Colin McMillen, a software engineer, writes humorous and technical pieces including SIGBOVIK papers and programming language jokes.
HN links his paper claiming 93% of paint splatters are valid Perl programs, often as a joke in threads about code and language models.
Dmitry is right. The vast majority of Googlers lean somewhere between against and apathetic to the DEI nonsense that's infected the company, but no one's willing to be the nail that sticks out and complain about it visibly.
Two anecdotes:
1. memegen had downvotes, and well-known instigators would continuously complain on plus about their shitty polarizing memes getting enormous numbers of downvotes, and get nothing but hugbox replies in the comments. The creator of memegen who was ideologically aligned ended up regretting adding downvotes at all, under the theory that people were conspiring to downvote instead of there being a silent majority of people that disagreed with the memes in question: https://www.mcmillen.dev/blog/20210721-downvotes-considered-harmful.html
2. Someone made an anonymous survey about whether people thought the Damore memo stated facts, had sound logic, was a good idea to post, deserved firing, etc. It was taken down shortly after because people didn't like the results and the implication that the majority of people that filled it out didn't think that the post was worthy of being immediately fired, etc.
Of all the non-esolangs (=exolangs?) APL+kith seem to be almost designorismic/estuarine (formerly, Riverian) beasts..
In your informed opinion, how would it make sense to be thrilled thinking about (not just a semi-dynamic APL (=S-DAPL?) as above but) designing
a APL-kith for widespread adoption by BOTH (demoscenic)gamecoders & Analysts (the academic variety)??? Specifically, which of the sneering checklist items[0] would be killer to cross off?
[0] https://www.mcmillen.dev/language_checklist.html
(Note in particular that the very APL inspired Wolfram has monopoly with physicists BUT does nothing for engineers
https://www.stephenwolfram.com/media/physics-whiz-goes-into-biz/
1988
>“But we tricked him, so to speak,” says Nobelist Murray Gell-Mann, who helped to bring Wolfram west. “We gave him a Ph.D.” )
OP seems to have run a programming language detector on the generated texts, and made a graph of programming language frecuencies: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Gx2kvNxXEAAkBO0.jpg?name=orig
As a result, OP seems to think the model was trained on a lot of Perl: https://xcancel.com/jxmnop/status/1953899440315527273#m
LOL! I think these results speak more to the flexibility of Perl than any actual insight on the training data! After all, 93% of inkblots are valid Perl scripts: https://www.mcmillen.dev/sigbovik/
No, asking an LLM to generate the inkblot is the same as asking the LLM to write a string and then obfuscating it in an inkblot.
OCRing literal random inkblots will not produce valid C (or C# or python) code, but it will prodce valid Perl most of the time, because Perl is weird, and that is funny.
It's not about obfuscating text in inkblot, it's about almost any string being a valid Perl program, which is not the case for most languages
Edit0: here: https://www.mcmillen.dev/sigbovik/
In Perl you have the dynamism, and the syntax.
Evidently, 93% paint splatters, when OCRed, are valid Perl programs:
https://www.mcmillen.dev/sigbovik/2019.pdf
I doubt that a similar thing is true for Clojure.
Here, the only problem is that you don't know what the symbols and some of the notations mean. You can look at the unfamiliar syntax and know what is a child of what. Most operators are words you can search for.
Bad language is a pretty subjective. Perl often gets a bad wrap because it can be hard to read and terse, but that doesn’t necessarily make it bad. It could be good in a “writing a quick script” circumstance.
Somewhat related to this, enjoy this article[0] titled “93% of Paint Splatters are Valid Perl Programs”
[0]
https://www.mcmillen.dev/sigbovik/