Jeff Duntemann's Contrapositive Diary

Well, in a couple of days I’m going to flip the switch and ask KDP to publish The Everything Machine, my first novel since 2021—if Complete Sentences really counts as a novel, of which I’m not entirely sure. I’ve already uploaded both ebook and paperback editions, and I’m only waiting for a final proof copy to get here. Amazon says tomorrow—and it’s been bang-on with delivery times for the first two proof copies I ordered across the past month or so.

I knew going in that there would be some changes to KDP. Amazon has sent me half a dozen emails reminding me that as of March 18, KDP will no longer accept mobi files. Mobi has been Kindle’s flagship file type probably as long as there’s been Kindle.I’ve seen no explanation, but after 3/18 only kpf (Kindle Create) epub, or docx files will be accepted. This doesn’t slow me down in the least. The Jutoh ebook editor that I use can export epubs as well as anything else in current use.

What surprised me more was the addition of spell-checking on uploaded ebooks. Out of the novel’s 130,000 words, the spellchecker called out 30-odd items as possible misspellings. Then it was courteous enough to send me an email listing them all. Out of those 30-odd, only four were actually misspelled words. The rest were character dialect or Jeff inventions, including metarhythmic, wubbled, birdoculars, bitspace, rectored, pinlight, fancraft, fauciam (Latin) recursor, bookspring, bitbags, gatherum (without omnium in front of it) and vuldt.

There are some asterisks: Although I invented the word “vuldt” when I was in high school, “Vuldt” is actually a Dutch surname. It must be a very rare surname, since none of the other surnames I used in the novel came up as misspellings. It didn’t like “steerskin,” even though it’s a reasonably common term.

Weirdest of all, it didn’t like the word “leptal.” Why? Because “leptal” isn’t a word. At best it’s the trademarked name of an antiseizure drug. But I was lead-pipe certain that “leptal” is the opposite of “dextral,” a real word meaning right-handed chirality. Alas, the real word for left-handed chirality is “sinistral.” (Recall the two old words from heraldry for right and left: “dexter” and “sinister.” ) As best I can tell, I was reaching for the word for left-handed chirality and inadvertently made up my own.

The spellchecker gave me the option of ignoring any of the highlighted words, which was handy. I fixed the typos in the epub and replaced “leptal” with “dextral,” because it didn’t matter which chirality I called out. The Hilbert stardrive has two chiral cables in its big ring, and which one I cited had no effect on the plot. Later, I fixed the typos in the paperback’s PDF. I uploaded corrected versions of both epub and PDF.

Now, we wait. Trust me, you’ll see the announcement here and a lot of other places when Amazon OKs the uploads and publishes them.

I told a joke on Twitter/X. Although it wasn’t much of a joke, it was subtle, or at least I thought so. Twitter has a new feature called Grok, which is an AI that (supposedly) explains posts. I wondered if Grok would get my joke. I might as well copy’n’paste the whole thing here:

Me:

The US government chooses two boll weevils every four years and leases them to the people. This makes the Feds the lessor of two weevils. And the weevils? They’re having a boll.

Grok:

The term "lessor of two weevils" is a play on the phrase "lesser of two evils," which refers to choosing the less unpleasant of two poor options. This phrase is commonly used in political discourse to describe situations where voters choose between two undesirable candidates.

The "boll weevil" in politics historically refers to conservative Democrats, particularly from the Southern United States, who supported some Republican policies during the Reagan administration. This term draws from the insect’s difficulty to eradicate, symbolizing the political resilience of these Democrats.

Jeff Duntemann’s post humorously suggests that in the U.S. political system, the government essentially leases out these conservative figures (boll weevils) to the public every election cycle, playing on the idea of political figures being somewhat unavoidable or persistent like pests.

It came to me as a silly play on words (“lessor of two weevils”) with the rest built around it to make it an actual joke. I wondered if most readers would understand the word “lessor,” which I don’t see much in my reading and don’t recall ever hearing it used in conversation.

Now, I myself didn’t know that “boll weevils” had once been used as a slur against conservative Democrats. I certainly haven’t read it with respect to modern politics. If I had, I would have created the joke another way. I simply meant to imply that the government chooses a couple of weevils every four years, and leases them to the public. We pay officials with our taxes during the time we “lease” them, but never own them. This makes the Feds a “lessor”.

So Grok didn’t get the joke as I intended it to be gotten, but read it as Reagan-era humor. So it goes. My opinion of AI hasn’t changed. It’s a massive pattern-matcher without any least cognizance that its explanations may simply be wrong.

I’ll play with Grok some more to see how well it “explains” additional posts, mine and others’.

Ok, this is probably illegitimate, but it’s one way to get access to literally all my DDJ “Structured Programming” columns, which appeared from 1989-1994. In fact, even I don’t have the files containing the text of many of those columns anymore, so I’m going to download them before circumstances force the poster to take them all down.

My column was distinctive due to a trick I shamelessly copied from Isaac Asimov’s long-running science columns in Fantasy and Science Fiction: Start with a funny but pertinent story. I picked one at random, and it turned out to be one of the better ones. Below is the opener for my January 1992 column, about event-driven programming, which I was studying at the time using Turbo Vision. (I was 39.) It’s just the intro, which lays out an experience I had that most of you have heard of. It really did happen, really. I couldn’t make anything like this up.

Chewing the Wrapper

Jeff Duntemann KG7JF

It was 1971, and I was a college sophomore at a beer bust put on by a fraternity hungry enough for pledges to admit anyone. I was dressed in a bright yellow sweater and bright purple bell-bottoms, trying very hard to grow my hair without realizing the ultimate futility of the effort. (Can you picture me with shoulder-length hair? Sigh. I can’t either.)

As often happens at parties, an impassioned discussion between two people begins to attract a crowd, and before long a considerable fraction of the party was watching me debate some half-sloshed prelaw type on the merits of bringing the United Nations into the Vietnam conflict. Or maybe it was the moral imperative of passing the E.R.A. I forget–because all the while I was half-watching a pretty young woman who was hanging on my every word, following my discourse with this look of unbelieving awe on her face.

Shall we say this was not an everyday occurrence, and her interest inspired me to even greater heights of eloquence. Was it my sweater? My sideburns? Or could it be that at least one girl in this five-and-dime college appreciated the power of brains over biceps?

The prelaw slurred some minor insult at me and slunk away, defeated. The crowd wandered off–but she hung on, eyes like sapphires riveted upon me, and in our single moment of intimacy she breathlessly revealed the secret of her admiration: "You know, you always talk in complete sentences!"

Chewing the Wrapper

My God! She had thrown away the gum and was chewing the wrapper! What about my passion? What about my social awareness? What about my obvious allegiance to the greater good of mankind? No matter–she went home with some football player, and I went home with my complete sentences. I guess in the long run we both got what we deserved. [Note well: By 1971 Carol and I were a very close couple, and I had no interest in the girl as a girl. Her remark just made for a good story.]

There’s a lesson here. Rarely are our creative efforts admired for what we as creators consider most admirable. Isaac Newton wanted to be remembered for his theology–calculus was just a throwaway. The seminal object-orientation of Smalltalk was ignored for 15 years because people were too busy ooh-ing and ahh-ing at its primordial GUI.

I expect this will happen more and more these days, as it ironically grows easier and easier to create a flashy user interface and positively murder to sort out an application’s internals. It’s humbling to keep in mind as you struggle to master event-driven programming under Turbo Vision or Windows: They’re not going to admire the intricate subtlety or robustness of your event loop. They’re going to admire the color coordination of your scroll bars.