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Available at both https://vin-dit.org and https://home.vin-dit.org, which is at my house, should be the same stuff. Also via IPV6 at https://home2.vin-dit.org or https://home3.vin-dit.org, depending what's going on here.
2024-2025 archivesPosts from November 2024 Posts from December 2024 Posts from January 2025 Posts from February 2025 Posts from March 2025 Posts from April 2025 Posts from May 2025 Posts from June 2025 Posts from July 2025 Posts from August 2025 Posts from September 2025 Posts from October 2025 Posts from November 2025 Posts from December 2025 Posts from January 2026 Posts from February 2026 Posts from March 2026 Posts from April 2026 Posts from May 2026 June 16Me at the County Council today trying to make the case that generative AI is a bad thing for society....June 14 Think maybe deleting and recreating the port forwarding rules in the Fios router that send web traffic to a Linux server internally resolved the problem. So it may not have been Windows' fault. Things working now. Also, somewhat concerned about the Arch Linux AUR supply-chain attack. I've been worrying about supply chain stuff for a while, and this is as close as I've come to being compromised by it. This is giving me doubts about the whole idea of open source collaboration. Right now this (the home.vin-dit.org version) is on a Debian VM. Is Debian more trustworthy than Arch? I looked at a post by a Debian developer on planet.debian.org of some commits he made to backport security fixes. Looked like a lot of tricky C code, completely beyond me. Should I have faith in that? Really HATE that this security/hacking crap ruins the Free Software utopia, as I like to imagine it.
June 11 ** 3 Windows is vexing me, it's not forwarding traffic again. Booting that box back into Arch!
June 11 ** 2 The recording: StellaByStarlight1964.mp3 June 11 OK jazz folks - I have a transcription (I've had for almost 50 years!) of Herbie's solo on Stella by Starlight on the My Funny Valentine album. I don't think I ever really digested it before. I've been playing along with that tune a little, aided by finding these changes that are somewhat like what they're doing. The chord substitutions/reharmonizations they do are incredible! The bass notes Ron Carter plays go to some very interesting places. I've listened to it so many times, but never really tried to pick it apart. It's kind of beyond me, but fun to attempt to understand. They're not doing the Real Book changes, in large part. It's like they have ESP. I love that album so much.
A starting point in looking at it was realizing that Herbie's solo starts about eight bars into the chorus and ends at a strange point as well, where Miles comes back. It's like a perfect piece of music that is very loosely based on the tune. (right-click or whatever to see at normal size) StellaByStarlightHancock.pdf The penciled in changes from the Real book should not be paid much attention to. Transcription by the great Bill Dobbins of Eastman.
June 09 Gave Claude (free version) online AI the same prompt deepseek locally didn't do well with. (the long one, with "you're confused. throw away all your previous reasoning." skipped.) It nailed it immediately, including unit tests. Kind of scary.
June 02 ** 3 OK, looked at the code it generated - it's fundamentally wrong! It gets a number of spaces to go between each word but then doesn't use it, just putting one space between each word, plus one if the gap number is < the remainder (see the prompt below). So it'll never be right. It compounds it by putting padding (spaces) at the end of the line, which is completely the opposite of the assignment!
June 02 ** 2 More about deepseek and justifiying text;
Prompt that it spun around on for a long time:
generate a Rust program with Cargo.toml file to justify an ASCII text file. take as input the file name and the desired line width. justify each line by inserting additional spaces between words, distributing the spaces evenly.
A prompt it's churning on now, seeming to be putting out code:
you’re confused. throw away all your previous reasoning. generate a Rust program with Cargo.toml file to justify an ASCII text file. take as input the file name and the desired line width. justify each line by inserting additional spaces between words, distributing the spaces evenly. That is, for each line: if the line as 0 or 1 words, output it as is without changing it. Otherwise, add up the length of the words into total_word_length, add the number of gaps between words to that to get total_content_length, subtract that from desired line width to get number of spaces to add. Do integer division on number of spaces to add to get the quotient (base number of spaces to add between words to the existing space, which will be 1) and the remainder (additional number of spaces to add to the line). remainder should be < number of gaps. as you construct the spaces for each gap while building the output line, if the index of the gap < the remainder, add an additional space so as to use up the remainder from the division. So each gap will have 1 space (which was there already) plus additional spaces of an amount equal to the quotient of the division (base number of spaces to add) plus the extra space from the remainder, when it is one if the first i < remainder gaps.
The churning on the first prompt was hard to take, it was like a very confused dim programmer.
Playing right now with the result of the second prompt. It doesn't compile and referenced an old version of a dependency. Playing with it more, it really got into trouble with that dependency, called "clap" which is used for command line argument parsing. I gave it this prompt:
this is good but it doesn’t quite work, the clap stuff for argument parsing isn’t working. Can you generate the same program using a different library for argument parsing?
It's yammering away.
This reminds me of a joke a comedian told, where a person is vacuuming the floor, and sees that the vacuum won't pick up something. So they pick up the something and look at it, and then put it back down and try again to get the vacuum to pick it up. They are more interested in the vacuum working right than in getting the floor clean. (Always bad when you have to explain a joke).
The idea of a sort of robot that writes code is very compelling, and when it doesn't work right away, I want to get it to work. It makes the idea of using my head to write the code seem like too much effort. I'm writing this as I play with the AI and running its output. I hardcoded the filename and width as it still was making up command line parsing that didn't work. It runs, but panics. As a test, my hand-coded version can work with the same input and width. Trying a couple other tweaks, but still panics. I really don't want to get into the weeds of fixing this program. Maybe it would have better luck in Python? 🤷
June 02 Fired up "deepseek-r1:14b" again on my Linux desktop and watching it try and write a Rust program to justify text. see justify.html. A problem I worked on long ago. (It's not very hard. ) The 'openweb-ui' docker image puts a web front end on it. It's painful to watch the words trickle out as it "reason"s . It's sort of hard not to look at, like a video of a car crash or something. Installing and running this stuff required a lot of downloading, but it supposedly is self-contained after that. I guess it is sort of a massive blob of data in a very complex structure with a complex algorithm that has some randomness, to put it in old school computer terms. So far it's still toiling away on little tests of its inner function. It seems to have confused extra spaces to be added between words with the total desired amounts of space between words. It did better on the card game "War".
It is pretty remarkable this is possible, and presumably a higher quality model could do better. I wish people weren't saying this stuff is inevitable, though. Is anyone steering the ship of humanity?
June 01 Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit!
(right-click or whatever to see at normal size) StellaByStarlightHancock.pdf
The penciled in changes from the Real book should not be paid much attention to. Transcription by the great Bill Dobbins of Eastman.