Really? Why?

I was at a local warehouse store this evening. Picking up a couple of staples we're out of of, but also browsing for intermittently available treats and otherwise engaging in the behaviors that result in spending more than you intended in those places. In the end I brought home a new choice in canned soft-drinks. There are six cans each of three flavors packed into a 3x6 grid. The box opens on the short end, so that you see three cans. It would have been very convenient for me if each row of six was a different flavor so I could put the box on my pantry shelf, open the end and have immediate access to all the available flavors. Of course that isn't what they did: two full rows of one flavor, then two rows of the next, and the final flavor all the way at the "back".

Sigh.

If I was in a charitable mood I might wonder about the difficulty of building a packing line to do the right thing as compared to what they did. But I'm not; I'm just unreasonably torqued off by this tiny inconvenience and feeling really unlikely to buy this product again.

Missing feature

Me

Hey CVA,¹ navigate to my Super Secret Lair.²

CVA

Okay. ::brings up a map::

Me, going bug-eyed

Dang CVA, why that way?

At this point CVA says nothing and you either follow it or not, which is not how you would interact with a human navigator. What we need is support for closing the loop on that question:

CVA

There are heavy delays on your usual routes.³

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¹ Creepy Voice Assistant

² For the traffic-aware routing. I know where the SSL is.

³ Knowing my "usual routes" would be just another creepy thing about the voice assistant but, oh, so useful. I'm gestating another post on the tension there.

How many featured guests does it take to change the "band" of an album?

Let's say, you're writing a music app. Something like Apple Music, Amazon Music, Spotify, or whatever. You will, of course, want to offer your users multiple ways to find music. A flexible search interface, a list of songs, a list of albums and so on. The fun comes if you decide to offer a list of artists. When should an album show up under a particular artist? How do you handle ensembles that aren't publishing as a named entity (i.e. it's by a bunch of people and not "by a band")? Worse still, how do you deal with tracks that include a featured guest artists on an album that is otherwise by a single person or band?

As a programmer whose cares about users, my vote would be to accept some duplicate presentations due to fuzzy matching rather than risk disappointing a user who disagrees with my way of answering those questions. But that doesn't seem to be what Apple picked. Indeed, I simply can't deduce the logic (if any?) underlying how Apple Music handles these questions. In the album list one album can show up more than once, partitioned according to the performance credit for each song. An album by a band that has one song with a featured guest performer isn't enough to make that band show up in the list of artists.¹ WTF, Apple? What are you thinking? Just ... WHY?!?

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¹ I've ripped the True Love Never Dies from CD, but Otherwise doesn't show up in my artists list, because I only have that one album at it has one track featuring Ash Costello. Grrr...

Side Quest: Infrastructure Build-Out

My hobby programming project stalled out. Again. Because I still didn't want to npm install.

This time the issue was a test harness.

The project is a wannabe game engine. Or at least a wannabe animation engine for now: user interaction is still in the works. I had gotten far enough to be bothered by the ways the physics isn't working right.¹ But the code is growing in size, and fixing the physics code will be fiddly. That is, after all, why it doesn't work right as things stand. Unit tests are part of my process for handing that kind of fiddly.

And when you search for pure JavaScript unit testing frameworks, they all request the forbidden incantation as step one. For the same perfectly valid reasons tall the language server did, I'm sure.

Now, I've written testing frameworks of various kinds in the past. A set of tests in Fortran for my dissertation analysis after the second attempt collapsed under it's own weight; a really kludgy mess of c-preprocessor and GNU-make just because I thought I was clever,² and a command-line end-to-end driver at work. None of them are professional or polished but they all work in some sense, and that teaches a lesson: it doesn't have to be fancy to work.

With that sort of thing in mind I conceived a vague notion of a minimal test harness that would write its output into a webpage.³ Obviously I'm not the first person to have that idea, and a little searching got me an example to use as inspiration. Thanks, Alex!

Only I couldn't leave well enough alone. I made it part of my "learn to program with AI" effort, worked with Gemma4 to give it a fluent interface despite my misgivings about that whole idea and thus was TestOf born. Maybe it'll be useful for someone else.

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¹ Embarrassing for a physicist, I can assure you.

² Please use something better than that!

³ We are talking JavaScript, after all.

Paging Generative Freud. Dr Freud, you are needed in the psych ward

I had a brainstorm today about a possible prompt to test the edges of LLM conpetence. It's longer prompt than most of the ones I use and demands a longer answer, so context lengths have to be expanded and it runs slowly on available hardware. As a result I've only begun investigating it.

But it triggered an idea for another "off the wall humor" type question which is quite succinct. The thing is that when I started asking models about that one I got a surprise, and thinking it might be perculiar to a particular model family I tried some others; and the surprise persisted. What. The. Absolute. Heck?

There is an old saw that a boat is a hole in the water that you throw money into, which is not the core of my prompt but has a similar flavor. What I'm actually asking the models to react to is a pair of definitions of two classes of boats in terms of how they make you broke. If you've spent anytime in boat-owning circles you've probably heard it. The joke is funny because (a) it acknowleges that boats are conspicuously expecnsive to own, and (b) it distinguishes between motor boats and sail bots, and you can order the definitions so your audience feels good about not being in one category until you hit them with the definition for the class of boat they own. Then it's rueful smiles all 'round.

Only ... model after model has wanted to interpret it as some kind of financial metephor. The difference between spending big for lots of velocity and binding your time doing things right in the hopes of achieving a better outcome. Or something like that.

Where are they getting that? Does their training data inclue lots of articles from the popular business press? Or something?

Weird.

Oddly it seems to come outstronger when models are allowed to reason.

Does any one know?

Did Sir Pterry every address the question of which divinty attends to tangled cables? I mean, it seems likely to me that the duty would fall to Anoia. Right?

Yes. Yes, she is.

When Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson announced, last year, that they had chosen a drummer to join them for a few more Rush shows, I was at once squealingly excited and deeply fearful. I mean, I knew intellectually that there is no way the guys would agree to go out with a less than fantastic drummer, but the emotions do not play by the same rules as reason. Well, I found a few videos and a few expert opinions, and that allayed much of my worry. And then a few months ago we go the video from the Juno awards and that was very promising. But there were a few lingering, irrational concerns. Was she good enough?

Well, I'm back from the opening show.¹

There is a lot that could be said about things like song selection (we go La Villa Strangiato and YYZ!), and the tributes to Neil (sniffling back tears), and how incredible Time Stand Still sounds with Aimee Mann harmonizing on stage, and on and on but I'll let others cover that.

The answer is unambiguous.

All the delicacy and subtlety on display in the videos I've seen of her earlier work was there, but when Neil's drum parts demand The Beast she's got that too.² The crowd's reaction to the first big fill in Tom Sawyer was emphatic, and Geddy's reaction to that was something to witness.

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¹ Thanks to Mrs. NoSwampCoolers for deciding that this was going to happen while tickets were still available.

² And while she looks completely different from Neil, in the hard parts her face carried the same grim determination. But when the drum chart was merely fast and demanding joy and satisfaction would break through.