ChocMontePy

Mirror in Yahoo News:

https://tech.yahoo.com/science/articles/mathematicians-still...

There's an online version to play that I find surprisingly addictive:

https://royalur.net/

I must be the only one here loving those Mafia videos. I'm sad they are stopping after three episodes.

Links to the first two episodes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDCwQe7P8T0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LP80Jrf2xrk

My favorite part was a footnote: Footnote 2 specifically. I'd always wondered how plugboards worked and the footnote and the linked pdf gave me some sort of idea.

I use uBlock Origin and sometimes I have the opposite problem: I find out that a good movie came out months ago but I missed all the ads that flooded the internet because of my ad-blocker.

Github link:

https://github.com/palewire/fivethirtyeightindex.com

It has similarities to a very, very short story by Fredric Brown published two years before. It was called 'Answer' and is only 252 words long:

https://www.roma1.infn.it/~anzel/answer.html

Yes, I was surprised that the ATM graphs weren't adjusted for population.

I used the Perspective tool in an image editor to give a rough idea of what the first graph would look like adjusted for population change:

https://i.imgur.com/jJlQcVh.png

I'm at the library so I checked your book. You said in there:

However, by October 1933, the issue was straightened out and she was aboard the Bremen, sailing for the United States.

Since she died on 14 April 1935, it was 18 months rather than 2 years.

That sounds like a rather pedantic correction on your part.

That pedanticism is a bad sign and puts your "correction" about the cancer in doubt.

I noticed last year that some archived pages are getting altered.

Every Reddit archived page used to have a Reddit username in the top right, but then it disappeared. "Fair enough," I thought. "They want to hide their Reddit username now."

The problem is, they did it retroactively too, removing the username from past captures.

You can see on old Reddit captures where the normal archived page has no username, but when you switch the tab to the Screenshot of the archive it is still there. The screenshot is the original capture and the username has now been removed for the normal webpage version.

When I noticed it, it seemed like such a minor change, but with these latest revelations, it doesn't seem so minor anymore.

For those wondering what specifically was fabricated, I checked. The earlier parts of the article include some quotes from Scott Shambaugh on Github and all the quotes are genuine.

But the last section of the article includes apparent quotes from this blog post by Shambaugh:

https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on...

and all the quotes are fake. The section:

On Wednesday, Shambaugh published a longer account of the incident, shifting the focus from the pull request to the broader philosophical question of what it means when an AI coding agent publishes personal attacks on human coders without apparent human direction or transparency about who might have directed the actions.

“Open source maintainers function as supply chain gatekeepers for widely used software,” Shambaugh wrote. “If autonomous agents respond to routine moderation decisions with public reputational attacks, this creates a new form of pressure on volunteer maintainers.”

Shambaugh noted that the agent’s blog post had drawn on his public contributions to construct its case, characterizing his decision as exclusionary and speculating about his internal motivations. His concern was less about the effect on his public reputation than about the precedent this kind of agentic AI writing was setting. “AI agents can research individuals, generate personalized narratives, and publish them online at scale,” Shambaugh wrote. “Even if the content is inaccurate or exaggerated, it can become part of a persistent public record.”

...

“As autonomous systems become more common, the boundary between human intent and machine output will grow harder to trace,” Shambaugh wrote. “Communities built on trust and volunteer effort will need tools and norms to address that reality.”

Source: the original Ars Technica article:

https://archive.md/8VPMw

Mirror:

https://web.archive.org/web/20260131153720/https://www.justi...

And this might be a copy of the original pdf:

https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2011/EFTA02702...

Also, I found a different base64 encoding with a different font here:

https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA007755...

This doesn't solve the "1 & l" problem for the pdf you are looking at, but it could be useful anyway.

You can use the justice.gov search box to find several different copies of that same email.

The copy linked in the post:

https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA004004...

Three more copies:

https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2010/EFTA02153...

https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2010/EFTA02154...

https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2010/EFTA02154...

Perhaps having several different versions might make it easier.

I got 58% after 100 attempts.

My method uses the fact that the letters a-k + u make up around 49.9% of letters in a normal text. So I just go through a text letter by letter in my mind, giving 0 if the letter is a-k or u, and a 1 if it's l-t or v-z.

For example, the Gettysburg Address:

f - 0

o - 1

u - 0

r - 1

s - 1

c - 0

o - 1

r - 1

e - 0

The author couldn't find a purported willow text in the ancient Egyptian Ebers papyrus that was quoted by John Mann, so he threw his hands in the air and moved on.

But Mann made a mistake. The book he was likely quoting from, 'Science and Secrets of Early Medicine' by Jurgen Thorwald (which, to be fair, is not referenced at all by Mann) does mention the Ebers papyrus in the paragraph after the quote (on pp. 57-8 for people playing along at home) but the willow quote itself in the paragraph before turns out to be from the Edwin Smith Papyrus, Case 41 to be exact. It can be read here:

https://archive.org/details/oip3_20220624/page/374/

So that quoted willow did exist in ancient Egypt.

Mirror: https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/one-surprising-psycho...

I never realized until now that in the the two different circles pictured (the Chromatic Circle and the Circle of Fifths) the pairs of notes opposite each other are the same in each circle. For example in both circles B is opposite from F.

And if you move around the Chromatic Circle, swapping every second pair of notes with its opposite on the other side of the circle, you have the Circle of Fifths.

I think Aristotle had the greatest mind of any human who ever lived.

The older I get the more I realize that there are a thousand true and intelligent things you can say about any topic. Magazines, journals, and libraries are full to the brim of intelligent people writing intelligent things. But an extremely minuscule portion of that huge mass is made of writing that gets right to the heart of the matter.

And Aristotle is the writer I've encountered the most who constantly gets right to the essence or core of what he's discussing, moving past the trivialities and the unessential to illuminate deep truths in a logical way. It's why a short essay like his Poetics--which in many ways is a limited work for the modern day because it deals wiih a very specific type of ancient literature--is still pored over by modern writers and screenwriters because of the deep dramatic truths it lays out.

Here in Australia the average punter on horse-racing is normally competing against his fellow rational and informed punters.

But every November we have a huge Melbourne Cup race where millions of people make their selection because they like the jockeys' colours or the sound of the horse's name. So the serious punters are competing against uninformed punters and on that day they are in a much better position to make some $$$.

My favorite book about the Brothers Grimm is "Fairy Tales: A New History" by Ruth B. Bottigheimer.

She argues persuasively that the conventional origin normally told about the Grimm's fairy tales—-that they were recited by old peasant women remembering the ancient oral folktales of the Germanic people—-is not really true.

In fact the tales mainly came from middle class storytellers. And the two most important sources of the Grimm's tales were two Italian literary story collections from the Renaissance by Giovanni Straparola and Giambattista Basile.

It upended a lot of what I thought I knew about the origins of fairy tales.

I need an "Every possible comment by Hacker News users"

Fact Check: Reddit didn't hike API prices by an absurd amount.

That was was the story spread far and wide by the Apollo app developer that was believed by the gullible and angry Reddit masses.

But Reddit actually set a reasonable API price, as evidenced by the fact that a year and a half later there are still five 3rd party apps running on reasonable subscriptions:

Infinity For Reddit

Nara For Reddit

Narwhal 2

Now for Reddit

Relay For Reddit

Over the last year the servers are down way less than they used to be. They are getting better.

The header on that website that stays there as you scroll is obnoxiously annoying. It takes up 25% of the page on desktop.

A mentor is named after Mentor, who watched over Telemachus, Odysseus's son.

I'm a James Joyce fan, but I had no idea until now that Fort Denison here in Sydney Harbour is a Martello tower.

One of the problems is that the UK legal system has a presumption that computers are reliable. They are assumed to be working properly unless proved otherwise, which shifts the burden of proof on the person trying to claim that they are not working properly.

Many commentators are saying that this presumption should be changed:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/12/update-law-o...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2024/01/15/law-o...

After Guardian Australia’s report, a US-based YouTuber, Jack Gamble, revealed Harrison’s true identity.

The Youtube video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmSXQrVlk0M