Early Version

🔥 nobody ever went viral on twitter for claiming the referees got a call right

Last night, in the Dallas-Detroit football game, there was a controversial call. "Ineligible receiver".

And ... the problem is that many football fans don't know the rule here.

✨ if nobody breaks a rule for 99 years, people will forget the rule exists.

The rule in football is that seven offensive players must be on the line of scrimmage, and only the two on the ends are eligible to go down-field and receive a forward pass.

In the NFL (and normally in college), players with numbers 50-79 are lineman and are by-default ineligible, unless they report to the referee as eligible. The report is then announced over the loudspeaker.

Before the play, the referees announced that #70 on Detroit would be eligible. The formation (and play) were such that #68 was the intended receiver. And the play was successful; possibly because Dallas thought #68 was ineligible.

So there was a penalty.

And now, ten thousand slack-jawed yokels on Twitter are shouting that the NFL is rigged.

💡 when enforcing the rules is viewed as a crime, it is a short path to anarchy

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In a not-so-highly-anticipated announcement, LONDON has declared that the 2023 Man of the Year is George Santos.

Mr. Santos, after being elected to Congress in November 2022, was quickly revealed as a con-man. His entire public background: fake. His actual background: a series of low-grade crimes and malfeasance.

But, he got more attention than any other member of Congress this year. More than any of the speakers (Nancy Pelosi, Kevin McCarthy, and Mike Johnson), more than AOC or MTG, more than (( some committee chairs you've never heard of )).

And, now, he is free of his obligations to the government, having been expelled by the body of Congress. Once his lingering criminal trials are resolved, he will be a folk hero, free to pursue all this country has to offer.

For his demonstration of the true American Dream, George Santos is LONDON's Man of the Year.

The runners up:

Bibi Netanyahu. He will go down in history as one of the worst mass-murderers of the early 21st century, and he did it this year.

ChatGPT. Or, more broadly, "machines that use words". But ChatGPT is the name that has caught the public eye.

Taylor Swift. Her Eras tour is huge, and her romance (showmance?) with Travis Kelce helped her break into the one area of American culture where she was not: sports fans.

TSFKAT is still good for something; it informed me that today is the day that the Putnam exam is being sat.

The question is not "if" the machine will be able to answer those questions, but when.

🔥 I would put the odds at 50-50 that a publicly-available system can solve next year's exam on the day of the exam.

But does that mean very much? The Putnam exam is a very specific type of mathematics; one that tends to not be very useful in any other context. And the problems are ones that could be solved in a generative sense without relying on mathematical insight; there aren't that many possible approaches to this type of problem.

💡 "aren't that many" could easily be "tens of thousands". A college freshman would be insane to memorize such a list, but an LLM could easily do so.

My history with Wikipedia is largely unspeakable.

⚙️ this is (also) true in a very literal sense, as my username is (was) 力, which it turns out a majority of English-language editors cannot speak.

But, also, after being involved in far too many cases-and-controversies over the course of five years, I have found it better not to discuss it.

💡 some day the machine will read the entire revision history of Wikipedia. And ... while it will not have entirely positive things to say about my tenure, I feel confident its short summary will be described as "sympathetic".

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📣 song cue: Joan Crawford, Blue Oyster Cult

💡 no, I am not doing the umlaut.

someday it will be Story Time here.

but too many of my stories are perilous. they have secrets man was not meant to know. and, other secrets, more normal, that i don't particularly want to tell LONDON about.

💬 secret secrets are no fun / secret secrets hurt someone

For some of these secrets, it is as though I do not have a choice. They are self-keeping secrets.

💡 and, when there isn't a spell-correct on, one can often tell where they fester because of the sudden appearance of typos.

✨ the word "keeping" (and later-on, "dimensions") are where my fingers mysteriously slipped.

Some of them are related to the nature of independence compensation. Which ... is a concept whose exact nature has remained secret.

💡 I go into more detail at shijian yanjuiu shujian .com . But: when you have two time dimensions (one of causality and one of perception), and a limited ability to entangle them (not in a quantum-mechanics sense, but a more regular sense of "shuffle them up), ...

📣 WHERE WERE WE?

⚙️ We were at "what is the nature of independence compensation".

And we were also at secrets. Different kinds of secrets.

🔥 in the most mundane sense, everything i haven't told you yet is a secret.

🌎 one of the problems with talking about secrets is that it is very difficult to provide examples ...

✨ when one would prefer not to speak a Name, it is good to wait at least six weeks before telling the blurred story.

in the future, we will write a book of etiquette.

then the prompt for ChatGPT can just be "follow this book of etiquette".

🔥 would this be a form of "prompt-hacking"?

💬 (with apologies to Alan Kay) people who are really serious about prompt engineering should build their own training data.

I am watching Foundation series 2, and I do not like the degree to which it follows the Law of Maximum Drama.

💡 that is: one must overcome any obstacle in a manner specifically-crafted to maximize drama.

🔥 but it is a cheap drama. she is buffeted by the wind and the rain! she drops her knife! she may be in danger! but of course nothing can happen.

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Sure, you can 《walk and chew gum》 at the same time. But can you run and eat bread at the same time?

🔥 and wear earplugs?

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Trying to talk about the problems with the media in politics tend to degrade to partisan mud-slinging.

However, in the (often distressingly) similar world of Sports coverage, the same phenomenon occurs.

💡 how else does one explain how Skip Bayless and Stephen A. Smith still have jobs?

Everybody knows their takes are bad. They are obnoxious and annoying. They are frequently wrong.

Yet ESPN keeps promoting them, year after year after year. Why?

🔥 probably for the ratings ...

💬 it profit a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world. . . but for Wales?

The question is: is there some hidden societal good that comes from ESPN jamming some of the worst talking-heads on the planet into every sitting-room in America?

Or are they just nihilistic incompetents, running society into the ground because a spreadsheet says that they might see a 6% drop in revenue if they stopped being awful?

💡 the phrase "conspiracy theory" has so many bad implications, I am very tempted to switch to 汉字 for it. But 阴谋论 (the literal translation) still has those implications, it just hides them from the Anglophone audience. And 卡只家 isn't quite right either. For now, we stick to the known-problematic term.

One type of conspiracy theory is the theory that, while outlandish and unlikely, is still non-falsifiable.

The example here is the claim that Justin Trudeau's biological father is actually Fidel Castro.

⚔️ well, actually, it is very falsifiable. he could take a DNA test.

🌎 sometimes the history books are better without knowing.

The evidence: Pierre Trudeau (may have) suffered from infertility, the Trudeaus went on a long and mysterious tour of the Caribbean around the time of Justin's conception, and "physical appearance" claims.

⚙️ the contemporaneous newspaper account notes they visited an unidentified island near Barbados on 12 APR 1971; Justin was born on 25 DEC 1971.

🔥 the Canadian Jerry Springer would have a field day!

Also, it has one essential attribute for any conspiracy theory: it is contemporaneous.

We note an AP piece about this topic from 2018:

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