information-theory on S Anand

Things I Learned - 14 Jun 2026

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This week, I learned:

Overheard a journalist saying: “I can tell when humans are lying. There are no tell tale signs of AI lying. At least I don’t have any.”
rdt-cli is a Reddit CLI. It uses a clever trick: it auto-detects installed browsers and extracts cookies (supports Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Brave). So, if you’re logged into Reddit on any browser, uvx --from rdt-cli rdt whoami automatically shows who you are logged in as. (The public-clis repo also lists other useful CLIs like twitter-cli, )
Currently, a $20 Claude Pro gives you ~$400 and a $100 Claude Max gives you ~$2,000 of API usage. For ChatGPT, the numbers are ~$700 and $3,500. SemiAnalysis
When Fable 5 refuses to answer questions, here’s the message that appears: “Fable 5 has safety measures that flag messages on most cybersecurity or biology topics. They may flag safe, normal content as well. These measures let us bring you Mythos-level capability in other areas sooner, and we’re working to refine them. Send feedback or learn more.” I managed to trigger this once while researching an M&A acquisition target. Clicking on “Edit and retry with Fable 5” triggered Opus 5 again, twice.
DNA codons (A, T, C, G) encode proteins in triplets. There are 64 triplets that map to 20 amino acids. Some like Leucine, have 6 codons. Some like Methionine have only one. Why? When creating genes, there’s a wobble, sometimes, at the 3rd codon. THe mapping minimizes that impact: small errors map to similar proteins. The more common proteins have more codons. There’s a lot of fascinating information science going on here. Gemini
ChatGPT now shows a “Check in” button when it’s thinking. Clicking on that gives you a work-in-progress answer while it continues thinking. When done, it replaces the WIP answer with the final answer. A useful feature!

Classic texts in computer science

Wed, 21 Jun 2006 12:00:00 +0000

Classic texts in computer science. Worth reading for the sheer insight.

Update: The link didn’t seem to work in Feb 2007. Here’s the list.

An axiomatic basis for computer programming by C. A. R. Hoare
Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) by C. A. R. Hoare
Call-by-name, call-by-value, and the lambda calculus by Gordon Plotkin
Towards a theory of type structure by John C. Reynolds
Definitional interpreters for higher-order programming languages by John C. Reynolds
An APL Machine 1970 by Philip S. Abrams
Henry Baker’s Archive of Research Papers (many classic Lisp papers)
The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engin by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page
No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering by Frederic P. Brooks, Jr.
A Mathematical Theory of Communication by Claude Shannon
Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems by Claude Shannon
Bayesian Networks without Tears by Eugene Charniak
A Universal Algorithm for Sequential Data Compression by Jacob Ziv and Abraham Lempel
A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks 1970 by Edgar F. Codd
Let’s Build a Compiler 1988-1995 by Jack Crenshaw
Gauging Similarity via N-Grams: Language-Independent Sorting, Categorization, and Retrieval of Text by Marc Damashek
Worse Is Better by Richard P. Gabriel
Hints on Programming Language Design by C.A.R. Hoare
Why Functional Programming Matters by John Hughes
The Design of APL by Kenneth E. Iverson
The Early History Of Smalltalk by Alan Kay
Computer Programming as an Art by Donald E. Knuth
The next 700 programming languages by Peter J. Landin
Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and their Computation by Machine (Part I) 1960 by John McCarthy
FORTH - A Language for Interactive Computing by Charles H.Moore
Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years 2001 by Peter Norvig
Parenthetically Speaking, a collection of essays from the 1990s by Kent M. Pitman
The Definition and Implementation of a Computer Language based on constraints by Guy Lewis Steele Jr.
Growing a Language by Guy Lewis Steele Jr.
Epigrams on Programming by Alan J. Perlis
The Complexity of Theorem Proving Procedures by Stephen A. Cook
Steps Toward Artificial Intelligence by Marvin Minsky
The Original ‘Lambda Papers’ by Guy Steele and Gerald Sussman
A Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures and Public-Key Cryptosystems by R.L. Rivest, A. Shamir, and L. Adleman
The UNIX Time-Sharing System by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson

Comments

jawahar 6 Feb 2007 5:52 am: anand this link is not working !!
Classic-texts-in-computer-science – maxviv 5 Jun 2016 7:15 pm (pingback): […] Classic texts in computer science […]

Better information is not always beneficial

Sat, 24 Sep 2005 12:00:00 +0000

Better information is not always beneficial.

For $795, LegalMetric LLC will tell you which judges rule most swiftly and which tend to favor patent holders. For lawyer and client, this knowledge can be very valuable. But does it increase the chances that the judge will come to a just decision?

It is the sort of information that Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow labeled “socially useless but privately valuable.” It doesn’t help the economy produce more goods or services. It creates nothing of beauty or pleasure. It simply helps someone get a bigger slice of the pie. Sure, if the product helps win cases, then both sides will buy it – just as both sides in high-stakes product-liability cases invest in jury-selection experts and software – and neither will have an unfair advantage. But does that make the society better off?

Comments

Arun 24 Sep 2005 4:51 pm: Interesting article. An internet bubble qualifies too, i presume? :-)

Limits of computing power

Wed, 04 Jul 2001 12:00:00 +0000

A bizzarre calculation on the limits of computing power using fundamentals of quantum mechanics.

Worlds information growth

Wed, 01 Nov 2000 12:00:00 +0000

A study shows that the world is producing about 250MB of info per person per year. It means that, on average, each of us is writing 50 times the size of the complete works of Shakespeare every year! If you’re wondering how that’s possible, just wander around this web page :-)