https://www.quora.com/Mathematics/What-do-grad-students-in-m...
> a bit like trying to explain a vacuum cleaner to someone who has never seen one, except you're only allowed to use words that are four letters long or shorter.
> What can you say?
> "It is a tool that does suck up dust to make what you walk on in a home tidy."
It is a tool to suck up dust and dirt from rugs, wood or even tile.
Maybe just go full pidgin:
“Tool to suck dust, make tidy for walk in home.”
s/, 'cos/;/You have to get others to guess a (typically multi-syllabic) word or phrase, but use only one syllable words to get them there.
"Tool suck dust, make not dirt for walk in home."
I hate this.
(This is hard.)
(Verbosity is your friend)
Elevators are cool like telephone booths. I've wondered what a dog thinks using them for the first time, then accepting what they do and how much they understand its geometries.
I think that's the whole point. It was never meant as being easier to grok
I can't find either the author or the talk. I think it was some 5 years ago.
At first, I thought it was Randall Munroe, but I might be remembering this: https://xkcd.com/thing-explainer/
I've also tried with Paul Graham, who has some articles trying to convey something similar, but no luck there.
Edited to add : I think the original proponent of a similar idea was Richard Feynman : https://www.hpcdan.org/reeds_ruminations/2022/03/understandi...
The Wikipedia article goes on to discuss interesting aspects of how the book was translated in different languages, with different self-imposed constraints.
That said, I think the most impressive achievement is the English translation of the French novel. Writing an original constrained novel is hard enough, but translating one means you can’t just steer the story wherever you like. You have to preserve the plot, tone, and themes of the original, all while respecting a completely different set of linguistic limitations. That’s a remarkable balancing act.
What is almost as impressive is that these novels (at least Perec's) have been translated to other languages.
But really impressive for the time.
(Just tried it, "write a short story of 12 sentences without one occurence of the letter e" - it had 5 es.)
For example, it may start like this "This is a way to solv-", or "This is th-"
One beam could be "This is a way to solv-". With no obvious "good" next token. Another beam could be "This way is solv-". With "ing" as the obvious next token.
It will select the best beam for the output.
Let's say I prompt my LLM to exclusively use the letters 'aefghilmnoprst' and the LLM generates "that's one small step for a man, one giant leap for man-"[1]. Since the next token with the highest probability ("-kind") isn't allowed, it may very well be that the next appropriate word is something really generic or, if your grammar is really restrictive, straight up nonsense because nothing fits. And then there's pathological stuff like "... one giant leap for man, one small step for a man, one giant leap for man- ...".
[1] Toy example - I'm sure these specific rules are not super restrictive and "management" is right there.
What I will add is that constrained generation is supported by the major inference engine like llama.cpp, vllm and the likes, so what you are describing is actually trivial on locally hosted models, you just have to provide a regex that prevent them to use the letter 'e' in the output.
There was a post here a little while back asking AI models to count the number of Rs in the word raspberry and most failed.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.15926
https://github.com/Hellisotherpeople/Constrained-Text-Genera...
Here's a "What if?" on a very similar issue that uses Markov chains: https://what-if.xkcd.com/75/
Thanks to Go, I know iota.
The conversationalist tone of the essay is misleading too. Hilbert, Minkowski, & Poincare, had done all the heavy lifting math and had held Einstein's hand all through 1915. As mathematicians they wouldn't qualify for Noble prize so made no claim to the discovery of GR.
You are always traveling at the same speed. That speed is 'c', the speed of light.
If you are sitting still, you are 'falling' through the time dimension at 'c'. If you move in the X,Y,Z dimensions, you must move slower in the 't' dimension so that your velocity vector still sums to 'c'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncleftish_Beholding
Up Goer Five; rocket science explained using only the one thousand most common english words.
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1133:_Up_Goer_Fiv...
But much smaller percent Niels Bohr
So while the vocabulary is kept low, the writing style becomes harder to process, at least for me. I wonder if there's a way to win on both fronts, to make it maximally comprehensible for all involved.
I'd argue "use normal words that everyone knows" (even if they are 5 letters!) would be included in such a strategy.
Edit: Okay now I made it further in and I'm being asked to keep several different perspectives in my head simultaneously, perceiving different events at different rates of time... I think I need a diagram... or a microdose...
"Any glow from an item will move in a void at the same rate. Each item has mass. Mass is the same as a glow. Mass will bend the area near it. Each item will move on a bent path in that area. If you move at a fast rate, time will seem to slow. An item will feel a pull down if the item goes up and does not stop."
That's way more work than it seems! Not being able to use -s or -er words is a real problem.
The easiest way to understand the relationship between time and space is repeat the thought experiment with the void, but assume that there is no consciousness there (i.e nothing running that can sense time passing).
Now imagine the only action you can take is to fire particles (say photons) in a given direction. In a void, that action is meaningless - the particle fires and never comes back. No information exists.
Now imagine there is a mirror somewhere in space. A particle fires, and then comes back. And maybe interacts with another particle. But still, this is generally meaningless and you cant derive any measurable thing from it, but you have a piece of information - particle comes back.
Imagine there are 2 mirrors in different directions. What you do is you set up 2 identical devices. Each one fires a particle, and when the particle comes back, it triggers a certain color ball to fall down a common shared tube, and then the particle gets fired again.
So with 2 mirrors, you get a sequence in the tube that looks something like blue, blue, blue, green, blue, blue, blue, green. Now you can make a measure of distance. You take the "blue" mirror as your unit, and say green mirror is 2 away.
You have also in fact created a clock. The tube contains information on how many cycles have passed - i.e in order to say that mirror is x away, you need to have counted x blue balls before that respective ball shows up. So you can see how distance and time is intimately intertwined. To measure distance, you have to necessarily have something that measures time.
Now lets say that the "green" mirror starts moving away from you, at a slow speed (i.e your particles are much faster. You start to see 3 balls in sequence, then 4, then 5, and so on. By comparing the difference in the subsequent position of the green balls, you can measure speed.
What happens if the speed of the mirror is 99% of the particle speed? The particle takes its sweet time getting there, and sweet time coming back. Even if you fire the particle as the green mirror is close to the particle emitter, its going to result in a measurement of a very large distance.
This is the relativistic effect where the space behind something moving fast increases.
This whole experiment demonstrates that what we consider space is precisely defined by measurements, and relativistic effects alter these measurements, which alters our perception of space.
You can do similar thought experiments to understand why space in front of you seems to shrink, why time dilation becomes a thing, and so on.
My understanding is that a more correct intuition is thinking of straight paths on the curved sheet. Say it's like a loosely woven tablecloth - objects in free fall will go along the threads of the weave, so if you stretch the fabric by placing a heavy object on it, the paths of smaller objects on the fabric will be stretched towards the heavy thing.
This metaphor falls apart for orbits though, as it requires "stretching" the fabric so much that the threads now somehow go in a circle around the mass heh. But the underlying principle is the same - an object in orbit is in free fall along a straight path in curved spacetime.
The same applies for explanations of bitcoin, or Machine Learning, or stock markets, just use the proper wording, difficulty, weights, secondary market. Metaphors are not teaching.
The point overall is to demonstrate that ideas of time, space, and speed are all just sequences of events from which you derive those metrics, and relativity is the fact that those sequences change with all three.
Constant in all inertial frames of reference. That's the important bit.
Side note: Dan Luu claims[0][1] that there's no readability advantage to narrow line width. I haven't really looked into it, but in my experience it feels like he's very wrong.
[0]: https://danluu.com/slow-device/ [Appendix: this site vs. sites that don't work on slow devices or slow connections]
Reading the wikipedia references show me that this is well studied and sourced.
Academic sources for his argument either dont exist or are so rare even he can't find them.
IOW, it's a post hoc rationalisation from him.
javascript:(function(){var newSS, styles='body { width: 800px ! important; margin: auto !important } '; if(document.createStyleSheet) { document.createStyleSheet("javascript:'"+styles+"'"); } else { newSS=document.createElement('link'); newSS.rel='stylesheet'; newSS.href='data:text/css,'+escape(styles); document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(newSS); } })();
You can write this feature as a userscript and then publish it to greasyfork
For example, older monitors had less pixels, so it's likely that the wrapping was sensible in older monitor/browser configs.
To say nothing of browser defaults being different, if this was pre-css, then the margins might have been baked into the default browser interpretation. In other words, pre-margin property, a webpage without margin didn't mean "this has no margin", in the sense that a modern webpage without margin specified would mean "DO NOT ADD MARGIN TO THIS!".
Also, reader mode was not suppressed by some naughty trick.
Unreal.
The real problem is our screens are the wrong shape. 16:9 is a stupid aspect ratio for a computer monitor if you work mostly with text. Square is probably the best. Using floating windows (like classic Mac OSX) is an option, but for some reason people like full screen windows these days. A tiling window manager is another option to effectively divide the screen up into better shaped areas. I tend to have 6 columns across 2 screens which works well.
My browser tabs are on the left side of the screen and they are all written left to right. There is ample space on the sides of websites to fit this and show the entire tab title. Meanwhile, other people have tabs along the top of the screen that all show one or two letters followed by “...”.
My taskbar is on the right and consists entirely of icons. The only text on it is the date/time and that is also written normally and not rotated.
This is the setup that I was saying I don't understand the resistance against — not 90° rotated text. When people say “vertical tabs”, they are not talking about rotating the text.
Why? I also usually use it with three columns of text, and it works well at that aspect ratio.
What you really have to ask yourself is why 16:9 is a better choice than anything else. It wasn't picked because 3 16:27 columns is ideal for text. The main reason we have them is because it's easier for the screen manufacturers to have just one aspect ratio to deal with. With 16:9 we're forced to have three columns per screen, but what if I only need two? What if I want more lines of text per screen? Square seems like a much more obvious middle ground.
Not just that, but it was an average of aspect ratios considered for the aesthetic of video data. Not text presentation.
It is a side effect of mobile devices -- Mobile-first design. When apps got popular, people decided that everything needed to be designed for mobile devices first, and adjusted for larger browsers screens later. So people started making everything tall and narrow. And said it was bad practice to do otherwise. Now people who learned UI design after those days often follow that idea. Personally, I am not a fan, but that is where it comes from.
Functional Differential Geometry by Gerald Sussman, same author behind Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
Isn't this historically inaccurate? Wasn't Einstein looking for an explanation for why Maxwell's equations mysteriously assigned a constant velocity to electromagnetic phenomena, apparently contradicting Galilean relativity?
0:47 Added in text: "Okay, here's the text prepared for reading aloud."
0:58
Original: "Okay, yes, it's a dumb idea,"
Audio: "Okay, yes, it's a bit of a strange idea"
1:08
Original: "Or do you, say, list off to the left some? What I want to ask you is: Can you find out? Hell no. You can see that, sure."
Audio: "Or do you drift off to the left a bit? The question is, can you figure it out? No, you can't. You can see that."
---
It appears you are using "Variational Lossy Autoencoder (VLAE)" as the basis for your website[1], which might be good for simplifying more complex things but defeats the purpose here. It's using more than four letters in words, and censoring out "dumb" and "hell"?
Why don't you try pointing that another explanation of the theory of relativity without this limitation? Seems like that'd be a more interesting exercise.
[1a] https://www.pdftomp3.com/shared/67e178f428779824db2e06c6 [1b] https://pdf-reader-storage-f55b8c51173224-staging.s3.us-east...
I allow the text to get slightly optimized for audio experiences, e.g. page numbers or mathematical notation gets replaced. But I have think about that again.
> no one can say who's held fast
with "no one can what does move and what does not"
"no one can say what does move and what does not"
If you were to write this in 2025, it would be indistinguishable from trash.
So many doors are closing.