Albert Einstein's theory of relativity in words of four letters or less (1999)

Old-Web Layout vs Modern Design

• Many comments focus on the page’s full-width text: in multi-tab, wide-screen setups it feels hard to read without margins.
• Others argue it’s still far more readable than ad- and script-heavy modern sites, especially with no popups, cookie banners, or broken reader modes.
• Strong disagreement over optimal line length: some cite typography norms favoring narrow columns; others say empirical evidence for readability gains is weak or misrepresented.
• Workarounds are shared: reader mode, zooming, resizing windows, bookmarklets and extensions to cap line width, custom CSS, or userscripts.
• Discussion broadens to monitor aspect ratios (16:9 vs 4:3/3:2/square) and UI chrome placement (vertical tabs/taskbars) as ways to reclaim usable text space; mobile-first design is blamed for tall, narrow layouts.

Constrained Language and Comprehensibility

• Readers find the four-letter constraint clever but often confusing; tracking “new pull” vs “old pull” and similar renamings becomes cognitively heavy.
• Several see the essay as a demonstration that vocabulary is valuable: forbidding normal technical words forces longer, more intricate phrasing and can reduce clarity.
• Some suggest that teaching often works better by introducing proper terms (“gravity”, “acceleration”) and explaining them, rather than avoiding them.
• Comparisons are made to other constrained or simplified works: lipogrammatic novels, “Thing Explainer”, simple-English variants, one-syllable explanations, and similar talks/essays.

Relativity Explanations and Metaphors

• One commenter offers an alternate metaphor with mirrors, photons, and colored balls to connect distance, time, and speed; others criticize it as still essentially Galilean and potentially misleading.
• There is skepticism toward over-metaphorical teaching (“rubber sheets”, “balls”) for concepts like relativity, bitcoin, or ML; some prefer precise technical language over analogies.
• Another compact intuition is mentioned: thinking of all motion as at speed c through spacetime, trading off between spatial and temporal components.

LLMs, Wordplay, and Automation

• Multiple subthreads debate whether modern language models are good at constraints like “no letter e” or fixed word lengths.
• Observations: models operate on subword tokens and often violate constraints unless outputs are externally filtered or constrained by decoding algorithms.
• Links and tools are shared for constrained generation (regex/beam search/“antislop” samplers), along with criticism that LLMs still frequently fail at strict wordplay without such scaffolding.
• An auto-generated audio version of the essay is criticized for lossy paraphrasing and censoring, undermining the point of the original constraint.