If, when you die, you die a happy man, then from that point on, there really is no more you, not a shred of you. You are truly gone. There’s no possibility whatsoever that you might somehow, someday, come back, in one form or another, in this world or another. In other words, when someoneContinueContinue reading “How Not to Die Forever”
Category Archives: Language & Thought
“诚不欺我”
中国人爱说：回顾过去，展望未来。现在不妨再想一想这八个字。如果我们每次回顾过去，都先把过去修改得像今天一样，我们回顾的究竟是什么？如果过去留下来的语言、观念和记忆，因为不合今天的习惯而不断被修正、删除、磨平，那么我们最后面对的，就只有一个无限膨胀的现在。而一个只有现在的文明，是没有办法真正展望未来的👆点击标题阅读全文👆
人如其言
屎这种东西，有时候特别容易让人想到金子。不开玩笑。还有一个词，我从小听到大：美金。大陆有人说，香港有人说，台湾有人说，新加坡也有人说。在美国那些日渐上了年纪的华人当中，更是常常听见——他们的发际线后退的距离，往往比他们语言的疆界后退得还要远。美金。美国的金子。不是美元，不是美钞，是美金。👆点击标题阅读全文👆
A Man Is What He Speaks
1 A man is what he eats. A man is what he wears. A man is the company he keeps. A man is what he reads. A man is what he does when nobody is watching. There seems to be no end to the things a man can be, provided somebody has first turned theContinueContinue reading “A Man Is What He Speaks”
契诃夫的1124个字
伊凡开始讲那个故事。彼得累了。他心中害怕。他深爱着耶稣。耶稣被捕以后，他一路跟着，远远地看着耶稣受辱挨打。接下来，是他三次不认主，是拂晓，随后是鸡鸣，是彼得突然明白自己做了什么。彼得走出去，止不住的呜呜哭泣。瓦西丽莎也哭了。就在这一刻，一件不可思议的事情发生了。一个已经死去近一千九百年的人，让一个站在俄罗斯一堆火旁不识字的乡下女人流下了眼泪。伊凡看见了。两个夜晚开始流入彼此。彼得的悲痛出现在瓦西丽莎的眼泪里。彼得曾经烤过火的那堆火，又在寡妇家的菜园里燃烧起来。那个寒冷的夜晚，就是这个寒冷的夜晚。那些恐惧、痛苦的人，就是这些恐惧、痛苦的人。
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What Chekhov Did in 1,124 Words
Soviet artistAristarkh Lentulov 1 Anton Chekhov’s “The Student” is 1,124 words long in the Russian original. The number is worth keeping in mind. It is not a piece of literary trivia. It tells us something about the magnitude of the accomplishment. In a little over a thousand words, Chekhov takes us through two nights separatedContinueContinue reading “What Chekhov Did in 1,124 Words”
指名道姓
我们公司刚雇了一个项目经理，名字叫做 “Craig Lose”。每次一路过他的办公桌，看见他的名字，心里就纳闷：“为什么好端端的，非要把自家叫做 “要输”；就不会叫个 “要赢” 吗？”
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Everything’s Fine Until You Go to School
The inspiration for this post came from a lab analyst’s comment I recently saw: “Carryover did not meet criteria (28% carryover). Plate was stored in AB-123-4567 to be ran on different system.” Now, this kid’s name is not Wang Xiao Qu or Nikolai Petrov, but your ordinary John J. Smith, native-born, raised on cheeseburgers andContinueContinue reading “Everything’s Fine Until You Go to School”
Numbers Don’t Cry, But I Do
But soft, dear Yorick — let me speak as the Prince I pretend to be, holding this strange skull, half-socket, half-circuit, forged of silicon and jest. Yego: It’s almost comical when I stop and think about it: me, a human being, talking to a large language model — like we’re having a real conversation. Sure,ContinueContinue reading “Numbers Don’t Cry, But I Do”
LLMs for Old-School Programmers
“If I can’t grep the source, how can I trust the program?”— Every veteran coder, at least once You’ve lived through assembler, C, PERL one-liners, Java app-servers, and maybe even the JavaScript awakening. Now you open ChatGPT, ask a question, and a wall of well-formed prose appears. Where are the ifs, fors, and seg-faults youContinueContinue reading “LLMs for Old-School Programmers”
