Top all-time · #3448
Dylan Black
Personal blog · maximumeffort.substack.comhistoryscienceculture
Dylan Black writes Maximum Effort, Minimum Reward, a personal blog at maximumeffort.substack.com about history, science and culture. Since 2022, 21 different Hacker News readers have linked it 40 times, most often “I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-18, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (13) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Dylan Black's posts for the 'tyranny of the wagon equation' idea on army movement limits, an experiment teaching ChatGPT to invent a language, and a take on whether a hot dog is a sandwich.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 13 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Some things that aren't worth doing are worth overdoing.
Most-linked posts?
- I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2022-12-04
- The tyranny of the wagon equation4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2022-09-06
- Reddit Mods and Scaling Problems in Social Control3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-02-08
- Pimp + Dik = Bumfit3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-03-23
- Anything Will Lase If You Hit It Hard Enough2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-03-15
What Hacker News says?
I actually wrote an article about this a couple weeks ago. https://maximumeffort.substack.com/p/is-a-hot-dog-a-sandwich... My contention is that the definition-first approach to defining sandwich is wrong, and that we should use PCA/unsupervised learning first to cluster sandwich-like objects into distinctive groups, which we can then name.
Comment linking /p/is-a-hot-dog-a-sandwich-defining?s=w
on “The Cube Rule (2017)”Submitted The tyranny of the wagon equation as a story · 243 points
HN discussionAdjunct: the tyranny of the wagon equation [1]. [1] https://maximumeffort.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-wago...
Comment linking /p/the-tyranny-of-the-wagon-equation
on “The tyranny of the rocket equation (2012)”Submitted How accurately calibrated is Jev? as a story · 55 points
HN discussion> Anything that isn't in the training data set will not be produced as an output. Thinking back to some of the examples I have seen, it feels as though this is not so. In particular, I'm thinking of a series where ChatGPT was prompted to invent a toy language with a simple grammar and then translate sentences between that language and English [1]. It seems implausible that the outputs produced here were in the train…
Comment linking /p/i-taught-chatgpt-to-invent-a-language
on “Numerical Precision Affects Mathematical Reasoning Capabilities of LLMs”Submitted I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language as a story · 40 points
HN discussionhttps://maximumeffort.substack.com/p/i-taught-chatgpt-to-inv... My bet would be that in ten years GPT would get pretty good at it, but eh, I dunno.
Comment linking /p/i-taught-chatgpt-to-invent-a-language
on “CheatGPT”Submitted Reddit Mods and Scaling Problems in Social Control as a story · 13 points
HN discussionLong before there was the tyranny of the rocket equation, there was also the tyranny of the wagon equation [1] that limited how far per-industrialized armies could move with wagons and animals (though the equation wasn't formalized). [1] https://maximumeffort.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-wago...
Comment linking /p/the-tyranny-of-the-wagon-equation
on “The South Pole Power Plant (2012)”Submitted The Great Kings of Assyria Reply to Spam Texts as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThere was an article featured the other day about how some communities on some subreddits become hostile when the community size gets too large [0] [1]. The article estimated that the critical size was Dunbar's number (150) raised to 2.5, which gives about 300k. Mastodon.lol looks to have been around 67k up until recently [2] (which gives an exponent of about 2.2). [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34713553 […
Comment linking /p/scaling-problems-in-social-control
on “Mastodon.lol will shut down on May 9, 2023”Submitted Pimp + Dik = Bumfit as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI would love for an RSS reader/HN/Reddit thing to exist. You could get you personal news on one side, and subs/communities whith two columns, one for news from sources curated by the admins/mods of the sub, and other column for news, links and text posts submittes by the users. You could only join by invitation, so as to make F2F social networks in self-hosted instances, or in a Discord-esque "server". I think the v…
Comment linking /p/scaling-problems-in-social-control
on “Confirmed: Twitter switched temporarily to rate limited mode”Submitted Dungeons and Dragons, Peasant Accelerators, and Inertial Confinement Fusion as a story · 2 points
HN discussionYou can make it invent a new language: https://maximumeffort.substack.com/p/i-taught-chatgpt-to-inv... I am sure you will continue to argue that this is still in line with everything-thats-ever-written prediction but my opinion is that at that point, it's a meaningless distinction. The human brain is also just a machine.
Comment linking /p/i-taught-chatgpt-to-invent-a-language
on “Telling GPT-4 you're scared or under pressure improves performance”Submitted Ancient Alien Linguistics, the Pyramids, and Radio Antennas as a story · 2 points
HN discussionhttps://maximumeffort.substack.com/ “Some things that aren’t worth doing are worth overdoing.” I write about physics, language, and history, or whatever interests me at the moment, with an overarching theme of spending way too much effort analyzing useless topics. Here’s some of my favorites: https://maximumeffort.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-wago... I derive an expression for number of donkeys needed to move a…
Comment linking /p/coming-soon
on “Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?”Submitted I Taught ChatGPT to Invent Its Own Language as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> When implementing an algorithm as a computer program by means of some kind of formal language (including those based on recursive functional programming paradigms), we must introduce specific data and code structures, their properties and interactions, as well as the set of operations we are allowed to perform on them, in order to represent the objects and relations that are relevant for our computation. In other…
Comment linking /p/i-taught-chatgpt-to-invent-a-language
on “How Organisms Come to Know the World: Fundamental Limits on AGI”Submitted Anything Will Lase If You Hit It Hard Enough as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThis counting system is fascinating! I wrote an article about this as well: https://maximumeffort.substack.com/p/a-brief-history-of-dik
Comment linking /p/a-brief-history-of-dik
on “Yan tan tethera pethera pimp – an old system for counting sheep”Submitted Anything Will Lase If You Hit It Hard Enough as a story · 1 points
HN discussionHere's one: https://szopa.medium.com/teaching-chatgpt-to-speak-my-sons-i... Here's another https://maximumeffort.substack.com/p/i-taught-chatgpt-to-inv... both found via google: https://www.google.com/search?q=using+chatgpt+to+invent+a+la...
Comment linking /p/i-taught-chatgpt-to-invent-a-language
on “The Problem with LLMs”Submitted A Measured Response to Bentham's Bulldog as a story · 1 points
HN discussion> You are conflating the counting problem with an inability to do anything with data it doesn't have. No, I'm answering your question, "Can you explain what you mean by "strictly a combination of its inputs"?" > For its ability to invent new languages and translate to and from them, see https://maximumeffort.substack.com/p/i-taught-chatgpt-to-inv ... It's not "inventing" new languages, it's pattern matching from the…
Comment linking /p/i-taught-chatgpt-to-inv
on “Show HN: GPT-4 Reverse Turing Test”Submitted AI-Generated Podcasts with NotebookLM as a story · 1 points
HN discussionYou are conflating the counting problem with an inability to do anything with data it doesn't have. For its ability to invent new languages and translate to and from them, see https://maximumeffort.substack.com/p/i-taught-chatgpt-to-inv... For the reason why LLMs can do this and why they don't necessarily need to have seen the words they read or use, you can look up "BPE tokenization" Could you give me an example th…
Comment linking /p/i-taught-chatgpt-to-invent-a-language
on “Show HN: GPT-4 Reverse Turing Test”Submitted Spoken Egyptian in Age of Mythology as a story · 1 points
HN discussionArticle is a little light on details with regards to why the author believes this effect exists. I have to imagine that their thinking is that application of force is limited to the distance you can travel one month instead of anything that would relate to the application of soft power (e.g. communication). Supplying a ground based force follows more of a square-cube law. You need to feed your horses to transport yo…
Comment linking /p/the-tyranny-of-the-wagon-equation
on “The size of an empire cannot be larger than 1 month of travel from capital”Submitted Daenerys Targaryen, Humanitarian as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
