Latest Lizza the least interesting so far. (I don't and wouldn't subscribe but the Twitter algorithm feeds me the screenshots.)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_... Pottery pottery Pottery pottery Pottery pottery Pedestal bowl: Archaeological Ante-historical Cultural parts but we Can’t know the whole.

This is an extremely interesting article about the collapse of early farming societies across Europe around ~5000 BC. We like to think of prehistoric times as being largely peaceful, but it seems early civilisations weren't immune to ritualistic violence & cultural collapse.

I'm enjoying Charli XCX's Substack, for the novelty value at least: itscharlibb.substack.com/p/the-realit...

Just saw a LinkedIn post from last week suggesting GPT-4 and Gemini 1.5 Pro if you want a powerful AI model.

I was planning on tweeting that I refuse to be captured by my Substack audience of confused aging Americans who want to read the humour writer Dave Barry, but so far I've only lost five subscribers after my Discrete Fourier Transform post, a little high but not unusually so.

Understanding the Discrete Fourier Transform: pappubahry.substack.com/p/just-fouri...

I learned today that Hamilton's playing at the cinema this weekend, and I'm already excited.

Joining an unexclusive club and sending an Excel tip to Mr Excel, mixing LET and TEXTSPLIT. I still feel a little of the excitement I used to feel ~15 years ago when getting a reply from a famous person on the Internet.

Parce que les enfants reçoivent, dès la mobilisation générale, beaucoup plus souvent qu'avant le prénom de leur père (qui est donc plutôt un vieux prénom) coulmont.com/articles/nam... 2/5

My post on sample quantile definitions (one of my better Substack posts, pappubahry.substack.com/p/i-have-opi... ) gets a shout-out in this post discussing the difficulties in handling weighted quantiles: www.practicalsignificance.com/posts/weight...

A lot more voters in New York than City of Perth, where Bruce Reynolds was recently elected mayor with 1918 votes after preferences.

I'm not surprised that AI-generated music is starting to become popular, but I am surprised that the first AI song to make a Billboard chart has very audible vocal artefacts. www.youtube.com/watch?v=opuD...

The Facebook algorithm has found that I get nerd-sniped by geometry puzzles, and now I am torn between hiding on principle the ones labelled 'Olympiad' when they are pitched at my level (well below Olympiad), and clicking on them because they are fun puzzles.

Anonymous Lichess bullet anecdote: a rare case of a Lichess game result differing from FIDE laws. There is no sequence of legal moves that leads to checkmate, so this is a FIDE-draw, but the simple Lichess heuristics don't detect that it's a fully dead position and awarded me the win on time.

DW Griffith in 1924, on movies in 2024: "I am quite positive that when a century has passed, all thought of our so-called speaking pictures will have been abandoned. It will never be possible to synchronize the voice with the pictures." babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=md...

Definitely my favourite aperiodic data release from the Planetary Data System in a while:

Entertaining slide from an OpenAI person: secondthoughts.ai/p/what-i-saw...

Reading some 16th-century anapestic tetrameter (Tusser, www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/5... ): If day star appeareth, day comfort is ny, If sunne be at south, it is noone by and by: If sunne be at westward, it setteth anon, If sunne be at setting, the day is soone gon.

Feeling a rare pull toward Blueskyism as I read Matt Yglesias argue that the Louvre has too much material, based on him not having found the Galerie d'Apollon in five visits. www.slowboring.com/p/break-up-t... (full piece is paywalled)

My favourite bug in recent Windows 11 releases is MS Paint's gigantic dialog box asking if I want to save changes.

Pleasant 10-minute video on the transistor from 1953: www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9xU...

It's a new season of YouTube recommending me Wembanyama highlight clips.

Wow, the BOM uses https now.

The QT chain that led to hype about GPT-5 solving Erdős problems started with: "gpt5-pro is superhuman at literature search: "it just solved Erdos Problem #339... by realizing that it had actually been solved 20 years ago" The use of 'found' two QT's later was not intentionally misleading IMO.

Rating Taylor Swift songs, 2025 edition: pappubahry.substack.com/p/rating-tay...

Currently updating my Taylor Swift song ratings. I'm worried that my ratings have drifted over the years by half a point or more out of ten.

Films that aren't Star Wars 14: pappubahry.substack.com/p/films-that... Weapons: 8 The Thing: 8.5 Jaws: 9 Relay: 8.5 Le Fil: 9 Inception: 8 The Roses: 7 Desperately Seeking Susan: 7 Casino: 8 Apollo 13: 9 One Battle After Another: 7.5

The Bread Carrier, by Pablo Picasso, 1905

A peculiar GPT-5 Deep Research hallucination, in which a paper is fabricated but marked as such. '(Hypothetical example for structure – Note: Replace with a real study if available.) ... (The above “Jones & Uhr” entry is a placeholder example; ensure to use actual studies in final output.)'

The three AI outcomes - we all become one with the machine god and shuffle off our mortal coils to live as a hive mind of cyborg superbeings - we all die horribly and painfully in an alien world that has no use for human emotion, creativity, or intellect - 1.5% TFP growth for seven years

A religious data point: after 1. e4 e5 2. Nf3, my higher-rated opponent last night thought for a while, then made the sign of the cross before playing 2... d6. The game ended in a draw.

I had a minute's worth of credit in my OpenAI account, so making some slop. Prompt: "Cartoon anthropomorphic chess pieces; white bishop, queen and knight discussing a sacrifice bishop takes h7."

The Github repos with Taylor Swift lyrics don't seem to have been updated with the latest album, looks like I'll have to do some copy-pasting.

The personal Elo ratings on elotaylor.com are meaningless because if each pairwise comparison has a deterministic winner, then the ratings diverge.

Interesting that Taylor's splitting her eight acoustic tracks over four variant albums. It must say something about demand curves or elasticity or something that she didn't try to soak her biggest fans for eight extra album purchases.

There are neural networks that isolate a vocal track from a mix now, allowing me to improve on some audio processing I tried in 2014 of a friend's rough recording: pappubahry.substack.com/p/further-ad...

Some 1960's vibes from Opalite, loving it.

I'm cautiously pessimistic about The Life of a Showgirl. All tracks are produced by Martin and Shellback, so I'm expecting to like a couple of super-catchy pop songs and find the album overall a little bland.

Strange Google Trends bug: searches for 'ipad' didn't get categorised as being in the 'iPad' topic during an almost three-year period. trends.google.com/trends/explo...

Slow-running edit war on the Wikimedia page for the world map in Vat. Urb. gr. 82: commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pt...

Odd: When I heard the original, unsuccessful version of The Sounds of Silence (plural!), I didn't notice anything out of the ordinary until the very last note. www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0q7... But then when I played the famous version (singular Sound) afterwards, the difference was very obvious.

New office.

59 on Puzzle Storm, huge new best!

Apollo and Daphne, artist unknown, 1630-60

I'm pretty most of my Substack subscribers were trying to subscribe to Dave Barry the American humour columnist, so I'm surprised I don't get more of these "Email disabled" notifications after posting something.

Partial retraction of 'Misinformation on Marginal Revolution': pappubahry.substack.com/p/partial-re... Tyler Cowen did in fact have a good (uncited) source for the claim about Berthold Lasker and shuffle chess -- much better than ChatGPT -- so I no longer consider his post misinformation.

Work hosted a webinar by "MrExcel" last night (very strongly recommended if you get a similar opportunity). Apparently in the early days of the World Excel Championship, it was all raw Excel skill, but these days the top players bring dozens of custom LAMBDA functions with them on their computers.

Surprising photo to open today's Slow Boring.

'Effective altruism has more than its share of critics. But Peter Thiel... is unusual in that, when he describes us as the “Antichrist,” he does not mean this as a generic slur but rather as a specific claim that we oppose Jesus Christ in the Second Coming.'