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You can also have the case where the human reading the document thinks something in there is instructions and they are not. There's a well known anecdote suppo
by tzs 2mo ago
You can also have the case where the human reading the document thinks something in there is instructions and they are not.
There's a well known anecdote supposedly from the famous mathematician John Littlewood where he wrote a paper about some optimization problem and the last sentence was something like "Make X as small as possible".
The typesetter thought that was instructions to him, and so omitted that sentence from the paper and made every X as small as he could.
- kbelder 2mo agoThere's a similar story about J. Edgar Hoover scribbling "watch the borders" on a memo, which was intended to be a formatting comment, but was interpreted as instructions.