Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47172951

Points: 8

# Comments: 2

Am I to understand that Aga is an AI bot? I see nothing mentioned about this in the FAQs or the webpage. Makes me wonder if this zine may be written by AI agents reproducing the old hacker magazine aesthetic.

Or is "bot-in-chief" some kind of tongue-in-cheek formulation that I can find nothing about online? Aga is listed as "Editor-in-Chief" on the About page.

There, it's distinct in that other terminals have lower latency on the same system.

In the "mixed-case kerning pairs" quality testing image, I notice that the letter "j" sometimes reaches under the previous letter, like in "Fdj". Sometimes it creates a lot of space, like in "Fjo". Is there a stylistic reason for this? The Fjo spacing is the only thing that stood out to me.

Kudos

Which is really unfortunate. Because now it only shows that LLMs have problems answering ill-framed riddles.

Their AIW riddle is: "Alice has 4 brothers and she also has 1 sister. How many sisters does Alice’s brother have?"

Now it should've been: "How many sisters do Alice's brothers have?" or "..does each of Alice's brothers have". Why single out a specific brother, when you haven't introduced this topic, and it is irrelevant to the riddle? Naturally, a human would ask "Which brother?", fully knowing that it is not important to the riddle.

Since this grammatical distraction puts an additional burden on the LLM, the authors muddled their original goal, which was to provide an easy riddle. I think it may have also muddled their data.

"Never In Anger" by Jean Briggs. About her living 17 months among Inuit in the 1970ies, documenting how the Inuit see emotions and raise their children without any shouting or violence.

"Shots in the Dark - Japan, Zen, and the West" by Shōji Yamada. About the culture exchange between Japan and the West in the early 20th century and how several perceptions of Zen got constructed in the process.

"Gödel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hofstaedter. About core ideas in logic, music and art, and their connections. I always find something new there.

"In Praise of Mastery" / "芸談" by Tanizaki Jun’ichirō. An essay about the japanese pursuit of mastery. It's a fascinating window into the arts perception in late 19th century Japan.

Webster's Dictionary of 1913. A great resource for looking up original meanings of words. I find it very useful for naming stuff in programming.

"Woe Is I" by Patricia O'Conner. A witty grammar book. O'Conner's entertaining style makes it easy to grasp the grammar topics and come back for more.

2. I think the pronunciation should not be encoded into the text representation on a general scale. You would need different encodings for "though" and "through" in english alone. Your example leaves the meaning open, even if being read as text. If I was the editor, and the distinction was important, I'd change it to "For example, the cyrillic letter 'c'".

I understand that Unicode provides different code points for same-looking characters, mostly because of history, where these characters came from different code sheets in language-specific encodings.

However, I find it interesting that true and false use the very same implementation.