Hi I'm the aforementioned Gary Robinson. Very sad to hear of Tim's passing. A really nice guy. And he wrote the following code for the SpamBayes project: https://www.linuxjournal.com/files/linuxjournal.com/linuxjou...

The reason that's especially interesting is that I was using an AI to write something that needed that functionality, and it spewed out that same Python code, which I recognized immediately. It was slightly modified with respect to naming and comments because, I assume, it was stored slightly imperfectly in the model's weights.

This concept of making the best use of any available data to infer useful probabilities seems like a crude form of some ideas behind current LLMs, BUT they (Peters, Graham, Robinson and Woodhead) were doing this work 20 years earlier.

I loved SpamBayes! It’s amazing how effective that was, all those years ago. I never learned Python, but I never had trouble using it to build small useful scripts. I never knew I had Tim to thank for both.