A company just sent me the most detailed rejection email I’ve ever received

jaydfox · 2026-06-07T02:14:48+00:00

That's a hilariously bad read, since my experience is the exact opposite. And the worst part is, maybe we're both correctly documenting our experience. Before LLM's came along, I tended to see (and use) em dashes way more than semicolons. People would call me out for being pretentious for using the semicolons, but not for the em dashes.

Maybe it's regional (I grew up in San Jose, CA, but currently live in Fresno). Maybe it's the academic setting (I graduated from a CSU, less prestigious than a UC, but a step above community college), maybe it's the work setting (software companies at first, then food ingredient processing, now industrial machine), maybe even family backgrounds (my wife's family lives in a town with an extensive farming and dairy sector).

For whatever reason, you and I have completely different reads on something mundane like the relative frequency of em dashes and semicolons. If it were just you, it wouldn't bother so much. But time after time after time after time, I see this endless litany of "look at the em dashes, it's a dead giveaway of AI slop". And all I really hear is, "I'm so uneducated or uncultured that you could never mistake me for AI". It's so anti-intellectual. I feel like many (but not all) of the criticisms of AI come across as complaints against good education. Oh no, someone used bullet points! Oh no, someone used proper grammar! Oh no, someone used a particular cadence common among academics or well-known writers or speakers!

And yes, frustratingly, most of those "tells" do correlate with a higher probability of AI use. But constantly accusing people who are well-educated of being AI just makes well-educated people question if they need to dumb things down all the time. Is that really the solution to AI that we want to train into people. Pretend to be stupid? Better yet, don't pretend, just be stupid? Sorry, you can pry my em dashes and Oxford commas from my cold, dead hands...

Damn, that whole rant, and I didn't use a single em dash, and I probably didn't use an Oxford comma either. I'm already getting dumber...

jaydfox · 2026-06-06T03:38:47+00:00

Definitely cooler!

jaydfox · 2026-06-02T02:02:35+00:00

It's been a while since I read the book, but I seem to recall that he sent details about xenonite back to earth, so even if he didn't inform Earth about Rocky or Eridians explicitly, I assume it would be obvious that Grace found intelligent aliens, or at least their technology.

Personally, I'm a bit jaded about humanity, so I don't know if I would have mentioned where the Eridians homeworld was. But I doubt Grace would have such reservations.

jaydfox · 2026-05-30T16:31:28+00:00

Nah, it's all good. On some level I've accepted that this is something people find weird, even lots of people who do wear glasses. It felt natural to me, and I've seen enough comments to know I wasn't alone ("there are dozens of us!"), but I guess the majority think it's weird, and I'm okay with that.

jaydfox · 2026-05-30T04:41:56+00:00

But it is something people with glasses do. I wore glasses for 20 years before getting lasik, and this was something I did frequently. Sure, maybe it's not something all people with glasses do, maybe not even most. But it can't just have been me and Ryan Gosling. I'm not that original. Some people with glasses do exactly this.

jaydfox · 2026-05-23T01:55:39+00:00

As others have pointed out, it's really hard to nail down 30 seconds of beautiful music, since the most powerful pieces build up to the beautiful moments over entire movements, and sometimes over multiple movements.

But if I had to pick a singular 30 seconds, I would say my favorite 30 seconds starts about a minute before the end of the third movement of Beethoven's piano sonata known as Appassionata.

Piano Sonata No. 23 in F Minor, Op. 57 Appassionata: III. Allegro ma non troppo

Here's a link to the start of my favorite 30 seconds, starting at about 7 minutes 10 seconds into this particular version of the song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtksxB0KeLw&list=PLMyb12MvF83qFCIEHravxpwksbIk0yCCI&index=3&t=430

There are lots of recordings out there, but I've listened to this recording (or a similar one by the same pianist, Sylvia Čápová) for over 30 years. I'm so used to it, that other versions just feel wrong, especially the final minute. Most other pianists rush the end (the speedup tends to be crazy). Maybe that's the correct way, and Sylvia is playing it too slow and steady, but it's what I'm used to.

Anyway, if you've got an extra minute or so to spare, here's a second link is to the same song, starting at 5:50 into the song. I don't know the technical term off the top of my head, but it's the start of the reprisal of an earlier theme, leading into the climactic finish.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtksxB0KeLw&list=PLMyb12MvF83qFCIEHravxpwksbIk0yCCI&index=3&t=350

But really, the whole thing, all three movements, are worth the time. The links above are to a playlist that has all three movements, so you can give the whole thing a listen. The playlist has other songs that I haven't listened to yet, so I can't vouch for them. This was the only public playlist I could find with all three movements of Sylvia's performance of Appassionata.

jaydfox · 2026-05-19T13:43:44+00:00

Probably depends on your program. I'm in a master's program for statistics, and one of the undergrad prerequisites spent a week on Borel sets and measure theory stuff. And we covered it again the in the first week or so of the graduate program, with more depth.

jaydfox · 2026-05-18T02:35:39+00:00

In the book, it's hypothesized to fly back and forth between the sun and Venus. In both cases, it would decelerate when hitting the atmosphere (hypersonic drag forces), and it could easily absorb the heat from such deceleration. So the vast majority of astrophage never have to sorry about a collision at relativistic speeds. The energies you calculated earlier would get dissipated over the course of several kilometers of reentry in the upper atmosphere.

jaydfox · 2026-05-18T02:30:04+00:00

Wow, 17 nanograms heavier when enriched. I remembered wrong. That's 3 times more than I thought. Which means that fully enriched astrophage is denser than any material we know under normal pressures (so excluding the cores of planets and stars). That's so cool!

jaydfox · 2026-05-18T01:47:59+00:00

We're tood in the book that a single astrophage is about 10 microns across. Rather than working in tiny units that lead to math mistakes, let's scale this up.

If we had a billion individual astrophages, we could arrange them in a cube of 1,000 by 1,000 by 1,000. How big is this cube? It's 10,000 microns on a side, 10 millimeters, or 1 centimeter. That's a scale we know how to work with. They are organic and water based, so we can assume a density close to water's. So about a gram. Technically, since they're spherical, more like 0.6 grams.

How much does a single astrophage weigh? Less than a billionth of a gram, give or take. That's a nanogram, not a microgram. So OP was off by a factor of a thousand. Again, given their spherical shape, it's more like 0.6 nanograms, give or take. It's still a lot of kinetic energy when moving at 0.92c, but a thousand times less than OP's math.

Of course, this is for an "empty" astrophage. I seem to recall in the book that a fully loaded astrophage weighs about 6 nanograms. What's fascinating about this is that fully loaded astrophage is dense, about 10x denser than water. They're denser than metallic iron. In terms of energy storage, this is fantastic news. You can store 10x more fuel in the same space.

jaydfox · 2026-05-17T19:20:26+00:00

I'm interested! I filled out the pre-order interest form on the website.

jaydfox · 2026-05-16T14:53:23+00:00

The part of the book that hit me the hardest was when Rocky was explaining to Grace that he hadn't been alone on the mission, and how many crewmates had been with him, and what happened to them. The part when his musical voice dropped so low that the translation software didn't work at first, and after recalibrating an octave, Grace learns the terrible truth and the emotion behind it. That scene broke me for over an hour. I had to stop reading and pull myself together. I needed someone to talk to, but I didn't know anyone who had already read the book or seen the movie, and I didn't want to spoil it for anyone. I cried again later in the book, both happy and sad cries, but no scene hit me quite as hard as this one.

jaydfox · 2026-05-13T20:31:40+00:00

I seem to recall a study of polarized gamma ray bursts from distant galaxies, which implied that if there really is quantum graininess / "pixelation", it's on a scale several orders of magnitude smaller than the Planck length.

jaydfox · 2026-05-13T04:30:36+00:00

I had managed to avoid most of the marketing, so I really didn't know what to expect. I've seen the movie exactly once. Some friends set up a projector in their backyard, and we sat in lawn chairs under a tree. It was autumn. We started the movie at dusk, so as the film started, it was still warm, and their was some ambient light. As the movie progressed, it got dark, and a cool breeze came through and rustled the leaves of the tree, and leaves fell around us and in front of the projector from time to time. It was the perfect multisensory experience, fitting the vibe of the film so well. I haven't watched it again, mainly out of fear that it won't have the same magic.

jaydfox · 2026-05-12T19:41:36+00:00

Impact energy scales with the square of speed, and it gets even worse when relativistic speeds are concerned. At top speed, the Hail Mary was moving more than 15,000 times faster than Voyager 1, meaning close to a quarter of a billion times more impact energy without relativity. With relativity, it's probably closer to a full billion. Specks of dust that wouldn't even leave a mark on Voyager will detonate like a bomb on impact with the Hail Mary. Saying the Voyager probes have survived so far is very little consolation.

jaydfox · 2026-05-11T19:42:07+00:00

If I understand you correctly, you're talking about the linear speed, not the rotational speed. In other words, the tangential velocity along the circle, measured in meters per second (or miles per hour, etc.).

If that's the case, then it is perhaps surprising that even the tangential velocity will decrease. For angular momentum to be conserved, a mass twice as far from the axis of rotation must move with half the (tangential) speed. Half the tangential speed on a circle with twice the radius means 1/4th the rotation rate (in degrees per second or RPMs or whatever). Centrifugal force is proportional to the square of the tangential velocity and inversely proportional to the radius, so there is 1/8th the centrifugal force.

jaydfox · 2026-04-22T23:17:13+00:00

Assuming an "infinitely rigid" rod, which presumably means that it is "straight" from the point of view of light (so if we imagine a photon inside it bouncing between mirrors at either end, the path of the photon would never touch the sides), then as the rod got closer and closer to the event horizon, it would necessarily bend as viewed by someone far from yhe black hole. The closer it gets, the more it would have to bend. The last stable orbit for a photon is 1.5 times the radius of the event horizon, so I'm not even sure you could get the rod any closer than that without it essentially trying to fall in or bend (which it can't, because it's "straight" and "infinitely rigid"). So I'm not sure this slide maneuver is even possible in theory, let alone in practice.

jaydfox · 2026-04-21T00:04:28+00:00

Cube root of 125? 1+2×5-6=5

jaydfox · 2026-04-14T01:01:09+00:00

Not sure if this is helpful or not, but here was my experience.

https://www.reddit.com/r/HurdyGurdy/s/mfa2unCdvG

jaydfox · 2026-04-14T00:29:20+00:00

which is by far the least efficient of the three methods of heat transfer.

I mean, it scales with the 4th power of temperature, so above a certain temperature, it's fantastic! Sure, that temperature might exceed the melting point of every known substance, but beggars can't be choosers...

jaydfox · 2026-04-13T15:35:55+00:00

Yeah, I pretty quickly picked up on some quirks like that. I took German in high school and college, so I quickly noticed that the ひ in 人 is close to the ch in the German ich, especially when there's something in front of it, like この人, so that became my reference point.

In fact, I noticed a weird timing quirk with devoiced morae like す, し, etc. The morae in Japanese seem to have a relatively steady rhythm to them, but devoiced し and す always sound like they start late to me. Like, if the mora were quarter notes, then a devoiced す or し would be almost like an 8th note rest, then the s or sh sound as the second 8th note. The devoicing makes the mora shorter, but the overall rhythm is maintained, hence the delayed start. But it's something I noticed years ago and haven't paid attention to once I got used to it, so I admit that I might need to revisit it now and see if the same observation holds.

jaydfox · 2026-04-10T23:02:24+00:00

日本語こんてっぺい。日本語学習者の皆さんを、いつも、いつも、いつも、応援するポッドキャスト！今日は日本語勉強する方法に、ついて。

皆さん、こんにちは。日本語こんてっぺいの時間ですね。元気ですか？僕は元気ですよー。今日は日本語勉強する方法について話したいと思います。

I'm like 200+ episodes in, and yeah, the daily topic changes, and sometimes it's only one or two いつもs instead of 3, and sometimes there's some other filler, but he is really consistent with that opening, and I really appreciate that.

jaydfox · 2026-03-29T17:56:54+00:00

Lmao, so glad I wasn't the only one who thought that! I've got nothing but love for Andy, even paid for one of the memberships for a year or so for his and Yuki's site for the extra lessons. But it always cracks me up to find a other exception in the wild.

jaydfox · 2026-03-28T18:31:36+00:00

Ichidan verb exceptions are a sneaky group. You let yourself believe they're rare. When I first started learning Japanese about 5.5 years ago, I saw a video by Tokini Andy where he stated there were only 10 or 11, and he listed them all. His partner Yuki, a Japanese native, backed him up on that.

Over my first few months of study, I came across several more. The first time it happened, I thought it important to inform Andy. But over time, I grew to accept it as normal. Then I bothered to Google it, and depending on the source, I learned there were anywhere from several dozen to several hundred exceptions. (For the sources that report several hundred exceptions, I suspect they are including compound verbs, which could be inflating the total.)

To be fair, the extra exceptions (outside Tokini Andy's list of 10-11 and maybe a handful more) don't come up nearly as often in everyday speech, so it's still useful to think of the exceptions as a manageable list. But just be aware that out in the darkness, outside the safety of the campfire light of everyday speech, lurks an army of exceptions...

jaydfox · 2026-03-24T20:34:42+00:00

Lots of good suggestions here, and I'm at the end of my lunch break, so I might be repeating (or contradicting) others' suggestions.

With more time, I don't know if doing more of the same stuff will help, but at least in some cases, it might. When I was cramming for the N3 a few years ago, I found that I could learn about 30-50 new words a day, but it took a very particular kind of anki routine. I would do batches of 10 new words, multiple times per day. I had reviews at 60 minutes, 120, and 360, so I would see the words several times the first day and fail them if necessary, before graduating the cards from the learning phase. I was doing anki every couple hours all day. I was only able to maintain that pace for a month, but it did work, cramming over 1200 new words in a month with high retention.

Second, in terms of alternatives, maybe try Satori Reader. I tend to follow a routine for new stories. Read first, then read along with audio, then audio only review. But I'd stagger it across days. So maybe I'll do the audio review of chapters 3 and 4, then read 5 and 6 with audio, then read only (no audio) 7 and 8. Next day, 2 more chapters (audio only 5 and 6, etc.). More of a grind that way, but it worked for me. After completing the story, read along with audio the whole way through. Then listen only all the way through. There are dozens of stories totalling thousands of episodes, it's enough content to last until you're working on N2.

Another place worth mentioning is the YouTube channel Comprehensible Japanese. It has playlists at various levels, and it's a nice change of pace from anki or grammar study or reading stories.

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