alt Hacker NewsAmong his various other works, it was Tim Peters along with Gary Robinson who turned pg's "A Plan for Spam" essay into the successful SpamBayes program: https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6467 .
(EDIT: Robert Woodhead apparently shares in the credit, too: https://www.ceas.cc/papers-2004/136.pdf https://ceas.cc/papers-2004.html . Apparently Rob Hooft was another implementor? I can't find a good source for that though.)
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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.
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.