I have very mixed feelings about Standard Ebooks and would much prefer being able to use Project Gutenberg directly, but one good thing Standard Ebooks does is that every book has an associated git repository (on GitHub), so it's (in principle) possible to see a history of fixes to the text over time.

Also one should probably compare the former to the single-page version on standardebooks: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/william-shakespeare/romeo-...

> If you disclose your brilliant idea, everyone will copy it and your advantage in the marketplace will be transitory.

but that is the very point that patents are supposed to prevent. So why do you say that?

The post you're replying to says:

> I don't think the money would have been spent if our competition could immediately copy what we figured out. Customers did benefit then, and now, 20 years later, anyone can do it

so clearly the patent worked for them: they were able to use their simple and intuitive UI, while the competition could not copy it till 20 years later. So what is the question?

See also the videos of the lectures of which these are the notes (https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/klr.html), at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mert0kmZvVM + https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOdeqCXq1tXihn5KmyB2Y...

Someone should make a webpage which has the list of videos (ideally without relying on YouTube), and next to each of them the corresponding notes chapter.

•1. Where most users can install software from:

↠↠ iOS: official store (App Store) + (in EU) other stores

↠↠ Android (now): official store (Play Store), other stores (e.g. F-Droid), arbitrary APKs

↠↠ Android (after changes): official store (Play Store), other stores (e.g. F-Droid), arbitrary APKs

•2. Who the developers of software can be:

↠↠ iOS: registered developers ($99/year)

↠↠ Android (now): any developer

↠↠ Android (after changes): registered developers ($25 one-time) + hobbyists (small distribution) + any developers (for advanced users)

•3. Installing your own apps on your own phone, without becoming a registered developer:

↠↠ iOS: using XCode: need to reinstall every 7 days.

↠↠ Android (now): using ADB

↠↠ Android (after changes): using ADB

The second row (•2) is what is changing in Android. I think "the ability to run my own code on my own device", narrowly speaking, is closest to the third row, which is not changing.

> “Waymo claims they’re far safer in the US than traditional taxi services. But whether that is still the case on London’s infamously complex, congested and contested streets, remains to be seen.”

• Burmese Days (1934): 97000

• A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935): 94000

• Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936): 87000

• Coming Up for Air (1939): 83000 (?)

• Animal Farm (1945): 30000 (just over 30k)

• Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949): 103000 (or 99000 without the “The Principles of Newspeak” appendix).

This essay was written in 1946. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell_bibliography#Nov... consecutive books he published were:

* Coming Up for Air (1939)

* Animal Farm (1945)

Given the "seven years", it appears considered "Coming Up for Air" his previous novel, and "Animal Farm" not a novel. I wonder why?

In any case, the novel that he next wrote “fairly soon”, and which he predicted would be a failure, was:

* Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

— from https://words.filippo.io/crqc-timeline/ "A Cryptography Engineer’s Perspective on Quantum Computing Timelines", the OP's blog post from two weeks ago, and the first link in this one. [HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47662234]

Yes today's quantum computers cannot factor 21, but enough progress is happening fast enough that now there's a >1% chance they will go much further in (say) five years.

More broadly (outside of relevance to cryptography), quantum computers already can (almost certainly) beat classical computers on certain contrived (useless) problems: see https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.09901 "Has quantum advantage been achieved?" for a summary of the current state.

There should be 7 paragraphs in the preview shown, with paragraph breaks after ‘reigns.”’, ‘on Amazon.’, ‘Well, yes.’ and so on.

> user reviews exert ever more influence compared to serious criticism […] The rise of Amazon reviews has reinforced a larger pattern of populist impulses challenging older cultural norms. The book clubs and reading circles that do so much to fuel book sales today generally pay little attention to professional critics

Can confirm; yes it was helpful! I've never thought seriously about parsing and I've read occasionally (casually) about Pratt parsing, but this is the first time it seemed like an intuitive idea I'll remember.

(Then I confused myself by following some references and remembering the term "precedence climbing" and reading e.g. https://www.engr.mun.ca/~theo/Misc/pratt_parsing.htm by the person who coined that term, but nevermind — the original post here has still given me an idea I think I'll remember.)

In particular:

> This is an unabridged version of a solicited article for a forthcoming Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of Mathematics. […] took over a year to write – which means, at the current pace of development in the field, that some of it is already slightly out of date.

----

Edit: The post at https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/116319186983426174 mentions also an (entirely unrelated) popular-math presentation titled “What does it mean to think like a mathematician?” https://terrytao.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/ta... which is interesting too (despite the ChatGPT-generated illustrations and repeating stuff Tao has said before, on his blog etc.)

As an adversarial/worst-case model, it can be useful to think of every service as potentially storing forever all the data that you ever give it access to. As a practical matter, services have terms of service that they follow. If your Claude Code terms say that your data will not be used for training, you can be reasonably confident that they will not be, and storing the raw inputs forever (as suggested by “significant chance all of it is leaked sooner or later”) would be even more unlikely. (For example, Google has entire teams dedicated to compliance with users' “wipeout” settings. You can take a look at https://myactivity.google.com and https://myadcenter.google.com to see some of what Google knows and thinks about you, and if you've chosen "Auto-Delete after 3 months" or whatever, you can be very sure it will be gone after that time. Every single team that stores user data is required to comply with this.)

I do think the services make it harder than it should be, to find out what the terms are — for a given usage of their services whether and for how long the details will be stored by them. Just saying that you can find this out and generally rely on it at least at the time (at a reasonable threat model, e.g. not treating the service as a malicious adversary having a giant law-breaking conspiracy that has never been exposed).

— patio11 about this response (https://x.com/patio11/status/2035115379169677717)

But of course, writing as good as a grad student's (just not the particular delightful idiosyncratic style of a specific person) is still very impressive and amazing, so your concerns are still valid.