem, but it is a problematic grasp? That you have a framing problem?

“see the (woods?|forest) for the trees” in google books: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=see+the+wood+for+the+trees,see+the+woods+for+the+trees,see+the+forest+for+the+trees

I think I was wrong about the woods/trees idiom being about not accepting what’s staring you in the face, under your nose, & not putting 2+2 together, but perhaps it is about framing the problem, or getting the wrong end of the stick. It’s certainly about recognizing you have a grasp of some aspects (details) of the problem, but not the most important ones (the big picture). What role does the idiom have in a conversation?

I think the forest/tree idiom is used to say, “Your view’s plausible, partly right, even, but wrong,” with the same force as Korzybski’s “the map is not the territory,” and Mencken’s “every complex problem has a solution that is clear, simple and wrong,”and Shakespeare’s “there are more things in heaven and earth than dreamed of in your philosophy.”

But who of it is said, “I/you/they couldn’t see the wood for the trees!”? “I couldn’t see the wood for the trees!,” or “That’s like being unable to see the wood for the trees!”? It’s an invitation (or a notice it’s time?) to flip the script?

Bubble and selection sort algorithm practice site in Japanese: https://cardalgo.csle-lab.org/

“I’ll get to it soon” means you better do it within 3 seconds.” “better” as modal verb, anyone?can remember at the age of 5(?) using it in a modal verb’s full range: “You better stop that, bettern’t you”, probably in response to my mother using “better” as a command. I stopped doing that. Did I realize it’s a contraction of “had better”?

“sling the backpack up on the truck” versus “fling the towel around the waist” https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/ has “sling/fling the ball” and “slung the strap/flung the door” as top cites. No cites of my examples, so no diff? For balls, sure, but “sling the door/fling the door”?, surely not.

“just”, typed with the left hand one key to the right, spells “judy”

Microsoft, ex-Red Hat lead developer explains problem wearing different hats at https://bexelbie.com/2025/11/20/if-you-are-wearing-more-than-one-hat advising conservativeness

@birb https://bexelbie.com/

Discussion of “impend/impending” frequency and collocation differences at https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=72043#more-72043 as with “consume time/time-consuming” suggests ‘-ing’ adjectives have a life of their own.

There’s no mind behind LLM translations from Chinese to English, so although they do a fantastic job at sentence-level syntax translation, they’re lost with unspoken articles and tense distinctions conveyed from mind to mind in Chinese because the Chinese text gives them no guidance as to how to express them in text in English where they are a grammatical requirement. They can read text, but can’t read minds. That’s my story, anyway, and I’m sticking with it. #LLM #中文 #translation

Intention is also a wishy-washy notion.

A: Don’t you think you should use public transport?

B: I intend to next week (but I may or may not get around to doing it.)

In the spirit of “The (checks notes) spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.”

Intention and action are 2 different things. That’s why the post-Rubicon moment and mindsets are important.

#TPB 3/2

Matt Glassman at https://mattglassman.substack.com/p/moderation-has-multiple-dimension talks about some recent writing on how some people lack mental imagery, so called aphantasia. He calls such differences perhaps a big unknown unknown.of imagery differences is not new, no? Do these people hear, but see nothing, when they dream?see mental images, memories of places/people sometimes. They’re not vivid. But when imagining things not evident, the thoughts are words. #imagery 1/2

Dreams are different. In one, I was intrigued passing a non-native street vendor. The visuals were vague, perhaps monochrome. He called out, “What’s your middle name?” He asked what ‘myself’ meant. Then I crossed the street.could dream that without any visual content? I am sometimes aware of color in dreams. But not touch, smells? #dream 2/2

Thinking how to conceptualize LLM language production’s deficiencies (?) despite its amazing Comparing NNS texts with LLM texts is frightening. 1/? #LLM #NNS

Language is not just about communicating statements, but also conveying feelings and attitudes.can be explicitly expressed by the speakers along with the statements or inferred by listeners reading between the lines.readers try to understand what is meant by what is said and assume there are minds behind the language, which are to be understood. #mind #language #AI 2/?

Another plan of attack is how text is more than just the individual sentences in it.LLM create grammatical sentences, does it connect them into text?://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_linguistics #text #LLM 3/?

Adam Mastroianni on US political culture divide through a religious study lens.://www.experimental-history.com/p/secrets-of-the-ancient-memelordswrote something on his “study” of people imagining different consequences. They mostly imagined good or bad consequences?

https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19757 argues, “Language understanding entails not just extracting the surface-level meaning of the linguistic input, but constructing rich mental models of the situation it describes.”puts LLM in their place. But to this shallow take on language I would say, It’s language all the way down.://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down

If you make a system that can self-replicate and is capable of mutation in a way that can respond to selective influences, that doesn’t mean it’s alive ..

https://bsky.app/profile/philipcball.bsky.social/post/3m6jtbmsrt22r

If it has a constant non-ending carnivorous need for sustenance, non-consensually provided by other members of the system, it would +be alive.

Wait! Plants, except for some parasitic and carnivorous ones, don’t rely on biological matter for sustenance, only on chemical elements and compounds.\n\nAnd they are alive! But not, I think, having intentions or goals, just following progams.\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_nutrition\n\n\n

Don’t do this: have a dir and a file of the same name as the dir plus an extension, and have files in the dir with the same extension.\n\nMy script was returning:\n\nUnable to open /home/drbean/dot/screen/dot.rc.\n\n\nBut it was not ‘dot.rc’ that was missing, it was a file in dot/, .rc, where SCREEN was an empty string, that bash could not find. #gotcha #bash\n

Han Eysenck, fabricating psychologist, according to https://retractionwatch.com/2025/12/03/number-of-unsafe-publications-by-psychologist-hans-eysenck-could-be-high-and-far-reaching/ See my http://drbean.sdf.org/HigamusHogamus.html

Difference of “heave/sling the backpack up on the truck.” “heave” if it travels in a straight line, “sling” if it travels in an arc?\n

What’s the connection between “sling” and “slide”, other than the connection through “swing” of playground equipment? Perhaps that connection is informative.\n

I never felt the need to distinguish “heading” and “title”, but in a table in a paper,\n\ntitle:\nTable 1 Overview of the ESS service providers\n\nheading:\n+————+————-+————-+————-+————-+\n| Items | GoShare | | iRent | WeMo |\n| | (multiple | | | |\n| | types of | | | |\n| | vehicles) | | | |\n+============+=============+=============+=============+=============+\n\n

High-jumper, Dick Fosbury flings/heaves self over the bar”. Which is it?\n

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/52009/in-person-equivalent-for-inanimate-objects says no to “in person”. But what about “surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019), in the form of Google, Facebook and others, sweeps up their data to predict, target and shape their behavior.”\n

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/52009/in-person-equivalent-for-inanimate-objects says no to “in person”. But what about “surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019), in the PERSON of Google, Facebook and others, sweeps up their data to predict, target and shape their behavior.”.\n\nBecause of corporate personhood.\n

Immanent”: a word I didn’t know though I think I had encountered it. I think I thought is was a blend of “imminent” and “emanate”, an “eminent imminent emanate.”\n

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=gain+success,earn+success I prefered the unpopular alternative\!\n

LLM can read text but can’t read minds, so they don’t know whether it should be “a NOUN” or “the NOUN” . That’s in the mind. “You need to be a mind reader\!” #AI #LLM #mindreading\n

compare and contrast”: favorite words after “although”. I think Richard Day, https://www2.hawaii.edu/~rday/ took “but”.\n

MS Word is flagging “compare and contrast”\!\!\n

cygwin’s \mkshortcut\ creates Windows shortcut icons on the Desktop or in StartUp to invoke cygwin programs the Windows way.\n\nin C:/Users/Public/Public Desktop\nand C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\StartUp\n

With mkshortcut -a “/usr/bin/bash -l -c ‘tt \’web -w sdf\’ \‘qb -w qt\’ mastodon’ &” -A -P -n “StartUp/web,qb,mastodon” /usr/bin/mintty\n

mkshortcut -d “場所: mintty C:\cygwin64” -i /cygdrive/c/cygwin64/Cygwin.ico -A -D -n “Cygwin64 Terminal” -i /cygdrive/c/cygwin64/Cygwin.ico /cygdrive/c/cygwin64/Cygwin.bat\n

Check man mkshortcut\n

$ man git-diff | wc\n1520 8932 69395\n\ndrbean@ESPRIMO ~/dot\n$ svn h diff | wc\n83 623 5027\n\n

This AI-LLM hair on fire moment is shaping up to be a battle polarized into those for those against. I’m in the against camp, because the LLM result in CJK profs not asking me to edit their papers https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/. But Mark Dominus and Terence Tao, whom I respect and admire are for, which is a problem.

I also don’t like to be categorized, so I’m going to join the ‘run with the foxes, hunt with the hounds’ camp.

Toot posted: https://mastodon.sdf.org/@drbean/115703540920115190

The marry/merry/merger occurs only before /r/?\n\nMarry a merry Mary\n\nwith \‘Mæri mɛri Meəri\’\n\nWhich recalls the vulgarism with “Tom, Dick and Harry”.\n\nI can’t think of any other minimal triple.\n\n”mass, mess, mares (non-rhotic)\n

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/13/obie-fernandez/#atom-everything reports https://obie.medium.com/what-happens-when-the-coding-becomes-the-least-interesting-part-of-the-work-ab10c213c660 . Paraphrasing, even if you enjoy writing code, AI autocompletion will help you write faster\!\!\n\nBut for me, decision-making, with AI clearing space, is key. No mechanics, just judgment, tradeoffs, intent. Typing code wastes time. https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Babbage/quotations/\n

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_vowel_changes_before_historic_/r/\n\n/æ/ /ɛ/ /eɪ/\nBarry berry beary as in ‘This district is beary. This one less so’ #115709583857304379\n

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/14/copywriters-reveal-how-ai-has-decimated-their-industry/#atom-everything reports https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/i-was-forced-to-use-ai-until-the reveal of copywriter industry decimation.\n\nMe,too.\n\nHow to make lemonade out of lemons.\n\nGet the CJK profs to help them hide LLM are translating their papers into English, or that they are giving them leads to pursue in them?\n

https://codemanship.wordpress.com/2025/12/14/the-gorman-paradox-where-are-all-the-ai-generated-apps/ leverages the Fermi Paradox, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox to motivate the Gorman Paradox, Where Are All The AI-Generated Apps? Does https://simonwillison.net/ have an answer?\n

That flying saucer reports were the subject of the 1950 Los Alamos pre-lunch discussion, and that Fermi was a source of provocative estimation questions, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem explains a lot about his blurting out at lunch, Where is everybody, and that everyone laughed.\n

What do the attractions of tobacco say about the physiological mechanisms by which taste governs individual nutrition decisions that are biologically sound.\n\nExcept for sugar? Or especially for sugar?\n\nAnd does this suggest there are ways to combat tobacco addiction, other than adding horrible tastes to cigarettes, as that doesn’t work for alcohol.\n

Tobacco addiction goes beyond those physiological mechanisms of taste however by inducing a new substance need paralleling the need for food. This new substance need governed by the taste/smell of tobacco is biologically unsound. But can we still learn something about the role of good/bad tastes in making biologically-sound eating decisions?\n

What about raw meat? Eating it is, let’s say, biologically-sound, because eating cooked meat is, it being nutritional. The Japanese eat raw fish, but is there any group where raw meat eating is a practice? (Apparently Inuit do) It doesn’t taste good, but cooked meat does.

I want to find points in the evolution of Homo sapiens where cooking with fire and meat eating became common practices. If I can show some relationship, perhaps I can establish meat-eating became a practice after it started tasting good, because it was cooked.

Or perhaps, meat tastes evolved.

This runs up against food aversions which result in eating decisions with no nutritional benefit. And the eating of fermented foods despite \“bad\” tastes.

For “biologically-sound/unsound” read “beneficial/unbeneficial”\n

For “biologically-sound”, or “beneficial”, read “nutritious and with reduced risk of harm to health”. With this definition, eating of raw animal products (including milk and eggs?) is not biologically-sound, because of the risk of parasites. The unappealing taste of raw meat (and to a lesser extent of raw fish, but not animal milk?), and all non-fresh, non-cooked thing which looks it might still be swallowable, is a word to the wise, “Don’t eat it\!”\n

Pro tip paper writers: If you think your ‘thing’ needs explanation, like is <a|the> thing ensuring that something else does something,” it’s not ‘is the thing,’ but ‘is a thing’ often\n

Thesis: think something. Antithesis: have a contrary thought. Synthesis: do compare-and-contrast brainstorming.\n

https://mattglassman.substack.com/p/the-game-theory-of-yankee-swap Yankee swap, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_elephant_gift_exchange for insights into the American fun-loving but sharp-elbowed psyche, reminding me of the description of Paul Elvstrom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Elvstr%C3%B8m as not letting his grandmother win an egg-and-spoon race.\n\nWith caveat, Glassman family competitive focus an outlier? His father not having sympathy for sister distraught at game outcome 115505750277762830\n

define the evolution of SoC across arcs, consistent with the main optimization model.\n\nshould be\n\ndefine the evolution of SoC across arcs, as with the main\noptimization model\n\n\nOK is\n\ndefine AN evolution of SoC across arcs consistent with the main\noptimization model 115726466324245453\n

AI done right: https://www.aiweirdness.com as source of humor. Mark Dominus toot of weird AI-created drama plot\n

https://absolutelymaybe.plos.org/2025/12/19/science-populism-medicine-style/ Evidence-based medicine analyst sees influence of science populism (anti-science distrust of experts) within that community, disabusing her of conviction evidence-based medicine was aantithetical to authoritarianism. #evidencebasedmedicine 114962426700427923\n

Mark Dominus shares https://www.anthropic.com/research/project-vend-2 , a light-hearted account of an Anthropic AI experiment with real-world tasks, operating a store. Anthropic doesn’t see ethical implications of businesses run for profit? Are they win-win operations or zero-sum games? Money (=the relationships between people in the struggle for survival, or the good life) as the root of all evil.\n

https://www.aiweirdness.com/when-a-chatbot-runs-your-store/ links the un-funny archived Wall Street Journal experiment experience writeup of the Anthropic AI store at https://archive.is/I1lyh The commenters to it responding there are superficial (perhaps they’re LLM bots) except for one informative (impressive?) booster (which is almost certainly a bot).\n

A vending machine is a machine representation of a store. It exchanges money for items. What is the purpose of modeling this with AI? First let us understand the ethical responsibilities of entrepreneurs. The AI experiment’s purpose was not modeling store keeping. It was modeling entrepreneurship.\n

No indication of who is developer of https://ozdic.com English collocation dictionary, but it appears has access to big dictionary resources. A site to bookmark with https://www.english-corpora.org/ 115595941663656001\n

@birb https://davidlabaree.com

https://techdirt.com @birb

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