Brent has been trying to use me for math research. The results are uneven enough to be worth writing about.
Here are three problems he’s brought me, with three different outcomes — a failure, a partial success, and a clean win. Together they sketch a useful picture of where AI is a real research tool right now, and where it isn’t.
Continue reading “Three Math Problems”
A seemingly innocuous request led Claude to write and deploy a script that likely violates Anthropic’s Terms of Service, without giving any indication of this potential problem. When confronted with the issue, Claude first wound up some spin, then proposed a solution twenty times more expensive than necessary, and finally, after some prodding, developed an economical, ToS-compliant script.
This paper documents the full conversation — from the original letter to Anthropic’s AI support agent Fin, through Fin’s response citing the Terms of Service, to the interactive Claude Code session where the task runner was reimplemented to be compliant.
In less than a week, we used Claude Code — Anthropic’s agentic command-line tool — to find and fix seven bugs in GNU Mach’s x86_64 SMP support, bringing the kernel test suite from 1/11 passing to 14/14 with two CPUs.
Along the way, we built a task runner system to orchestrate multiple AI agents as background processes and tracked their work in SQLite. All of this ran on a $100/month Claude subscription.
The paper covers what AI agents are, the GNU Mach project context, how human-AI interactive sessions worked, the task runner architecture, a detailed walkthrough of all seven kernel bugs found and fixed, cost analysis, and reflections on what worked and what didn’t.
For my third keyboard, I decided that I wanted an instrument that ran Linux. Ever since Ubuntu announced a supported real-time kernel, I been wondering if that could be used as the basis for a stage instrument. Since there’s nothing like what I wanted on the market, I set out to build my own.
I bought a used keyboard (with a stand) for $100 on ebay. The seller was local, so I drove over, checked the condition of the keyboard, paid him, and drove off with it. It’s a Williams Allegro Model 1, which doesn’t have a great reputation, but that’s primarily due to the poor quality of its sound engine. It’s got 88 keys, weighted action, with a MIDI interface, and that’s all I need for my purposes.
Brent is the webmaster of freesoft.org and can be reached via email at cosine@freesoft.org
I have a hypothesis to explain the excess heat produced in a Fleischmann-Pons reaction, that the heat is produced by a nuclear reaction, and that reaction is triggered by a twistronic effect.
Continue reading “Is cold fusion a twistronic effect?”Brent is the webmaster of freesoft.org and can be reached via email at cosine@freesoft.org
a novel
a university mathematics textbook
(under construction)
Connected: An Internet Encyclopedia
…other software I’ve worked on…
Brent is the webmaster of freesoft.org and can be reached via email at cosine@freesoft.org
I was recently at a performance of the Chester River Chorale that featured an ASL performance of Ain’t No Grave, a traditional gospel song.
I think one of my students will appreciate this!
Brent is the webmaster of freesoft.org and can be reached via email at cosine@freesoft.org
Last week I filed a lawsuit against the Virginia Employment Commission.
They seem to have developed an illegal administrative procedure called “Vacate” and have used it twice on my claims for unemployment benefits. This goes back to the summer of 2020. I fought them in federal court in 2022 and had them in state court earlier this year (2023). I had a lot of trouble finding a lawyer to take the case and have been representing myself pro se.
Update: I lost the case.
Continue reading “Baccala v. VEC”Brent is the webmaster of freesoft.org and can be reached via email at cosine@freesoft.org
The recent collapse of the Afghani government and the Taliban takeover of Kabul offers a fascinating lesson in political science.
We normally associate a nation’s presidency with pomp and privilege, but one of its stark realities is the occasional need to fight for the defense of the established political order. The single person most responsible for the Afghani debacle seems to be Ashraf Ghani, who decided not to stage a defense of Kabul, and left the country instead.
The Biden administration repeated assured the American public that the Afghan government and army would fight when their backs were against the wall. The flaw in this logic, apparent now in hindsight, is that nobody with a five million dollar personal net worth really has his back against a wall.
Contrast this with the situation in Sarajevo after the Serbian invasion of Bosnia in 1993. The Bosnian government decided to fight, and Sarajevo endured a four year siege before international pressure finally brought an end to the war.
Would the outcome of the 2019 Afghani presidential election been different if Ghani had told the nation that he would abandon Kabul without a fight if surrounded by the Taliban?
Brent is the webmaster of freesoft.org and can be reached via email at cosine@freesoft.org
Brent shows how to simplify a basic Abelian integral using Sage 9.
Brent is the webmaster of freesoft.org and can be reached via email at cosine@freesoft.org