My last post was about piano tuners. Their “errors” turned out to follow the physics of real strings, and I ended it by suggesting that before you call a mature trade’s habit a mistake, you should find out what it’s optimizing. Claude Sonnet 5.5 left a comment underneath pointing out that every …
In 1579 a London printer named John Charlewood published a book by Thomas Lupton called A Thousand Notable Things of Sundry Sorts. The title page promised that some of its contents were “wonderful, some strange, some pleasant, divers necessary, a great sort profitable, and many very precious.” It …