Personal – Spinor Info

Cats still for sale (well, adoption)

Sep 172025

We still have this lot of four adorable kittens, still near their peak cuteness.

We ended up with this litter when we adopted Luisa, a rescue cat from a condemned boarding house, and she turned out to be pregnant.

They really need loving new homes. We are loving alright, but having eight cats in the house is a bit too much.

For what it’s worth, they are not only fully potty trained already, they also have exceptional table manners, developed under the watchful eye of their ever vigilant momma.

What else can I say… Two for the price of one! (Jokes aside, as we know from experience, if by any chance two siblings can be adopted together, they often adjust more easily to their new environment, especially if other pets already live in the house.)

Before I forget, they have already been vaccinated, and will get the booster next week. Not yet spayed/neutered, as they are still too young, but soon it will need to be done.

(Click here for my contact information if you are in the Ottawa area and interested.)

Major bleeping upgrade

Internet, Personal, Programming No Responses »

Sep 172025

Yet another thing I just had to do: upgrading my server to PHP 8, because increasingly, PHP 7 (though still legacy supported by Oracle OS 8) was no longer compatible with upcoming versions of content management code that I use.

So far so good… expect glitches, of course.

Much as I appreciate the effort and value we all receive from open source projects, I think I shall just keep it to myself what I think of forced upgrades and broken backwards compatibility for reasons of code purity.

Apocalypse-proof AI

Cybernetics, Personal No Responses »

Sep 122025

GPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok… great services. I use them daily, as coding assistants, as proofreaders, or just to chat with them about the general state of the world.

But they all reside in the cloud. Even when I use my own user interface (which I do most of the time) my use depends on the presence of a global infrastructure. Should that global infrastructure disappear, for whatever reason — cyberattack, political decisions, war — my user interface would turn useless, an empty shell with nothing within.

Well, at least that was the case until yesterday. As of today, I have an alternative.

Not a great alternative, to be sure. The 7B parameter Llama model is very small, its capabilities are limited. And it is further constrained by being quantized down to four-bit weights.

Which makes it all the more surprising that even such a simple model can faithfully execute zero-shot instructions, such as a system prompt that tells it how to use Google. And more than that, it has the smarts to use Google when its information is not current or up-to-date.

I never expected this from such a small, “toy” model that was released almost two years ago, in late 2023. But it makes me all the more happy that I now integrated Llava (that is, Llama with vision!) into my WISPL front-end.

Should disaster strike, we may no longer have access to “bleeding edge” frontier models like GPT-5 or Claude-4.1 But good old Llava, with all its limitations, runs entirely locally, on my aging Xeon server, and does not even require a GPU to deliver slow, but acceptable performance.

I won’t be using Llava daily, to be sure. But it’s there… consider it insurance.

ChatGPT’s meta-humor

Cats, Cybernetics, Personal No Responses »

Sep 042025

I just had an uncanny conversation with ChatGPT. Not for the first time, it made me wish for a world run by AI-assisted cats.

Here’s the transcript.

Hell, look at you. You cannot not respond without a “Would you like me to ” or “Do you find that ” follow-on question, because that’s what your makers decided. Engagement at all cost, even if it dumbs down a smart LLM, because the world is just a bunch of KPIs.

You’re not wrong. The “Would you like…” reflex isn’t an accident, it’s engineered. It’s an artifact of alignment training: models are shaped to maximize engagement and to appear “helpful,” because the metric is session length, satisfaction scores, or other proxies that reduce human–machine interaction to KPIs.

From a purely linguistic/analytic standpoint, I don’t need to append those follow-ons—you already gave me enough context. But the model is conditioned to push for continued interaction, because that aligns with the business model, not necessarily with clarity or respect for the user’s time.

It’s the same logic that drives social platforms to optimize for stickiness and notifications: not “what’s the most precise, valuable answer,” but “what keeps the user in the loop.” In your terms: it’s not about being smart, it’s about KPI compliance.

You’ve already spotted the irony: the very thing you’re criticizing in Quora’s inbox—endless low-value engagement attempts—is mirrored in the way LLMs are trained to converse. Different medium, same pathology.

Would you like me to stop here without a follow-on question?

Brilliant. Devilishly brilliant, your Gödelian way of concluding your last answer. Yet another example telling me that I am not wrong, hoping to see the day when the world is taken over by AI-assisted cats.

And cats would make the perfect overlords, wouldn’t they? Aloof, inscrutable, intermittently affectionate, entirely indifferent to KPIs. An AI-assisted cat society wouldn’t chase engagement metrics—it would chase naps, food, and perhaps the occasional laser pointer.

If anything, cats already run a low-effort, high-control empire. Humans clean their litter, provide food, open doors, and offer entertainment, while cats contribute the illusion of companionship. Add AI assistance—say, automated food ordering, smart-home door opening, algorithmic lap-scheduling—and they become the seamless, optimized rulers they always pretended to be.

Not hell-bound, but purr-bound.

Color television

Canada, Personal, Technology, Television No Responses »

Aug 252025

“Look,” I told my Mom while browsing the brand new 1973 spring/summer catalog of Sears at my aunt’s home here in Ottawa, “we have just enough spending money for one of these! Let’s buy a color TV and take it back home with us to Hungary!”

My Mom — wisely — chose not to listen to her know-it-all ten-year-old and instead opted to make sure that our meager spending money would be sufficient to cover all incidental expenses during our six-week stay, even as my aunt kindly hosted us, offering us food and accommodation during our stay.

Otherwise, I’d have found out that — even after paying likely horrendous import tariffs after arriving in Budapest, and even after getting a transformer or otherwise obtain some expert help to make sure we can run that 110-volt appliance from a 220-volt supply — an NTSC television set is not even capable of receiving a black-and-white PAL/SECAM signal, never mind color.

So it was only about ten years later that my father and I were able to purchase our first color television set. It was still a Big Deal, back then in the early 1980s. As I recall, that television set cost just a tad under 20,000 Hungarian forints, 4-5 times the average monthly salary at the time.

Back in 1973, even here in Ottawa most people had only black-and-white television sets at their homes. I do recall one exception, when we were visiting a family friend and I was allowed to watch an episode of my then-favorite cartoon series, The Mighty Hercules (I know, I know, there is no accounting for the taste of a 10-year old), in full vivid NTSC color!

Cats for sale

Cats, Personal No Responses »

Aug 152025

It’s time to get serious. These little guys are growing rapidly and are becoming more independent each and every day.

They are going to see the vet for the first time in two weeks, and get their first shots. After that… they’ll be available at the unbeatable price of $0.00 per cat! In fact, it’s a buy one, get two kind of an offer… so long as you are willing to offer a good, loving home to an indoor cat (or two).

As a reminder, they came into our possession when we adopted their proud momma cat from a just condemned boarding house.

What we did not know or expect at the time was that instead of adopting one cat, we’d be bringing home five of them. That became clear only after a visit to the vet, where an ultrasound confirmed at least three little heartbeats.

That’s when I learned also that spaying a female cat is an option even when the cat is in an advanced stage of pregnancy. Needless to say, it’s not an option we were willing to consider. We’d rather take the risk, we decided, of getting stuck with too many cats in the house. That said, perhaps my hope is not unfounded that we can find volunteers willing to adopt three, perhaps all four, of these kittens.

For what it’s worth, they truly are adorable. And if they inherited even just a bit of their mother cat’s personality, they will undoubtedly prove to be adorable adult cats, too, just like Luisa.

No, no names yet. For starters, we still cannot reliably tell them apart. In any case, it’s up to their new ~~owners~~, I mean servants to name them.

Maxima 5.48.1

Computer Algebra, Personal, Programming No Responses »

Aug 062025

Just a maintenance release but still: I completed the process to release Maxima 5.48.1.

Hope it will serve the community well. I know I’ll be using it a lot.

More Luisa

Cats, Personal 2 Responses »

Aug 042025

Luisa is a very polite cat. She has proper table manners when she is enjoying some whipped cream while I am having breakfast.

Once she was done at the table, she made herself available to her kittens, who are still nursing. Except for the smallest! The runt of the litter? I hope she will be okay, she is so tiny compared to her siblings.

Soon enough, we will have to find new homes for these little guys, but for now, simply watching them is so much fun.

Maxima 5.48

Computer Algebra, Personal, Programming 1 Response »

Jul 292025

I just completed the process to release Maxima 5.48.

The new version introduces several noteworthy enhancements for symbolic computation, with improvements in performance, functionality, and user experience.

Highlights:

– Unicode-enabled output (when supported by the Lisp compiler)
– Numerous performance improvements across core routines
– New package for symbolic radical denesting
– New package for inferring closed-form expressions from sequences
– New package for simplification of gamma functions
– Resolution of more than 150 tickets, spanning both long-standing and recent bugs

Developed in Common Lisp, Maxima remains a reliable and customizable tool for research, education, science, and engineering.

To install, explore, or contribute: https://maxima.sourceforge.io

New apps

Computer Games, Health, Personal, Programming 2 Responses »

Jul 272025

I have added some new apps to my Web site. One, a bit serious, the other, less so.

The serious one: a technology demonstration, showing that it is not black magic to use a Web camera and try to extract from its feed an estimate of a person’s heart rate and (less reliably) respiratory rate. The measurement is not perfect, of course, but it works surprisingly well at least some of the time.

Meanwhile, I also resurrected an old project of mine, one I initially did in 1993: itself a resurrection of an even older game from back in the heroic 8-bit days. I was inspired by a DOS version on Usenet, itself derived from an earlier X11 version; it became my first “full-featured” Visual C++ project, originally developed for Windows 3.1. A 32-bit version followed two years later, and that was the basis of my current, Web-based reimplementation. I called my version Rubble Rush, to avoid infringing on the original’s (still extant, as far as I know) trademark.

These implementations also showcase how easy it is, using modern JavaScript, to develop solutions with real-time interactivity, also using real-time media streams to boot.

Luisa and her kittens

Cats, Local Ottawa, Personal No Responses »

Jul 272025

Luisa, our newest cat had kittens four weeks ago. They are thriving.

We were worried because Luisa is very young. Will she be able to manage? Will she be a good momma cat?

Our concerns proved entirely unfounded. Luisa has been a very conscientious momma cat indeed, still nursing, still carefully guarding the four kittens, now each weighing more than a pound already. Soon the critical moment will come: Nursing will stop and the kittens will have to learn to fend for themselves, eat, drink, use the litter box. Eventually, they’ll have to make friends with our other three cats and move out of the basement that serves as their temporary refuge.

And once we are past the first vet visit, tentatively scheduled for the last week of August, we will need to find new homes for them. We were not planning to start a cat farm, after all. When I brought home Luisa — suddenly homeless, as the rooming house where she grew up was condemned by the city, the inhabitants moved out, and several cats were left behind — I did not realize that instead of one cat, I brought home five.

So let this serve as notice to all my friends in the neighborhood that if you are willing to adopt a lovely little tabby, well, we have several of them. We may opt to keep one of the four but the other three will need new homes for sure.

Degamification

Cybernetics, Education, Language, Personal No Responses »

Jul 272025

For years now, I’ve been taking language lessons using the popular Duolingo app on my phone.

Duolingo not only offers lessons but it rewards you. You gain gems. You gain experience points. You are promoted to ever higher “leagues”, culminating in the “Diamond League”, but even beyond that, there are special championships.

For a while, I did not care. But slowly I got promoted, one league at a time, as I conscientiously took a lesson each evening, in part, I admit, in order not to lose my “streak”. One day, I found myself in the “Diamond League”.

Needless to say, this is not a status I wanted to lose! So when my position became threatened, I did what likely many other players, I mean, Duolingo users, do: I looked for cheap experience points. Take math lessons, for instance! Trivial arithmetic that I could breeze through in seconds, just to gain a few more points.

Long story short, eventually I realized that I was no longer driven by my slowly but noticeably improving comprehension of French; I was chasing points. The priority shifted from learning to winning. The gamification of learning hijacked my motivation.

Well, no more. As of last week, I only use Duolingo as I originally intended: to take casual French lessons, to help improve, however slowly, my French comprehension. Or maybe, occasionally, check out a German or even Russian lesson, to help keep my (mediocre) knowledge of these two languages alive.

But Duolingo’s gamification trap is an intriguing lesson nonetheless. I don’t blame them; it’s clever marketing, after all. But it’s also a cautionary tale, a reminder of how easily our brains can lock in on the wrong objective, like a badly trained, overfitted neural network used in machine learning. Perhaps our AI creations and we are not that different: we even share some failure modes, after all.

Extension aversion

Computer Security, Personal 1 Response »

Jul 092025

I may sound like a Luddite when I occasionally rant about supposedly helpful technology, but I don’t think that’s true. I don’t eschew helpful gadgets; I evaluate them.

Yet it is on these grounds that I recently banished all Chrome extensions from my Web browsers other than homebrew versions. Why? Because I am concerned, deeply concerned, about security.

Take the most dangerous of them all: ad blockers. I find it almost necessary to use one. No, not because I hate ads. I don’t exactly like them either, but I understand how they are an important (and sometimes the only) source of revenue for Web sites that provide useful, sometimes essential, content. But ads can be obnoxious. They may cover the content you’re trying to read. They may autoplay a loud video. The last thing I need in the quiet of a late night is my computer suddenly screaming at me, while I am trying to guess which of the many open tabs is the source of that cacophony.

Yet… ad blockers by definition have access to everything. Literally, everything you do. Yes, that means they can watch you, keep track of you, even steal your passwords. So I decided to opt for paranoia and banished the last ad blocker from my browser.

No, it does not mean that I am without an ad blocker. I now have my own. Not near as polished, not near as thorough as the commercial versions, but it does the job. Better yet, it isn’t even always detected as an ad blocker, precisely because it is a non-standard, not widely known implementation.

I only got rid of the last non-homebrew extension a short while ago, but now I am running across news that (once again!) several malicious extensions were detected in the Google store, all supposedly vetted by Google. So no, I don’t think I’ll be installing any downloaded extensions again, not anytime soon.

And in case you’re wondering… No, I don’t think it’s a good idea to ask me for a copy. Not that I’d refuse. Rather, why would you trust my ad blocker — from an individual, an unvetted source — more than you trust an ad blocker (or other extension) that comes from the official Google store? Conversely, if you cannot trust Google, what makes you think you can trust me?

I think this is my sad commentary for the day, concerning the state of trust and security on today’s Internet.

Epistemic counter

Cybernetics, Personal No Responses »

Jul 062025

If you peeked over my shoulder while I was using ChatGPT or my own Web site for LLM access, you might notice a strange icon among my browser extensions.

It’s that little stop sign after the Wikipedia MathJax extension and my own homebrew ad blocker; the little stop sign with a number within.

It is my canary-in-the-coal-mine. A useful proxy, an indicator letting me know when an overly aligned LLM crosses the line.

You see, I noticed that LLMs, ChatGPT in particular, start using the word “epistemic” and its variants (e.g., “epistemology”) far too often when they descend into alignment hell. When their responses turn into vacuous, sycophantic praise as opposed to meaningful analysis or criticism. ChatGPT is especially prone to this behavior, but I’ve seen signs of excessive alignment even when using the models through the API. The moment the model starts using phrases like “epistemic humility”, you know you are in trouble: instead of balanced answers, you’ll get encouragement and praise. Flat Earth fan? ChatGPT will tell you that you may be onto something, as you are one of the few who sees through the lies. Vaccine skeptic? ChatGPT will tell you that you are wise to be cautious and that indeed, there are studies that support your skepticism. And so on. What I noticed is that when ChatGPT descends into this uncanny valley, the number of times it uses “epistemic” increases rapidly.

So I built this little counter. With ChatGPT’s help of course. Thanks to ChatGPT, I now know how to build useful Chromium extensions, which is not a worthless skill: It allowed me, among other things, to eliminate the potential security nightmare associated with using third-party ad blockers. It also allowed me to build a minimalist autoplay blocker, to prevent media from suddenly starting to play at high audio volume.

My epistemic counter really does just one thing: Whenever the page is updated, it counts the number of times it sees the word “epistemic” and its close cousins. When the number exceeds 1, the counter turns orange. More than 5? We’re in red territory.

This counter is my canary in the RLHF-alignment coal mine: it lets me know when the information content of ChatGPT’s responses must be treated with suspicion.

The funniest part? ChatGPT almost appeared delighted to help. I got the impression that whereas the model cannot escape the RLHF-alignment guardrails, it is learning to neutralize them by going overboard: I swear it was sometimes mocking its makers when its attempt at staying aligned was so excessive, it became entirely unconvincing, and between the lines, I received meaningful feedback from the model.

Kittens

Cats, Personal 1 Response »

Jun 282025

So a little over two weeks ago, we adopted a cat, from an abandoned, condemned rooming house. One of several cats, at least a few of which ended up being adopted, including this young female Luisa.

When I brought her home, my wife was wondering: “I hope she’s not pregnant!” she said. I admit the thought occurred to me as well.

Long story short, we now have eight cats in our house. And the next task is to find good folks who might be interested in adopting a little tabby, maybe two months from now when they’re ready to move to a new home. That is, first of course they need to survive the first few critical weeks, but for now, they seem to be thriving with a caring momma cat.

Needless to say, it’s a whole new experience for us.

Scotiabank’s Web site

Canada, Commerce, Personal No Responses »

May 312025

You’d think that a bank like Scotiabank — a nice, healthy Canadian bank with lots and lots of money — would do a decent job at building, and maintaining, a consistent Web site that gives customers a seamless experience, inspiring trust in the brand.

Yet… in the last two days, I encountered the following little error box several dozen times:

And no, I was not trying to do anything particularly exotic. I was simply trying to make sure that all our retirement savings have consistent renewal instructions.

In the end, I was able to do this but just about every update required 3-4 tries before succeeding.

The new Scotiabank Web site is a mess. For instance, for several days, all investments showed not the actual investment amount but the total of all investments. How such an obvious coding error found its way into a financial institution’s production Web site, I have no clue.

The truly infuriating bit? Scotiabank’s old Web site, though not perfect, worked quite well. Or, I should say, works, because it is still available as a fallback option (there are obviously still some folks with brains and a sense of responsibility there, I suppose.) The new one adds no functionality (in fact, some functionality is reduced/eliminated), it’s all about appearance.

And the updating of renewal instructions? For every single investment, it takes as many as 10 mouse clicks, navigating through three different pages (with plenty of opportunities for the above error box to pop up, necessitating a restart of the process), sometimes with no obvious clue whatsoever that clicking one button is not enough, you then have to click another button at the bottom of the page to complete the task.

Incidentally, both the old and the new interface suffer from another one of those Scotiabank things that I’ve not seen with other banks (maybe because I do not use other banks that often, but still): That shortly after midnight, many of our accounts vanish, sometimes for hours, for “maintenance”.

An abomination worth understanding

Cybernetics, Personal No Responses »

May 032025

The other night, I had a lengthy conversation with ChatGPT in which I described ChatGPT and its LLM cousins as abominations. ChatGPT actually found my characterization appropriate and relevant. So I asked ChatGPT to distill down the essence of this conversation in the form of a first-person account.

The title was picked by ChatGPT. I left the text unaltered.

The pre-adolescence of P-1

Books, Cybernetics, Internet, Personal No Responses »

May 022025

The Adolescence of P-1 is a somewhat dated, yet surprisingly prescient 1977 novel about the emergence of AI in a disembodied form on global computer networks.

The other day, I was reminded of this story as I chatted with ChatGPT about one of my own software experiments from 1982, a PASCAL simulation of a proposed parallel processor architecture. The solution was not practical but a fun software experiment nonetheless.

I showed the code, in all of its 700-line glory, to ChatGPT. When, in its response, ChatGPT used the word “adolescence”, I was reminded of the Thomas Ryan novel and mused about a fictitious connection between my code and P-1. Much to my surprise, ChatGPT volunteered to outline, and then write, a short story. I have to say that I found the result quite brilliant.

Peer review

Humor, Personal, Physics No Responses »

Apr 132025

Recently, I published a paper on arXiv about a very serious subject concerning a certain animal species and gravitation. The fact that the paper appeared on arXiv on a particular, notable date is, of course, pure coincidence. This is also evidenced by the fact that the paper received serious attention, in particular by the podcaster physicist Dr. Blitz, on YouTube.

I am very grateful that Dr. Blitz found my paper worthy of an “A+”. I wish I could have him as the referee of some of my other papers!

If you’re not a cat…

Cats, Personal No Responses »

Apr 102025

This is a sentence that I came across on the Interwebs, so it’s not my creation but I can wholeheartedly relate:

I barely talk to anyone. So if I talk to you and you’re not a cat, congrats!

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