iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jeffrey Shallit 🇺🇦 @shallit.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Ah, now writers of romance novels have suddenly become experts in LLM's and the behavior of complex systems.

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Jeffrey Shallit 🇺🇦 @shallit.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

So you're just saying we're f*cked, then?

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Jeffrey Shallit 🇺🇦 @shallit.bsky.social · 16/05/2026

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).

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Jeffrey Shallit 🇺🇦 @shallit.bsky.social · 25/04/2026

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!

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Jeffrey Shallit 🇺🇦 @shallit.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

Still crazy: (By the way, the answer is "Something Green" by Fredric Brown.)

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Jeffrey Shallit 🇺🇦 @shallit.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

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.

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Jeffrey Shallit 🇺🇦 @shallit.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

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.

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Jeffrey Shallit 🇺🇦 @shallit.bsky.social · 08/04/2026

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".

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Jeffrey Shallit 🇺🇦 @shallit.bsky.social · 06/04/2026

Dutch lessons in duolingo often sound like small tragedies.

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Jeffrey Shallit 🇺🇦 @shallit.bsky.social · 21/03/2026

I love these personalized solicitations to submit to obviously very very legitimate and reputable scholarly journals.

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Jeffrey Shallit 🇺🇦 @shallit.bsky.social · 06/03/2026

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?

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Jeffrey Shallit 🇺🇦 @shallit.bsky.social · 14/02/2026

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.

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Jeffrey Shallit 🇺🇦 @shallit.bsky.social · 08/12/2025

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.

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Jeffrey Shallit 🇺🇦 @shallit.bsky.social · 04/12/2025

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.

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Jeffrey Shallit 🇺🇦 @shallit.bsky.social · 03/10/2025

No one else could have gotten away with something like that? What a silly remark.

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Jeffrey Shallit 🇺🇦 @shallit.bsky.social · 26/09/2025

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.

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Jeffrey Shallit 🇺🇦 @shallit.bsky.social · 16/09/2025

After reading for more than five decades, I cancelled my subscription.

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Jeffrey Shallit 🇺🇦 @shallit.bsky.social · 16/09/2025

Ms. Attiah: I cancelled my subscription.

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Jeffrey Shallit 🇺🇦 @shallit.bsky.social · 06/09/2025

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.

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Jeffrey Shallit 🇺🇦 @shallit.bsky.social · 21/08/2025

What accounts for this huge rise? Use in a movie or book?

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Jeffrey Shallit 🇺🇦 @shallit.bsky.social · 09/08/2025

Every new technology brings the same kinds of stories and reactions.

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Jeffrey Shallit 🇺🇦 @shallit.bsky.social · 05/08/2025

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."

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Jeffrey Shallit 🇺🇦 @shallit.bsky.social · 05/08/2025

Indeed, there is a lot of "automobiles are dumb and unreliable and you're wasting your time and money by buying one; stick with horses" energy coming from Jens.

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Jeffrey Shallit 🇺🇦 @shallit.bsky.social · 13/07/2025

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.

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Jeffrey Shallit 🇺🇦 @shallit.bsky.social · 11/07/2025

When even the bland "Hi & Lois" comic strip gets it, you know people are finally catching on.

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Jeffrey Shallit 🇺🇦 @shallit.bsky.social · 10/07/2025

When even a newspaper cartoon as anodyne as "Hi and Lois" gets political, you know the situation is serious.

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Jeffrey Shallit 🇺🇦 @shallit.bsky.social · 04/07/2025

If you fly the American flag today, please fly it upside down.

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Jeffrey Shallit 🇺🇦 @shallit.bsky.social · 01/07/2025

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.

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Jeffrey Shallit 🇺🇦 @shallit.bsky.social · 19/06/2025

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?

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Jeffrey Shallit 🇺🇦 @shallit.bsky.social · 18/06/2025

I have a question for you. You used to have a clear view of the threat Trump poses. Yet now you've given up everything you claim to stand for: integrity, honesty, fairness, justice, in order to support a deranged fascist. Why made you give up all your principles? What made you so evil?

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Jeffrey Shallit 🇺🇦 @shallit.bsky.social · 08/06/2025

We're literally experiencing a fascist takeover and this is how the Atlantic responds? The Atlantic is such a bad joke and this writer is a pathetic coward.

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Jeffrey Shallit 🇺🇦 @shallit.bsky.social · 08/06/2025

They did. -- signed, someone who was alive at the time.

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Jeffrey Shallit 🇺🇦 @shallit.bsky.social · 05/06/2025

Pretty amazing reliance on a guy who is an admitted liar and propagandist. If the NYT were sensible and honest they'd shun that repellent guy like every normal person would.

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Jeffrey Shallit 🇺🇦 @shallit.bsky.social · 20/05/2025

Not interested in playing games with you. If you don't know the meaning of "willfully", then it doesn't surprise me you don't know what "thinking" is, either.

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