Jeffrey Shallit 🇺🇦
@shallit
Grumpy old American mathematician and computer scientist, now retired. My Erdös number equals 1.
When I taught advanced formal language theory at Waterloo, I used to hand out these laminated 'bar bet' cards, which are based on a fun little paper I wrote in 1999. The list of primes given is minimal. It's a very specific case of a theorem due to Haines (1969).
Someday I hope to visit the extremely large moose that occupies a blank spot in the map of Saskatchewan. Those antlers alone must be 60 km in length!
Still crazy: (By the way, the answer is "Something Green" by Fredric Brown.)
I asked ChatGPT for help in remembering the title and author of a science fiction short story from the 1950's about an explorer on another planet where there is nothing green except the flash of his ray gun. And it went crazy.
Google's Gemini (the cheap junky version that ruined Google search) gets the 2nd largest Pisot number wrong. It is the positive real zero of x^4 - x^3 - 1. The polynomial it suggests instead isn't even Pisot.
This kind of thing cracks me up: Robert George, a far-Right professor at Princeton, is like a mindless parrot. Everybody he likes is "courageous", an "independent thinker", a "truth-seeker". Everybody he doesn't like, though, "lives in a bubble", is an "ideologue", & indulges in "groupthink".
I love these personalized solicitations to submit to obviously very very legitimate and reputable scholarly journals.
This is the kind of thing I find fascinating. The relative frequencies of writing "two following" and "following two" (as in "the following two books should be on everyone's shelf) has switched places in the last 200 years, with the switchover point being approximately 1927. Why has it happened?
It's even funnier when `experts' commenting like this don't seem to realize that there are multiple version of ChatGPT and they spend different amounts of resources to answer your question, depending on which version you use.
I wish the silly parade of LLM critics would at least mention WHICH version of Chat GPT they are using. It's like complaining about the unreliability of automobiles when you drive a Fiat Strada.
The "Brian Cole" that was arrested for possibly being the pipe bomber might possibly be this person (not in the photo, but the red arrow). At least the name and age match.
No one else could have gotten away with something like that? What a silly remark.
I honestly don't understand how the US as a nation can survive when there are so many educated people who actually believe like the guy in this Facebook discussion. We are so fucked.
Over at The Evil Place, twitter just put a block on my account because I posted that @jd-vance-1.bsky.social belongs in the Hague for this.
Every new technology brings the same kinds of stories and reactions.
Looks like Jens could not stand anyone disagreeing with him and has now blocked me. Sadly, this is not my first experience like this. If Jens were right why he is so threatened by someone with a different opinion? Here's another one from 100 years ago: "Any kind of an automobile is unreliable."
This is John Masko, writing in the Wall Street Journal in November 2024. I'd like to ask him if he still thinks the fears expressed were unreasonable, but I can't find an e-mail that works.
When even the bland "Hi & Lois" comic strip gets it, you know people are finally catching on.
And yet another person whose field of study is not about LLM's making pronouncements about them that are wildly false, getting all huffy when the false claims are pointed out, and finally retreating and blocking me. So pathetic. So anti-intellectual.
Hey JD Vance @jd-vance-1.bsky.social and welcome to Bluesky! Here's my question: why and when exactly did you decide to give up fighting against racists, and simply join them instead?