AltSci Blog

I'm headed back to São Paulo, Brasil for a month starting on January 16, 2013. See you there! If you're reading this, please visit my new website AI3 Javantea out.

Dec 24, 2012

AI3 is officially in beta. Hooray! Start testing when you get a free minute. Send any bug reports to me. I am so excited to work on them and respond to you.

What is AI3? The way that I usually describe it is like an inverse thesaurus. Instead of finding a synonym or antonym for a word, you find the most likely word to put afterward and the context of that word. You can also find sentences that use two words. If you're stuck on a word, check out a few hundred uses of that word. Unlike Google, most of the results are not sorted by popularity. They're sorted by position in the database.

Dec 13, 2012

Some of you may be excited to hear that I am finally on the brink of releasing a very interesting website. How interesting? It has kept my interest for weeks even though some of it is hard and some of it is annoying.

gzip -l ~/ai3_db_backup_20121211_ram2.gz
         compressed        uncompressed  ratio uncompressed_name
         1137167097           403791553 -181.6% /home/jvoss/ai3_db_backup_20121211_ram2

zcat ~/ai3_db_backup_20121211_ram2.gz | grep -e ^INSERT -e ^LOCK -e ^UNLOCK |wc
   4716  642299 4698740275

It's alright if you don't understand what the above means. The first one shows a bug I found in gzip where when you try to find out how large something is when it's bigger than 4GB uncompressed, it wraps and gives you a small number and a negative compression ratio. It's not a vulnerability so don't worry about it. The second one shows that there is about 4.7 GB of interesting data in that file.

As planned I made my way to a hostel near Paulista. Unplanned was how I got there, who I met on the way, and a sunburn covering my face, head, ears, and probably neck. Despite being untouched the previous two days, the sun came out in full force today. I did not use any sunscreen which I will remedy in the future. While my sunburn heals I have a plan to learn the rest of Portuguese in less than 2 days. Rather than explain it in detail, I will explain what led me here, show you a preview of my new method and move on.