I’ve said it before, but not for a while: My entire writing workflow is, and has been for years, made possible by pandoc. It’s pandoc that makes it possible for me to write everything in a text editor and then easily convert to html, docx, pdf — whatever I need.
I am pretty broken up about the death of my friend of nearly forty years, Jay Wood, but I tried to write about him.
Researchers from Arizona State University:
Our investigation, conducted through the controlled environment of DataAlchemy, reveals that the apparent reasoning prowess of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) is largely a brittle mirage. The findings across task, length, and format generalization experiments converge on a conclusion: CoT is not a mechanism for genuine logical inference but rather a sophisticated form of structured pattern matching, fundamentally bounded by the data distribution seen during training. When pushed even slightly beyond this distribution, its performance degrades significantly, exposing the superficial nature of the “reasoning” it produces.
I wrote about Richard Wilbur’s greatest poem and how a bit of it was (I think) inspired by his reading Dorothy L. Sayers.
2023 workflow: web search and then click through pages until you find the info
2024 workflow: Ask chatbot, copy and paste answer
2025 workflow: Ask chatbot, doubt its answer, web search and then click through pages until you find the info
Stopped reading: The Big Goodbye by Sam Wasson. It’s a very well-written book, but the people involved in the making of Chinatown — one of the truly great American movies — are so horrible that after a while I couldn’t stand to read about them any more. 📚
