[AnthonyMouse]

At which point we're back to, why is Microsoft acting like a government and treating their users like property of the crown instead of autonomous adult human beings who should be free to choose what software they want on their own PC?

[Barbing]

all five letters of that answer are in your username :)

[jstanley]

So that narrows it down to about 300 possibilities. https://gist.github.com/jes/bbdad4c6e54ffa120f62cd443ded8d8f

Plausible candidates include "asset", "enemy", "homes", "mates", "moats", "money", "nasty", "state", "stunt".

[Barbing]

Awesome

(467 on macOS Sequoia it seems)

[defrost]

Are you thinking of a single five letter word, two words of three and two letters, or an entire sentence that only uses 5 distinct letters?

Consider being less cryptic, for the sake of those with English as a fourth language.

[berdario]

(also a non-native speaker here, mildly annoyed by the obscure joke from GP)

Wordplay are exactly the kind of stuff that LLMs excel at, so I asked Gemini flash, and I got

> snarky play on words by suggesting that the answer to AnthonyMouse's question is "Money."

> Here is the breakdown of how they arrived at that:

> The Username: AnthonyMouse

> The Letters: The word "Money" can be formed using the letters found in M-o-n-t-h-o-n-y M-o-u-s-e

(Gemini's answer is actually longer, I just kept the interesting bit)

Amusingly, this answer exhibits a similar problem to the "how many r in raspberry" problem (it forgets how to spell correctly), since

AnthonyMouse != M-o-n-t-h-o-n-y M-o-u-s-e

But it seems that it got to the correct answer (or an incorrect but plausible :) ) despite that

[AnthonyMouse]

LLMs give you the boring (i.e. statistically probable) answer. You could probably get it to say "money" almost regardless of what the original question was because it's so generic. It might even say that for a name without all the right letters.

Let's save a tree and ask bash:

$ grep ^.....$ /usr/share/dict/words|grep -i ^[AnthonyMouse]*$

From the more than 300 possibilities we can then consider the context. We're talking about Microsoft here, and the problem suggests we're the sort of people who expect anagrams to have secret meaning, so we should prefer an answer implying some kind of conspiracy or kabbalistic nonsense. The obvious candidates are therefore mason and Satan. Between these, Satan would require reusing a letter the candidate set only has once, and one of the other words on the list was stone. We can form two five letter words if we're allowed to reuse letters and thereby get stone mason.

This is the most irrefutable possible proof that we're being pointed to a masonic conspiracy rather than Microsoft's usual popular association with the antichrist.

[Barbing]

>it's so generic.

Can only be one root of all evil, I suppose :)

[AnthonyMouse]

Come on now. We all know that time is money. It stands to reason that time is equally the root of all evil. They don't want you to know that this is actually the original method used to derive the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

[Barbing]

Thanks for doing the legwork :) my b

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47735828

[Barbing]

Sorry, that was yesterday's HN Wordle! (that's the New York Times-acquired wordplay game Wordle, quite the popular wordplay game--just joking that I created a word game of my own)

Useless reflection to ignore below (forewarned!)

I hesitated to post; in the end, the value of the comment was so low, I expected non-wordplay-fans to scroll past and lose nothing, so I left it in the hopes at least one person would find the answer themselves and be pleased about it.

thanks

[defrost]

No drama, I don't mind a puzzle or oblique reference. I'm also a grandparent and spend too much time on pointing out that what one person is thinking of isn't always the same as what another is, and that there's often yet another way of looking at a statement.

I liked your comment, I guessed the word, and had fun pointing out ambiguities at play.

[Barbing]

:D u gr8

[Cordiali]

I'm guessing they're thinking of the word 'money'.

[defrost]

yeah, but, .. Barrett Strong or Flying Lizards money?