svat

il y a 5 joursdiscuss

For OP: I think "Type specimen" should be the default sample text, just to get readers into the right spirit. :)

For anyone else reading this: make sure you click on the "controls & metrics" at the bottom to try out all the options (such as comparing with your browser's "text-wrap: pretty"); it's really cool!

svat

il y a 7 joursdiscuss

By your reasoning, multiplying two numbers in binary involves no multiplication at all, because multiplying by 1 and multiplying by 0 are both trivial operations.

But obviously multiplying two n-bit binary numbers is not done in O(1) time, so "only counting the number of multiplies" is not a meaningful model, and not the model adopted by the researchers quoted in the article.

svat

il y a 9 joursdiscuss

This is great! Loved the demo and controls (and nice touch to include The Frog Prince as one of the sample texts lol). I think by doing tracking and expansion you're going even further than original Knuth TeX did/does. Maybe for the demo when hyphenation is turned off, the browser side should also turn it off? Or leave it like this, justif without hyphenation still does better than browser with hyphenation :)

Wish this project great success!

svat

il y a 11 joursdiscuss

> AI is a bad writer, but […] Let’s say they finally fixed the machine so it was really good, so its default setting was to write exactly like VS Naipaul. The result would be a world in which you’re constantly confronted by cold emails from VS Naipaul, bubbly magazine articles by VS Naipaul, signs in shop windows in which VS Naipaul tells you about the new opening hours, strangely flaccid sexts VS Naipaul ghostwrote for someone on Feeld, and websites in which VS Naipaul fails to say anything in particular about grilled meats. This would not be an improvement; it might even be worse. Any world in which there is only one literary voice, blanketing everything in the exact same tone, is a nightmare.

(From https://samkriss.substack.com/p/if-you-let-ai-do-your-writin...)

svat

il y a 22 joursdiscuss

No they are not, which is why Wikipedia doesn't rely on them. All information on Wikipedia is supposed to be verifiable via a reliable secondary source (books, newspapers, etc from publishers with a reputation), so anything written by any editor can, if unverifiable, be removed by any other editor, anonymous or not.

svat

il y a 22 joursdiscuss

I had to read your comment several times, because the quotes seemed to have nothing in common, let alone be "almost verbatim". Then I realized you were probably commenting not about the quotes themselves, but about the formulaic construction "…said <person>, <description> <relation>". Yes it's a standard format common to all science journalism and journalism in general. Even searching for the specific phrase "and was not involved with the research" and looking for pre-2022 results (needs a bit of filtering as search engines are biased towards recent pages), we find for example:

> [2014-01] “Here you’re able to, in combination, use many, many selective antibodies and screen them in a very sensitive manner,” said Mark Rubin, who directs the Institute for Precision Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College and New York Presbyterian Hospital, and was not involved in the research. https://csb.mgh.harvard.edu/data/wiki_pages/26/thescientist....

> [2018-12] “I think it’s beautiful stuff; I’m really excited,” says Eric J. Schelter of the University of Pennsylvania, who studies lanthanide-dependent enzymes and was not involved in the research. https://axial.acs.org/biological-chemistry-and-chemical-biol...

> [2020-06] The study “adds to the growing appreciation of cells’ responses to bioelectric aspects of their environment,” said Michael Levin, who directs the Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology at Tufts University and was not involved in the research. https://partnerships.princeton.edu/news/researchers-use-elec...

> [2018-11] Linda Bauld is Professor of Public Health at the University of Edinburgh and a member of the NCRI Cancer Conference Scientific Committee, and was not involved in the research. She said… https://ecancer.org/en/news/15060-doctors-and-nurses-relucta...

> [2019-03] The case provides “solid evidence for remission,”says Hans-Peter Kiem, a physician who studies cell and gene therapy at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, and was not involved in the research. http://institute.wuhanvirology.org/Newsletter2016/201904/P02...

> [2021-08] ‘I would say there's a lot of potential … now that they have shown that these structures are feasible, they are stable, at least under these conditions,' said Professor Roman Fasel, who heads the nanotech@surfaces Laboratory at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (EMPA) and was not involved in the research. https://projects.research-and-innovation.ec.europa.eu/en/hor...

> [2011-01] Dr. Kristine Scordo, who heads the Acute Care Nurse Practitioner Program at Wright State University-Miami Valley College of Nursing and Health in Dayton, Ohio, and was not involved in the research, said the results with rosuvastatin are consistent with what she sees in clinical practice. https://webapp2.wright.edu/web1/newsroom/2011/01/18/rosuvast...

> [2022-06] The findings could allow doctors to “focus on the patients we think would truly benefit from chemotherapy and avoid the side effects for patients for whom it’s likely unnecessary,” said Dr. Stacey Cohen of Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, who reviewed the colon cancer findings and was not involved in the research. https://nihfw.ac.in/Doc/Daily%20Health%20News%2020220608.pdf

> [2018-11] Robert Jones is Chair of the NCRI's Advanced Disease Prostate Cancer Clinical Studies Subgroup, Professor of Clinical Cancer Research at the University of Glasgow, and was not involved in the research. He said https://ecancer.org/en/news/15045-men-with-prostate-cancer-w...

> [2022-07] Professor Marielle Pijnenburg is head of the paediatric assembly of the European Respiratory Society and was not involved in the research. She says… https://publications.ersnet.org/press/2022-07-children-close...

> [2022-08] “Alcoholism is hard to treat, so any success is noteworthy,” Boris Heifets, who studies psychedelics at Stanford University and was not involved in the research, tells STAT News’ Olivia Goldhill. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/psychedelic-magic-...

It's really a common format, and gathering quotes from independent sources is pretty much what all journalism is about.

svat

il y a 28 joursdiscuss

I think it's the latter. I find the introduction (written by Kent Beck) easier to understand than the rest of the article (which he says is AI-written: "genie-generated description of YAGNI").

In particular writing like this is just annoying:

> Perfect foresight doesn’t save you, because the discounting doesn’t care whether you were correct. It cares that you sequenced the cost ahead of the return. The gap between the two is the loss, and you opened the gap on purpose.

svat

il y a 29 joursdiscuss

X, who was Y, was stuck at Z the entire W.

(Bruce Edgar), who was (on (102 not out)), was stuck at (the (non-striker's end)) the entire (over).

• An “over” consists of six opportunities to hit the ball and score “runs”. (A “run” is the basic unit of scoring.)

• "102 not out" indicates how many runs the player had personally contributed to the team's score. The number is large enough to suggest that this was the player who was playing particularly well in that match.

So the sentence is saying that the player who could be expected to make good use of whichever of those six opportunities he got, did not get any of them.

I think as with most cases of unfamiliar jargon, the sentence can be confusing not because of unusual words but because of everyday words being used with technical meanings ("not out", "end", "over").

svat

le mois dernierdiscuss

To make the chronology clear:

• The Wikipedia page from before the reference to Chen's article was added: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chip%27s_Challeng... — it cites two sources for "coded by Tony Krueger" ("About box from the game") and for "written [by Krueger] in a single summer" (a forum post).

• Chen's article mentions "Tony Krueger is remembered in Wikipedia as the person who ported…", then adds a footnote: “Probably not as widely documented is that he accomplished this without the source code: He reverse-engineered the MS-DOS version and then reimplemented it for Windows.”

• The Wikipedia article then cites Chen's article for this additional information.

It's all fine and proper. I've just edited the citation to make this clear again.

svat

il y a 2 moisdiscuss

This is cool, good luck with your project! For this page, you may want to pick as the default examples some longer words (like say "nevertheless") that show both positive (odd number) and negative (even number) patterns.

Also for anyone else reading this, Frank Liang's thesis "Word Hy-phen-a-tion by Com-put-er" (https://tug.org/docs/liang/) is a great read, and the data structure it uses (packed tries) is clever too. The section of the TeX program that describes hyphenation is also an interesting read, and Knuth added a further twist (what we may call a hash-packed trie) in his frequent-words literate program for Bentley's column.

svat

il y a 2 moisdiscuss

I think your second paragraph is the same as “so slowly”, just quantified. And I'd argue that the technical meaning of “almost all” does match the everyday definition: if you told someone that “for sufficiently large N, almost all 2N-bit numbers are not the product of two N-bit numbers”, they'd probably think of “almost all” as a fraction like 99.99% or 99.999999% or whatever, and whatever fraction they picked, the statement would be true (with the threshold for “sufficiently large” depending on the fraction they picked).

So whether “only 17%” is interesting or not depends on whether you see it as a stand-in for “less than half”, or “a number close to 0”.

(Posting this comment mainly to correct an error in my previous comment: in both places that I wrote “n=2^64” I should have instead written “n=2^32”.)

svat

il y a 2 moisdiscuss

I think by "have 32 bit factors" the GP actually means "has a factorization as a product of two 32-bit numbers", rather than the natural meaning that doesn't work, as you pointed out.

svat

il y a 2 moisdiscuss

It's related, but not the same thing. For example, for b=10, the number 70=2x5x7 is b-smooth, but it cannot be written as the product of two numbers less than b. Here are the other b-smooth (counter)examples for b=10:

    | n   | factorization  | products of two numbers
    |-----|----------------|------------------------------------
    | 50  | 2 * 5^2        | 1x50, 2x25, 5x10
    | 60  | 2^2 * 3 * 5    | 1x60, 2x30, 3x20, 4x15, 5x12, 6x10
    | 70  | 2 * 5 * 7      | 1x70, 2x35, 5x14, 7x10
    | 75  | 3 * 5^2        | 1x75, 3x25, 5x15
    | 80  | 2^4 * 5        | 1x80, 2x40, 4x20, 5x16, 8x10
    | 84  | 2^2 * 3 * 7    | 1x84, 2x42, 3x28, 4x21, 6x14, 7x12
    | 90  | 2 * 3^2 * 5    | 1x90, 2x45, 3x30, 5x18, 6x15, 9x10
    | 96  | 2^5 * 3        | 1x96, 2x48, 3x32, 4x24, 6x16, 8x12
    | 98  | 2 * 7^2        | 1x98, 2x49, 7x14

svat

il y a 2 moisdiscuss

The word “most” is indeed not very surprising if taken to mean >50% (as you do), but the surprising fact (admittedly not relevant for 2^64 in the quoted sentence) is that “most” can be replaced with “almost all” in the technical sense meaning “tending to 1” i.e. “1 - o(1)”, i.e. “eventually greater than 1-epsilon for any epsilon”.

Here's the multiplication table up to 9 (so for n=10 in place of n=2^64), and it already contains only 37 distinct products among its 100 entries:

     × |  0  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9
    ---+------------------------------
     0 |  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0
     1 |  0  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9
     2 |  0  2  4  6  8 10 12 14 16 18
     3 |  0  3  6  9 12 15 18 21 24 27
     4 |  0  4  8 12 16 20 24 28 32 36
     5 |  0  5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45
     6 |  0  6 12 18 24 30 36 42 48 54
     7 |  0  7 14 21 28 35 42 49 56 63
     8 |  0  8 16 24 32 40 48 56 64 72
     9 |  0  9 18 27 36 45 54 63 72 81

That is, in decimal, only 37% of (up to) two-digit numbers can be written as products of two one-digit numbers. This fraction, which drops to 28% at n=100, only drops to 17% at n=2^64 (per the article). So it decreases VERY slowly, and it's nontrivial that it actually goes to 0.

svat

il y a 2 moisdiscuss

See “The Concept of a Meta-Font”: https://gwern.net/doc/design/typography/1982-knuth.pdf

svat

il y a 2 moisdiscuss

> But nearly all print publishers also do what SE does.

Do they? To check, I tried to find a recent publication of Agatha Christie, and found the collection “Country Christie: Twelve Devonshire Mysteries” which says “First published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2025”. It still has British-style punctuation (throughout the book), and times like “1.30”, “9.30”, “11.30”, “7.30 a.m.”, “12.30 p.m.”, and “8.30”. I checked a couple of other recent publications and admittedly they do modernize (though not in phrases like “every one of you”), but again I found the collection “The Last Seance: Haunting Tales from the Queen of Mystery” (2019) which does not. So it seems mixed.

In any case, I think it's fine to do what Standard Ebooks does, and if it were instead called something like “Modernized Ebooks with American punctuation”—if readers would know before picking one up—it would be totally unobjectionable. The name “Standard” gives the wrong impression. It's a bit like colorizing old black-and-white movies (or dubbing foreign-language movies instead of subtitling them): yes possibly even a majority of people may prefer it, but IMO it would be good to be more explicit what has been done.

svat

il y a 2 moisdiscuss

Your comment makes it sound as though the mistake was introduced by an inexperienced contributor who did not read the guide, when in fact it was introduced by the founder/editor-in-chief of the project. :) And in case it wasn't clear, only one of the mistakes was reverted, and the other one I quoted is still present in the book even as of this moment.

More broadly, the position of Standard Ebooks is that a modern reader would be distracted by spellings like "some one" and "every thing", and by time written like "2.30" instead of "2:30", and that books in British quotation style must be converted to American quotation style. I think most readers can in fact tolerate such small differences, and this position is frankly insulting — the punctuation and spelling of works are part of their character, and if anything, I'm more distracted by such anachronisms in style introduced as part of the Standard Ebooks process.

svat

il y a 2 moisdiscuss

An Applied Mathematician's Apology by Nick Trefethen[1] has a chapter (a couple of pages) titled "Cleve Moler and Matlab".

> I first met Cleve Moler when I was a graduate student and he visited Stanford, where his loud and friendly voice reverberated around Serra House. Moler is the antithesis of a European, and as a transatlantic soul, I love both Europeans and their antitheses. A room with Moler in it is a no-nonsense zone. He has no interest in showing you how your problem is connected with the theory of pseudodifferential operators. He just wants to get things done computationally, and nobody has done it better. Moler is about the same age as Knuth, and while Knuth was writing his great books on the analysis of discrete algorithms, Moler was creating the modern era of numerical software. He was an author of both of the foundational software packages of the 1970s, EISPACK and LINPACK, and he also published two influential software-based numerical analysis textbooks. And then, in around 1977 in the Computer Science department at the University of New Mexico, he invented Matlab, which changed the world.

I never liked using Matlab (the little I used it), but after reading this I understood better what its innovation was: “All the right algorithms would be invoked in all the right places, without the user needing to know the details.”

A footnote I found interesting:

> For me `eig(A)` epitomizes the successful contribution of numerical analysis to our technological world. Physicists, chemists, engineers, and mathematicians know that computing eigenvalues of matrices is a solved problem. Simply invoke `eig(A)`, or its equivalent in whatever language you are using, and you tap into the work of generations of numerical analysts. The algorithm involved, the QR algorithm, is completely reliable, utterly nonobvious, and amazingly fast. On my laptop, for a 1000 × 1000 matrix A, `eig(A)` computes all 1000 eigenvalues in half a second.

[1]: https://sites.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/akherim/NickApology...

svat

il y a 2 moisdiscuss

Hi (looks like I've already starred your repo at some point months/years ago)!

The motivation was not to replace art with technology, but to preserve/resurrect an art that was going away, by truly capturing the human understanding[^1]. When the rest of the industry was perfectly content with the deterioration of typesetting, Knuth set out to capture the aesthetics of the best journals of the past. A quote from the Mathematical Typography paper I linked above (https://websites.umich.edu/~millerpd//docs/501_Winter13/Knut...):

> At this point I regretfully stopped submitting papers to the American Mathematical Society, since the finished product was just too painful for me to look at. Similar fluctuations of typographical quality have appeared recently in all technical fields, especially in physics where the situation has gotten even worse.

Frankly, I think the "replace art by technology" impression is a very shallow one, that I alluded to earlier. When Knuth wrote his “The Concept of a Meta-Font” in a journal (Visible Language) mostly read by designers/typographers, many of them wrote letters in response (https://shreevatsa.net/tex/metafont/concept#reactions). What you can see is that the best of them were supportive (even bringing up new points like how it could be useful in educating the next generation of font designers), but some were sharply critical, more or less resenting this intrusion of technology into their art medium. But now a few decades later, basically all fonts are distributed and stored digitally anyway, except that (without METAFONT) the shapes of letters are now basically just stored as binary blobs / sequences of numbers, without any METAFONT-like understanding of typographically relevant quantities like (say) x-height, comma depth, slab thickness, etc. Which one is truer to the art?

(Not a rhetorical question BTW: as in the Bigelow/Southall quote above, one could say that Knuth's approach is to achieve typographical/artistic excellence through understanding, but the artistic approach is visual and intuitive without a cognitive component. But this is a different complaint from the "replace art by technology" take.)

(BTW apart from the default Computer Modern fonts designed by Knuth, who based them on earlier Monotype fonts, almost all fonts used by people with TeX too are designed by font designers, not computer scientists.)

[1]: Related quote from Knuth (sorry paraphrasing from memory): “People say that the best way to understand something is to teach it. I say no: the best way to understand something is to teach it to a computer.” But then again he has also said: "Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do."

svat

il y a 2 moisdiscuss

Actually:

• He had already published the first editions of Volume 1, 2, 3, and the second edition of Volume 1, by 1973. It was in 1977 when the publishers sent him galley proofs for the second edition of Volume 2, having switched to phototypesetting (away from hot-metal typesetting a la Linotype, though IIRC it was actually Monotype) that he was disappointed with the results. And he had some back-and-forth with them and they did improve their fonts (https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/367133/48), but he was still dissatisfied.

> I didn't know what to do. I had spent 15 years writing those books, but if they were going to look awful I didn't want to write any more.

• At this time he came to know of the existence of digital typesetters. Typesetting with computers had existed before, but it had always seemed a crude toy, rather than something suitable for “real books”. But he saw Patrick Winston's Artificial Intelligence that had been just published (I think he got an early proof copy to review or something), and he realized for the first time that digital typesetting was an option (apparently Winston's book was printed at >1000dpi, and Knuth later got his hands on a machine that claimed a resolution of 5333 dpi: see this wonderful comment from Knuth's student and “right-hand man”, David Fuchs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20009875)

• In fact it was the fonts that he was dissatisfied with rather than the typesetting, so METAFONT was in some sense the primary/motivating project and TeX was only written in order to be able to use METAFONT.

• Actually his first idea was to simply take the old fonts, get high-resolution scans of them (not easy to obtain at that time) and use them directly. He approached Xerox Research Center but:

> I asked if I could use Xerox's lab facilities to create my fonts. The answer was yes, but there was a catch: Xerox insisted on all rights to the use of any fonts that I developed with their equipment. Of course that was their privilege, but such a deal was unacceptable to me: A mathematical formula should never be "owned" by anybody! Mathematics belongs to God.

• So he went home and (after trying a bit with TV cameras) tried projecting photographs of the pages onto the wall and tracing the outlines, and it was while staring at these images that he realized that the shapes of letters were not arbitrary but there was some logic to them (e.g. in the font he was using, the spacing between the vertical strokes in 'm' was equal, and equal to that in 'n'), and he decided (as a computer programmer) to capture this design in code — something that had never before been done. The hardest letter to capture this way is S, hence the paper in the OP.

> Finally, a simple thought struck me. Those letters were designed by people. If I could understand what those people had in their minds when they were drawing the letters, then I could program a computer to carry out the same ideas. Instead of merely copying the form of the letters my new goal was therefore to copy the intelligence underlying that form. I decided to learn what type designers knew, and to teach that knowledge to a computer.

• This is also why METAFONT never really caught on among typographers: as Charles Bigelow (quoted by Richard Southall, https://luc.devroye.org/Southall-METAFONT1986.pdf) observed, “the designer thinks with images, not about images”. Knuth did not want crude “geometric” constructions of letters (as some prior 16th century typographers had attempted: https://www.ams.org/journals/bull/1979-01-02/S0273-0979-1979... and as some typographers only passingly familiar with METAFONT think!). He wanted actual real typographically beautiful shapes, but to be able to generate those shapes with code. This is obviously much harder than simply drawing the shapes using visual intuition, even if it enables variation. (See “The Concept of a Meta-Font”: https://gwern.net/doc/design/typography/1982-knuth.pdf — again, many people in the typography world confuse the abstract concept of a meta-font introduced in this paper with (their incorrect impressions of) the METAFONT program, and omit crediting Knuth for variable fonts).

• The second edition of Volume 2 was not printed with Linotype. Yes the machines still existed in Europe and he talked to typesetters (he mentions in particular a person from Belfast), but it was in fact published using TeX (the first version, TeX77 and MF78). He was still unhappy with the results, though, and spent a few more years learning more about typography and working with people like Bigelow and Hermann Zapf, before the rewrite into the current TeX82 and MF84 (and current version of Computer Modern). I think it's only with the third edition (1997) that he's finally satisfied.

Submissions

The P.G. Wodehouse Method Of Refactoring (2008)

Case Study: Monolithic Repository at Google (2018) [pdf]

Donald Knuth's 23rd Annual Christmas Lecture: A Conjecture That Had to Be True

comments