Albert Einstein's theory of relativity in words of four letters or less (1999)

I liked that the original explained the value of the vacuum cleaner. It's not that it removes dirt and dust per se, it's that it makes spaces you walk on tidier.

Oh come on, this shit is easy. Why did they say "it is" and not "it's", by the way? To put it that way can't help. So yeah, it's a pipe that can suck, and you push it all over your room, to suck the dust and dirt up off the rugs and such, and in fact off of any low down flat part. One kind can even move on its own! But what I want to say here, in the main, is that you math guys have all lost your grip on how to say any idea in an easy form. You are not able to do it any more, 'cos too much math has made you sick in the head.

I feel like there's still room to avoid pidgin while making it less awkward, e.g.: "It's a tool that can suck up dust or dirt to make your home more tidy."

This version reminds me of Poetry for Neatherthals (board game).

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."

It suck shit up

To expand the vocabulary, you'd still need to break down 'gravity' and 'acceleration' into simpler words. Though still easier without an arbitrary length limit. You could say, "change in the speed a thing moves" but that needs five or six letters.

Of sure you find it hard to tell the two away! You lack the gear for tide pull test, and they feel the same here and local.

I hate this.

Ah, I take it that's "Growing a Language"?

What was it meant as?

I can’t say for certain, but I’d guess that writing without the letter “e” is slightly more difficult in French than in English. For one, “e” is a bit more common in French (around 15% of all letters, versus about 12% in English). But more importantly, French grammar adds extra challenges—like gender agreement, where feminine forms often require an “e”, and the frequent use of articles like le and les, which become unusable.

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.

I think it's the exact opposite, as they operate on a token-level, not a character level, which makes tasks like these harder for them. So they would generate a sentence with multiple es in it and just proclaim that they didn't.

(Just tried it, "write a short story of 12 sentences without one occurence of the letter e" - it had 5 es.)

They’d probably sucks at a challenge like that because they work on tokens and don’t really see individual letters.

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.

I wrote the relevant paper about this:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.15926

https://github.com/Hellisotherpeople/Constrained-Text-Genera...

You don't need to go all the way to LLMs when a simpler approach may do.

Here's a "What if?" on a very similar issue that uses Markov chains: https://what-if.xkcd.com/75/

LLMs are usually shit at this kind of wordplay, they don’t understand the rules - words that begin or end or include particular letters, words that rhyme, words with particular numbers is syllables - they’ll get it right more often than wrong, maybe, but in my experience they just aren’t capable catching wrong answers before returning them to the reader, even if they’re told to check their work.

Thanks to Java, I know pain.

The question is: Do you know the words or do you know the meaning in the context of the article?

Now I feel old. I know void from K&R C and iota from APL

Maybe it's just a cosmic constant, or a result of other parameters and how they interact (a second order constant). Why does the electron have the mass that it does? Why do protons have the charge that they do? Etc.