3+ day, 18+ min ago  (146+ words) Peter Vogel posted the following image on X yesterday. The receive side of the coin is a decision tree for decoding Morse code. The shape is what makes this one interesting. Decision trees are typically not very compact. Each branch…...

6+ day, 20+ hour ago  (175+ words) While shopping on a major e-commerce site, I wanted to get an answer to an obscure question about a certain product. Not finding the answer immediately on the product page, I thought I'd try clicking the AI shopping assistant helper…...

1+ week, 58+ min ago  (124+ words) Suppose you have a calculator or math library that only handles real arguments but you need to evaluate sin(3 + 4i). What do you do? If you're using Python, for example, and you don't have NumPy installed, you can use the built-in…...

1+ week, 4+ day ago  (166+ words) A few years ago I wrote about comm, a utility that lets you do set theory at the command line. It's a really useful little program, but it has two drawbacks: the syntax is hard to remember, and the input…...

1+ week, 6+ day ago  (214+ words) The hardest part of using regular expressions is not crafting regular expressions per se. In my opinion, the two hardest parts are minor syntax variations between implementations, and all the environmental stuff outside of regular expressions'per se. Embedded regular expression…...

2+ week, 4+ day ago  (382+ words) Atonal music is difficult to compose because it defies human instincts. It takes discipline to write something so unpleasant to listen to. One technique that composers use to keep their music from falling into tonal patters is the twelve-tone row....

2+ week, 6+ day ago  (439+ words) Lilypond is a TeX-like typesetting language for sheet music. I've had good results asking AI to generate Lilypond code, which is surprising given the obscurity of the language. There can't be that much publicly available Lilypond code to train on....

3+ week, 2+ day ago  (165+ words) The previous post looked at why Mathematica does not simplify the expression Sinh[ArcCosh[x]] the way you might think it should. This post will be a sort of Python analog of the previous post. SymPy is a Python library…...

4+ week, 1+ day ago  (302+ words) I was working with a colleague recently on a project involving the use of the OpenAI API. I brought up the idea that, perhaps it is possible to improve the accuracy of API response by modifying the API call to…...

1+ mon, 1+ day ago  (213+ words) After writing the previous post, I poked around in the bash shell documentation and found a handy feature I'd never seen before, the shortcut ~-. I frequently use the command cd - to return to the previous working directory, but didn't know…...