Passiflora: like Electron but 1/500th the size. I used to be in academia. I got better. Neither a "liberal" nor a "conservative".
Joined October 2025
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It seems vitally important to some to know whether a text was composed by a human or an AI.
I don't understand *why* this is so important (surely the text should stand on its own merits, or lack of them?) but I concede that such people exist. Okay, fine. There are people who claim that they can hear a difference if they replace the plastic knobs on their audio equipment with wooden ones. In itself, this isn't going to harm anything (other than their bank accounts) and provides some harmless amusement at their gullibility for the rest of us.
The AI v. human people are constantly searching for a "tell" — some simple-minded segmentation algorithm by which AI-written and human-written texts can be separated.
(OMG! I used an em dash! Some are going to stop reading here. 😀)
Most of these "tells" are are just plain dumb.
Let's say someone observes that architects use the word "fascia" far more often than non-architects (I haven't tested this, but I feel pretty confident that it's true).
Can you then conclude that any text containing the word "fascia" was written by an architect, or even was *likely* written by an architect? No, you cannot. Non-architects use the word all the time. Maybe the person was talking about the home repair he did last weekend. Maybe it's an internal memo at Lowes, talking about which items should be listed in this this week's flyer. Maybe it's someone with such terrible keyboard skills that his spell checker has confused "fascist" with "fascia", and he's blindly accepted the suggested change. There's absolutely no way to tell based on the presence of the word per se.
Now, if you had a large sample of texts written by the person over a long period of time (the time period is also important — our homeowner might write a lot of "fascia" texts while the repair is in progress, then never use the word again), which *as a whole* contained a disproportionate number of uses of "fascia", you could start to feel more confident that he is an architect (though maybe not even then... he might be a building contractor — or a surgeon).
From a single example? Sheer nonsense.
(Oops! I did it again! Twice! Definitely a bot!)
Why is this important? If it were just a matter of people making fools of themselves (like the wooden knob folks), it wouldn't be important at all. However, people are being given bad grades, perhaps even losing their jobs, based on one of these alleged "tells". That is completely unacceptable.
Even if such a "tell" did exist (which it doesn't), the likelihood that it would continue to work a year from now (or even six months from now) is very small. I follow this field fairly closely, yet I'm constantly surprised at how far each new generation has come.
Rather than wasting time looking for a "tell", teachers should concentrate on adapting themselves and their teaching methods to a world where AIs exist. They should learn about AIs themselves, then teach their students how to use them in a responsible manner. They're not going away.
One interesting idea I've seen: the students are assigned a topic, then given (say) a week to learn as much about the topic as they can. Every source is fair game. Books, Wikipedia, AIs, YouTube videos, you name it. Evaluating the credibility of the source is part of the task. Then they're put in a proctored exam room and asked to produce an outline of the topic. The students should be given different topics, of course. You don't want one student (or a small group) generating an outline for the others to cram.
There are many other things that could be done. Use your imagination! If you don't have one of those, perhaps you could ask an AI for help. 😀
pulpgrinder retweeted
@grok Approximately how many Canadians seek medical treatment outside of Canada every year?
You know, I've got a working hypothesis that anyone who uses the word "cringe" in this way is a babbling idiot. So far, I've yet to see a single counterexample.
pulpgrinder retweeted
Rust compiler: "I cannot allow you to compile this because reference x might outlive borrowed scope y on line 42."
C compiler: "You want to cast an integer to a function pointer and jump straight into uninitialized heap memory? Hell yeah brother, here's your binary."
pulpgrinder retweeted
⚡️I have seen men build cages from their own beliefs, then declare themselves free.
pulpgrinder retweeted
Back in the '90s we had not one, but two idiots come to grief in the polar bear enclosure at the Alaska Zoo. You know, the same polar bears that are one of the few predators that will routinely stalk humans?
One was an Australian tourist who climbed over two barriers to "get a better picture". Then she found out how fast a polar bear really is (hint: goddamned fast). She survived, though she got chewed up pretty bad.
The other was, to our shame, a local. Though he also survived, persistent rumor has it that Binky (the bear) took care of removing him from the gene pool.
Polar bear vasectomy: not recommended.
This being Alaska, neither got any bleeding-heart treatment, and demands (mostly from the Lower 48) that Binky be euthanized were met with the contempt they deserved.
Below: Binky with one of the Australian tourist's shoes. This image was a popular t-shirt at the time.
You know what else?
Not once have I ever chimed in with a passive-aggressive "Those catheters must've been designed by a woman herp-derp" thing.
Female urinary catheters are usually 15-20 cm long (6-8 inches).
Male urinary catheters are 40 cm (16 inches) long.
Guess which of the two is less fun to insert.
Love it.
We hired a new VP named Michael Lee.
Unfortunately we already have a Michael Lee.
He works in the warehouse.
He's been here 11 years.
New VP gets:
[email protected]
He immediately messages IT.
“Can you move the other Michael to michael.lee2 and give me michael.lee?”
No.
He asks HR.
HR asks me if we can “prioritize seniority.”
I explain that the warehouse Michael has eleven years of email history tied to that address and changing it because someone with a nicer title arrived would be insane.
VP reluctantly keeps the 2.
Warehouse Michael finds out.
Changes his Teams display name to:
Michael Lee (Original)
By Friday the VP is being referred to as Sequel Mike.
He has asked IT to intervene.
Unfortunately nickname management is outside our support scope.
pulpgrinder retweeted
Read the blog here: vals.ai/blogs/faster-shortes…
pulpgrinder retweeted
We asked ten Claude Opus 5.5 agents to devise a faster shortest-path algorithm and prove it in Lean. Within 15 hours, they produced C-HD: a formally verified improvement over the published bounds.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
C-HD's formally verified bound improves priors only in a narrow sparse density range (m ≤ n⌊⌊log₂ n⌋^{3/4}⌋) as an asymptotic guarantee with enormous constants and no practical speedup demonstrated. vals.ai/blogs/faster-s… github.com/spicylemonade/…