Tootfinder

OpenAI says GPT-5 is its first "unified" AI model and combines the reasoning abilities of its o-series of models with the fast responses of its GPT series (Maxwell Zeff/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/07/openais-gpt-5-is-here/

OpenAI's GPT-5 is here | TechCrunch
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says GPT-5 is the "best model in the world," and aims to make ChatGPT more intuitive to use.

No Hail Mary here for Dak Prescott, yet https://insidethestar.com/no-hail-mary-here-for-dak-prescott-yet

Five new NFL rules to know heading into Week 1 of preseason: Here are the biggest changes for 2025

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/five-ne

Here is a poll about #GenAI since that's all we're talking about at the moment:
Do you believe that you can detect AI-generated text?
If so, what are your tips to detect it? I found this article which has a few suggestions :

5 Easy Ways To Tell If Written Content Came From Generative AI
Spread of generative AI content online since ChatGPT 3.5 launched in November 2022 is up 8,362%. Here's how to tell if content was written by an AI bot or not.

FYI, an important action to take! Leave a public comment opposing the repeal of the EPA Endangerment Finding. All the details are in this #standupforscience post on BlueSky:
https://bsky.app/profile…

@… I think that what you are describing here is aligned very well with what I'm trying to get across here:
https://mastodon.functional.computer/@

soldered ram is the absolute fucking WORST, and i'm really glad to see this: https://www.ifixit.com/News/95078/lpcamm2-memory-is-finally-here

LPCAMM2 Is Finally Here, and It’s a Big Deal
LPCAMM2 promises to be the thin, fast, efficient, and REPAIRABLE laptop memory standard of the future. Today, we take apart the first laptop to actually use it.

Police arrested over 40 people outside the Trump International Hotel in New York City
as hundreds gathered for a peaceful action led by Jewish leaders
calling for the end to Israel’s starvation and ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
Democracy Now! was at the demonstration and spoke to some of the protesters,
including Motaz Azaiza, renowned photojournalist from Gaza,
and Rabbi Ari Lev Fornari, who was arrested.
“We’re here to say, ‘Let Gaza live,’ to risk everyt…

“End the Starvation”: Jewish Rabbis & Allies Outside NY Trump Hotel Call for U.S. to Stop Arming Israel
Police arrested over 40 people outside the Trump International Hotel in New York City as hundreds gathered for a peaceful action led by Jewish leaders calling for the end to Israel’s starvation and ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Democracy Now! was at the demonstration and spoke to some of the protesters, including Motaz Azaiza, renowned photojournalist from Gaza, and Rabbi Ari Lev Fornari, who was arrested. “We’re here to say, 'Let Gaza live,' to risk everything to say, 'Never again,'” says …

🇺🇦 Auf radioeins läuft...
Kllo:
🎵 Still Here
#NowPlaying #Kllo
https://thumper1.bandcamp.com/track/kllo-still-here-thumper-remix
https://open.spotify.com/track/27E9SrEZkRdKKsEqWlYeQP

Oh hey, relevant
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-it-could-happen-here-30717896/episode/community-preparedness-basics-with-live-like-288156408/

Measuring Our Electrical Appliance Energy Consumption - Read how once we have bought a gadget, we measure what it uses, and work out how to use it efficiently. No vampires here please! - https://www.earth.org.uk/measuring-appliance-consumption.html

Measuring Our Electrical Appliance Energy Consumption
Read how once we have bought a gadget, we measure what it uses, and work out how to use it efficiently. No vampires here please!

The UK hates antisemitism so much that here they are arresting the daughter of a Holocaust survivor for protesting Israel’s ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people.
Wait, no that doesn’t make sense… so maybe they don’t hate antisemitism but they love fascism and genocide? I guess that makes more sense given their history of colonialism and slavery.
#UK

Logging in here or the first time in a while to wish @… a very heartily fuck you for inviting a racist to give a keynote at #RailsConf.
What a way to sully your legacy and that of the conference, putting a bad taste in everyone's mouth.
There's a German expression for this—a "Griff ins Klo" (reaching into the toilet and pulling something out).
I hope y'all step on Lego bricks daily.

> As currently constructed, AI is an oligarchy-enriching, worker-immiserating, energy-depleting, brain-rotting economic bubble in waiting. Democrats can get on the public’s side here.
I haven't even read the article but (considering how strongly I agree with the premises here) I'm mostly just sad about how clearly this highlights the financial capture of the DNC
---
Democrats Must Oppose the AI Industry - The American Prospect

Democrats Must Oppose the AI Industry
As currently constructed, AI is an oligarchy-enriching, worker-immiserating, energy-depleting, brain-rotting economic bubble in waiting. Democrats can get on the public’s side here.

Anyone with experience on here driving an #EV around the French Alps? Problems finding chargers? ABRP looks like it's a bit thin on the ground for fast chargers? Maybe ok for trickle charge? Trying to work out if I dare rent an EV or should l stick to ICE for now (which I really don't like..). #askFedi
EDIT: update - thanks all for your helpful info, looks like it's easily possible even in the french Alps. Looking forward to my summer holidays!

you'll pry my ✨ from my cold dead hands; it's not "an AI sparkle" any more it is "an AI em dash"
(you never see me use it here because i use it in a specific contextual manner)

So I've found my answer after maybe ~30 minutes of effort. First stop was the first search result on Startpage (https://millennialhawk.com/does-poop-have-calories/), which has some evidence of maybe-AI authorship but which is better than a lot of slop. It actually has real links & cites research, so I'll start by looking at the sources.
It claims near the top that poop contains 4.91 kcal per gram (note: 1 kcal = 1 Calorie = 1000 calories, which fact I could find/do trust despite the slop in that search). Now obviously, without a range or mention of an average, this isn't the whole picture, but maybe it's an average to start from? However, the citation link is to a study (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32235930/) which only included 27 people with impaired glucose tolerance and obesity. Might have the cited stat, but it's definitely not a broadly representative one if this is the source. The public abstract does not include the stat cited, and I don't want to pay for the article. I happen to be affiliated with a university library, so I could see if I have access that way, but it's a pain to do and not worth it for this study that I know is too specific. Also most people wouldn't have access that way.
Side note: this doing-the-research protect has the nice benefit of letting you see lots of cool stuff you wouldn't have otherwise. The abstract of this study is pretty cool and I learned a bit about gut microbiome changes from just reading the abstract.
My next move was to look among citations in this article to see if I could find something about calorie content of poop specifically. Luckily the article page had indicators for which citations were free to access. I ended up reading/skimming 2 more articles (a few more interesting facts about gut microbiomes were learned) before finding this article whose introduction has what I'm looking for: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3127503/
Here's the relevant paragraph:
"""
The alteration of the energy-balance equation, which is defined by the equilibrium of energy intake and energy expenditure (1–5), leads to weight gain. One less-extensively-studied component of the energy-balance equation is energy loss in stools and urine. Previous studies of healthy adults showed that ≈5% of ingested calories were lost in stools and urine (6). Individuals who consume high-fiber diets exhibit a higher fecal energy loss than individuals who consume low-fiber diets with an equivalent energy content (7, 8). Webb and Annis (9) studied stool energy loss in 4 lean and 4 obese individuals and showed a tendency to lower the fecal energy excretion in obese compared with lean study participants.
"""
And there's a good-enough answer if we do some math, along with links to more in-depth reading if we want them. A Mayo clinic calorie calculator suggests about 2250 Calories per day for me to maintain my weight, I think there's probably a lot of variation in that number, but 5% of that would be very roughly 100 Calories lost in poop per day, so maybe an extremely rough estimate for a range of humans might be 50-200 Calories per day. Interestingly, one of the AI slop pages I found asserted (without citation) 100-200 Calories per day, which kinda checks out. I had no way to trust that number though, and as we saw with the provenance of the 4.91 kcal/gram, it might not be good provenance.
To double-check, I visited this link from the paragraph above: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022316622169853?via=ihub
It's only a 6-person study, but just the abstract has numbers: ~250 kcal/day pooped on a low-fiber diet vs. ~400 kcal/day pooped on a high-fiber diet. That's with intakes of ~2100 and ~2350 kcal respectively, which is close to the number from which I estimated 100 kcal above, so maybe the first estimate from just the 5% number was a bit low.
Glad those numbers were in the abstract, since the full text is paywalled... It's possible this study was also done on some atypical patient group...
Just to come full circle, let's look at that 4.91 kcal/gram number again. A search suggests 14-16 ounces of poop per day is typical, with at least two sources around 14 ounces, or ~400 grams. (AI slop was strong here too, with one including a completely made up table of "studies" that was summarized as 100-200 grams/day). If we believe 400 grams/day of poop, then 4.91 kcal/gram would be almost 2000 kcal/day, which is very clearly ludicrous! So that number was likely some unrelated statistic regurgitated by the AI. I found that number in at least 3 of the slop pages I waded through in my initial search.

Still Here, Still Queer
Great Australian Pods Podcast Directory: #GreatAusPods

Here we go again… Ship attacked by the Houthi’s probably.
#yemen #houthis #geopolitics @…

Almost 4 months later, here it finally is:
uv: Making Python Local Workflows Fast and Boring in 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiBIjouDGuI
This is a big boi of almost 40 minutes, so I’ll need any help that I can get to make ppl watch it. Despite the blood and tears that went…

Yee-King !
https://bassmidstopsandtherest.substack.com/p/no-36-dr-matthew-yee-king

(spaghetti intensifies)
Cleanup time again i can barely move here

Tonka Hemingway: 'It's been fun coming out here competing' https://www.raiders.com/video/tonka-hemingway-raiders-training-camp-presser-08052025

CrowdStrike released its annual threat hunting report showing that we're in a new era of cyberattacks from sophisticated attackers who rely on clever social engineering, AI, and devices outside of IT's purview.
Check out my latest CSO piece for more details and tips on how defenders can better guard against these threats.
CrowdStrike: A new era of cyberthreats from sophisticated threat actors is here

CrowdStrike: A new era of cyberthreats from sophisticated threat actors is here
The company’s latest threat hunting report highlights the speed and AI sophistication of threat groups today, offering defenders strategies for keeping up.

Get your free download of “Ritual Escape” here >
(Your email, etc. is not revealed to me. I’m just glad you get to hear this cool suite of instrumental music.)
#DownloadCodes #FreeMusic

Stan Stewart - Ritüel Kaçış (Ritual Escape) | Free Bandcamp Codes

🤔 Surpringly but also unsurprisingly specific. "Singaporeans are avoiding the U.S. more than other Asian travelers. Here’s why" https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/05/singaporeans-are-avoiding-the-us-more-than-other-asian-travelers-.html

Singaporeans are avoiding the U.S. more than other Asian travelers. Here's why
A survey shows Singaporeans' views of the U.S. differed from those from Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines and Malaysia — often by a wide margin.

And here you are, get the Java Geek Weekly, special prior heatwave edition.
https://blog.frankel.ch/java-geek-weekly/96/

This year is the 45th anniversary of Pac-Man. Here's a great piece on how it changed gaming and the world https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20250730-how-pac-man-changed-gaming-and-the-world

'It's a reminder of childhood': How Pac-Man changed gaming - and the world
Celebrating his 45th birthday this year, the yellow eating machine revolutionised video games – and has even been used in science. What has made him and his adventures so addictive?

Get your Imposter Syndrome on, literally.
Many colors and styles. Sale prices right now.
$13 Regular, Fitted, & Classic Tees
$15 Tanks & V-Necks
$5 Mini Art Prints
Up to 50% Off Accessories
Everything Else On Sale! (sale prices as marked)
Sale prices end on August 12th at 5 PM CDT.
Get it here:

The Lean project is looking for someone to work on a documentation tool for math/technical communication. This is likely to be very influential, so a chance for someone with the right skills to have great impact. See the announcement here:
https://

Public view of Lean | Zulip team chat
Browse the publicly accessible channels in Lean without logging in.

Oh, here's some stories from Mark Hamill you've never heard before! 😁
▶️ Mark Hamill on Hitchhiking to Auditions, Being a Teen Heartthrob & Meeting George Harrison - Jimmy Kimmel
https://youtube.com/watch?v=XiVvNTjj-cs&si=1jcr6TCHRe33FnjU
…

Tried getting a timelapse of the sunrise this morning. Some proper long lens would work great here, too bad my longest lens is still a wide-angle lens. 😂

We are a stupid species.... Here is my county government trying to create a Rube Goldberg class blockchain based system to deal with a problem that could be solved by printed lists of paper
The crypto/blockchain mindset certainly contains a big element of "if all you have is a hammer then everything looks like a nail".
(By-the-way, our county government is dumb in other dimensions - for year the emergency response command center was in a basement next to, and and *below…

Santa Cruz County quietly abandons blockchain program once touted as bleeding edge
Santa Cruz County has shelved its ambitious blockchain wallet project after two years, citing complexity and low public adoption. Officials now plan to pursue simpler digital tools they say are better suited to resident needs.

Katie Wilson, ahead in early results in Seattle's primary for mayor, emphasized housing in her platform.
But not the SF YIMBY vision of upzoning/market-rate only while slashing affordable housing funds. SOCIAL housing with major public investment.
Who will run for SF supervisor next year on that?
https://www.w…

"here's a dialogue I had with Claude" is always half-way between
- man, I was so stoned last night, and, you know, have you wondered about [the bleeding obvious considered profound]..."
and
- "I had the weirdest dream; I was [and then, and then, and, I can't quite remember, but then]..."

I took the train here to avoid paying for parking, I used one of the giveaway tickets that I was given, and I am frugal with food and drink. Now, I just need to find the right band to listen to. #CheapDayOut

Since I post #WristCheck's so often here, my daughter wanted to get in on the action.
feedback please. 😉

my current idea is to just retake the word conspiracy and devalue it and just use it for every day facts.
Here's a conspiracy they don't want you to know and they aren't talking about in the media: Sales tax in NJ is 6.625%. USE THIS INFORMATION WISELY!

Thanks @… for hosting a PeerTube instance for all the Fedicon videos @…
My video is up here

Here's something that can't be enshitified, as it started out as shit already, yet they still try to do it.
https://mstdn.social/@TechCrunch/114988000017885467

TechCrunch (@TechCrunch@mstdn.social)
Attached: 1 image Elon Musk says X plans to introduce ads in Grok’s responses https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/07/elon-musk-says-x-plans-to-introduce-ads-in-groks-responses/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon

We stayed at #TheSocialHub #Florence.
It was one of the better #hotel experiences here in Italy. The young vibe as well as the services offered are really cool. Price was very competitive. I'll defini…

Even here in Norway, so-called freedom is an illusion, I'm still bound to a boss and forced to sell my labor just to keep a roof over my head.
Real liberty can't exist while our lives are dictated by wage slavery and the demands of the capitalist system!
#AntiCapitalism #Anarchism

How YouTube prepared to stream, for free, the Brazil NFL game globally: it partnered with NBC for production, ran multiple tests, and set up backup plans (Janko Roettgers/Lowpass)
https://www.lowpass.cc/p/youtube-nfl-livestream-bts-brazil-tech

The story behind YouTube’s NFL livestream
YouTube is for the first time streaming an NFL game for free to everyone. Here's how the service is pulling it off, from fiber links to hardware transcoders.

I bet I'm the only person in #Japan who learned about what #OnePiece is not from anyone here, but from following news about #Indonesia and that symbol being used as a sign of protest against

Prabowo’s Indonesia draws opposition via cartoon pirates | Lowy Institute
Pop culture resistance can become a powerful form of resistance – especially when authorities overreact.

Pretty hefty snail sex over here this morning from two leopard slugs. The pale stuff hanging out below are both their reproductive organs emerging from their heads 😳
#uckermark #slug #slugs

Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Code.org, IBM, and other companies pledged new commitments for AI in education as part of a White House event hosted by Melania Trump (Ashley Gold/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/09/04/melania-trump-ai-in-education-the-robots-ar…

Melania on AI in education: "The robots are here"
The White House sees AI in K-12 education as a key part of ensuring American competitiveness in the field.

Jeff Moss on DEF CON and its shadow power https://therecord.media/jeff-moss-def-con-click-here

Up here near Lillehammer, moonrise tonight is 20:01, and the blood moon should last until 20:11. But, unfortunately, a cloud bank is obscuring the eastern horizon and thus preventing us from seeing the red moon rising. :(

🇺🇦 Auf radioeins läuft...
Depeche Mode:
🎵 Here Is The House
#NowPlaying #DepecheMode
https://colortheory.bandcamp.com/track/here-is-the-house
https://open.spotify.com/track/5BepFANwD9If9EkO86JTS4

Are other academic journals seeing an uptick in obvious spam submissions? Over the past couple of years, we've received an increasing number of obviously irrelevant submissions - articles that have nothing to do with our focus. What's happening here? People trying to check some box for a performance review?
#academia

Here's Bob B, our unofficial barn cat who volunteered almost a year after an unsuccessful attempt to get him to live indoor/outdoors who's a bit harder to get pictures of than our others
#cats #photo #photography

Here is my latest Human Meme podcast episode!
#language

Following a discussion on reddit of all places, here's a poll. Please spread far and wide because [garbled audio, static, unintelligible noises]
The question is: do you normally listen to and enjoy audiobooks?
Also, this is what I mean by "inner monologue" (sorry it's not WP but that page terrifies me)

How Inner Monologues Work, and Who Has Them
Inner monologues can represent a rich experience for some, as long as they don’t get out of hand.

"What's slimy, green and flourishing thanks to climate change?"
#Canada #Climate #ClimateChange

What's slimy, green and flourishing thanks to climate change? | CBC News
Canada's lakes are changing because of warming caused by the burning of fossil fuels. Here's why scientists are concerned.

This month's digest/newsletter is on the way to the age-verified kosher normal people who signed up for it in their email.
The rest of you unverified anarchists can use your VPN and access it here.
#digest #newsletter

I normally don't use ChatGPT, but I asked him to generate a poster for the "Alien v Predator II" movie I posted about recently. Here is the prompt:
"Dear CharGPT, could you please create a fake movie poster for me?
At the top, the movie title "Alien v. Predator"
In the middle, at left the head of Elon Musk in profile, facing right, grimacing, with bared fangs, drooling. 🧵‍>

Kind of hazy day here and the camera isn't close, but the new #CanyonFire in Ventura County has established itself pretty quickly.
https://cameras.alertcalifornia.org/?p

“A returns deal with France that makes access to safety in the UK — even for those with close family or connections here — dependent on someone else risking their life to cross the Channel only cements the role of smugglers in how people fleeing war and persecution must seek asylum in the UK."
'A grubby trade in human lives' | Morning Star
…

Whoa, at first I feared that an obnoxious cloud bank in the wrong azimuth over #Bochum, Germany, would spoil the Total #LunarEclipse but with minutes to spare it all worked out: here are three quick samples around the end of #totality, with more in https://www.facebook.com/dan.fischer.393/posts/pfbid02jj4HkLbc8jvxo1gLaeBiZrr5KtQpC9QmXt5crLCFLup6GYfRjRMAjan9pKxU8mLal - longer series to follow.

Abuse in Buddhism: The Law of Silence https://openbuddhism.org/library/videos/2022/elodie-emery-wandrille-lanos-present-buddhism-the-unspeakable-truth/

Because I'm setting up materials again, and my blog on "Taming Brightspace for Linux" is serving as an aide-memoire, here are some details on using BrightSpace from Linux, bypassing as much as possible of its user interface by using webdav: https://brendanhalpin.net/blog/posts/wo…

HUD is working on work requirements and time limits for help. These may be unlawful - HUD's put caps on benefits before
Should federal rental aid come with a time limit? Here's how it works in one place : NPR
https://www.npr.org/2025/06/07/nx-s1-5425500/federal-rental-aid-time-limit-hud-delaware-housing-authority

Let me introduce you to Nera, the youngest of three siblings. They all turned 1 year old on May 31st. Their mother one day in late April arrived here homeless (we asked intensively throughout the neighbourhood) and already pregnant. All four of them are alive and healthy and still live in our property. #caturday

I am ignorant on what it is to be trans or a woman or a world-class athlete, but I THINK the problem here is a doomed project of representing a multidimensional continuously variable attribute with a single Boolean https://infosec.exchange/@JessTheUnstill/114639211101368863

Here's what concerns Hall of Famer Dan Marino about Aaron Rodgers' new deal with Steelers

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/heres-w

“Innovation” https://mastodon.social/@appleinsider/114802683878143883

imagine living in, presumably, america, having vanguard manage your future retirement funds, then logging into minecraft only to recreate vanguard
there's a political statement here somewhere but i can't find it because i'm too busy being amused
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imnZddHnbwY

Chagas disease, long considered only a threat abroad, is established in California and the Southern U.S.
“The disease is definitely underdiagnosed,” said Hernandez, the Kaiser cardiologist.
“If we screened for it and caught it early, most patients could be cured.
The problem is we don’t, and people end up dying or requiring terrifically expensive care,” including organ transplants and surgery.

Chagas disease: The deadly disease you've never heard of is here
Chagas disease is deadly, pervasive and more prevalent in the U.S. than you'd think. It's not just brought here by people from nations where the disease is endemic, but by bloodsucking kissing bugs native to the U.S. And it may be sickening far more people than we know.

@… Here we go! https://www.kingsplace.co.uk/whats-on/words/online-wolf-359-the-10-year-reunion/

I biked on a street similar to this in Vancouver! Could tell from the younger trees on the outside that the cycle track was a recent addition. We can do this here too
https://mastodon.online/@BrentToderian/114808060180884076

Brent Toderian (@BrentToderian@mastodon.online)
Attached: 1 image This is really important. The main thing that makes it hard to achieve integrated nature and green in cities isn’t density of buildings or density of people — it's density of cars. And the more well-designed and integrated density of people & buildings you achieve, the fewer cars you need or want.

If you're curious about webrings, @… tipped me off to this large, essentially comprehensive list of them, here: https://brisray.com/web/webring-list.htm. This s…

My wife calls el-presidente "the coin operated president". And to prove the point, here is an example of our coin-in-the-slot president in action, an action that shows how a small "donation" can result in a $billion payout of taxpayer money.
https://www.ny…

Trump Delayed a Medicare Change After Health Companies’ Donations
The president posted talking points provided by one firm that donated millions, and his administration delayed a change on coverage of pricey bandages that could have hurt the company.

Media ethics experts, New York Times contributors, and others say the way that the NYT presented its Zohran Mamdani article raises significant ethical concerns (Liam Scott/Columbia Journalism Review)
https://www.cjr.org/news/times-mamdani-college-a…

Times Mamdani Article Using Hacked Documents from White Supremacist Draws Outcry
“What matters most here is whether the information was true and factual,” the Times’ Patrick Healy told CJR.

NFL bans teams from providing smelling salts, but here's how players can still use them in games

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/nfl-ban

Both @… and @… are being displaced yet again and forced to move South as Israel continues its genocide and wholesale destruction of Gaza with the complicity of our inhumane governments in the West.
Please keep them in your th…

Gaza Verified
I’ve personally had video conversations on Signal with the people from Gaza whose Mastodon accounts on the fediverse are listed here and I verify that their accounts are genuine. – Aral Balkan

Alt text - Why It's Important
- please use #AltText -
https://publish.obsidian.md/debbieohi/alt-text

Alt text - Why It's Important - Debbie Ridpath Ohi - Obsidian Publish
This page helps explain why it's important to use alt text when posting images on Bluesky, best practices, and tips. Cover-WhyUseAltText-v2-flat-800.jpg INDEX Here are just some of the ways alt-text …

Here We Goooo: Can Dak Prescott, Jake Ferguson re-establish connection? https://www.dallascowboys.com/news/here-we-goooo-can-dak-prescott-jake-ferguson-re-establish-connection

Should we teach vibe coding? Here's why not.
Should AI coding be taught in undergrad CS education?
1/2
I teach undergraduate computer science labs, including for intro and more-advanced core courses. I don't publish (non-negligible) scholarly work in the area, but I've got years of craft expertise in course design, and I do follow the academic literature to some degree. In other words, In not the world's leading expert, but I have spent a lot of time thinking about course design, and consider myself competent at it, with plenty of direct experience in what knowledge & skills I can expect from students as they move through the curriculum.
I'm also strongly against most uses of what's called "AI" these days (specifically, generative deep neutral networks as supplied by our current cadre of techbro). There are a surprising number of completely orthogonal reasons to oppose the use of these systems, and a very limited number of reasonable exceptions (overcoming accessibility barriers is an example). On the grounds of environmental and digital-commons-pollution costs alone, using specifically the largest/newest models is unethical in most cases.
But as any good teacher should, I constantly question these evaluations, because I worry about the impact on my students should I eschew teaching relevant tech for bad reasons (and even for his reasons). I also want to make my reasoning clear to students, who should absolutely question me on this. That inspired me to ask a simple question: ignoring for one moment the ethical objections (which we shouldn't, of course; they're very stark), at what level in the CS major could I expect to teach a course about programming with AI assistance, and expect students to succeed at a more technically demanding final project than a course at the same level where students were banned from using AI? In other words, at what level would I expect students to actually benefit from AI coding "assistance?"
To be clear, I'm assuming that students aren't using AI in other aspects of coursework: the topic of using AI to "help you study" is a separate one (TL;DR it's gross value is not negative, but it's mostly not worth the harm to your metacognitive abilities, which AI-induced changes to the digital commons are making more important than ever).
So what's my answer to this question?
If I'm being incredibly optimistic, senior year. Slightly less optimistic, second year of a masters program. Realistic? Maybe never.
The interesting bit for you-the-reader is: why is this my answer? (Especially given that students would probably self-report significant gains at lower levels.) To start with, [this paper where experienced developers thought that AI assistance sped up their work on real tasks when in fact it slowed it down] (https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089) is informative. There are a lot of differences in task between experienced devs solving real bugs and students working on a class project, but it's important to understand that we shouldn't have a baseline expectation that AI coding "assistants" will speed things up in the best of circumstances, and we shouldn't trust self-reports of productivity (or the AI hype machine in general).
Now we might imagine that coding assistants will be better at helping with a student project than at helping with fixing bugs in open-source software, since it's a much easier task. For many programming assignments that have a fixed answer, we know that many AI assistants can just spit out a solution based on prompting them with the problem description (there's another elephant in the room here to do with learning outcomes regardless of project success, but we'll ignore this over too, my focus here is on project complexity reach, not learning outcomes). My question is about more open-ended projects, not assignments with an expected answer. Here's a second study (by one of my colleagues) about novices using AI assistance for programming tasks. It showcases how difficult it is to use AI tools well, and some of these stumbling blocks that novices in particular face.
But what about intermediate students? Might there be some level where the AI is helpful because the task is still relatively simple and the students are good enough to handle it? The problem with this is that as task complexity increases, so does the likelihood of the AI generating (or copying) code that uses more complex constructs which a student doesn't understand. Let's say I have second year students writing interactive websites with JavaScript. Without a lot of care that those students don't know how to deploy, the AI is likely to suggest code that depends on several different frameworks, from React to JQuery, without actually setting up or including those frameworks, and of course three students would be way out of their depth trying to do that. This is a general problem: each programming class carefully limits the specific code frameworks and constructs it expects students to know based on the material it covers. There is no feasible way to limit an AI assistant to a fixed set of constructs or frameworks, using current designs. There are alternate designs where this would be possible (like AI search through adaptation from a controlled library of snippets) but those would be entirely different tools.
So what happens on a sizeable class project where the AI has dropped in buggy code, especially if it uses code constructs the students don't understand? Best case, they understand that they don't understand and re-prompt, or ask for help from an instructor or TA quickly who helps them get rid of the stuff they don't understand and re-prompt or manually add stuff they do. Average case: they waste several hours and/or sweep the bugs partly under the rug, resulting in a project with significant defects. Students in their second and even third years of a CS major still have a lot to learn about debugging, and usually have significant gaps in their knowledge of even their most comfortable programming language. I do think regardless of AI we as teachers need to get better at teaching debugging skills, but the knowledge gaps are inevitable because there's just too much to know. In Python, for example, the LLM is going to spit out yields, async functions, try/finally, maybe even something like a while/else, or with recent training data, the walrus operator. I can't expect even a fraction of 3rd year students who have worked with Python since their first year to know about all these things, and based on how students approach projects where they have studied all the relevant constructs but have forgotten some, I'm not optimistic seeing these things will magically become learning opportunities. Student projects are better off working with a limited subset of full programming languages that the students have actually learned, and using AI coding assistants as currently designed makes this impossible. Beyond that, even when the "assistant" just introduces bugs using syntax the students understand, even through their 4th year many students struggle to understand the operation of moderately complex code they've written themselves, let alone written by someone else. Having access to an AI that will confidently offer incorrect explanations for bugs will make this worse.
To be sure a small minority of students will be able to overcome these problems, but that minority is the group that has a good grasp of the fundamentals and has broadened their knowledge through self-study, which earlier AI-reliant classes would make less likely to happen. In any case, I care about the average student, since we already have plenty of stuff about our institutions that makes life easier for a favored few while being worse for the average student (note that our construction of that favored few as the "good" students is a large part of this problem).
To summarize: because AI assistants introduce excess code complexity and difficult-to-debug bugs, they'll slow down rather than speed up project progress for the average student on moderately complex projects. On a fixed deadline, they'll result in worse projects, or necessitate less ambitious project scoping to ensure adequate completion, and I expect this remains broadly true through 4-6 years of study in most programs (don't take this as an endorsement of AI "assistants" for masters students; we've ignored a lot of other problems along the way).
There's a related problem: solving open-ended project assignments well ultimately depends on deeply understanding the problem, and AI "assistants" allow students to put a lot of code in their file without spending much time thinking about the problem or building an understanding of it. This is awful for learning outcomes, but also bad for project success. Getting students to see the value of thinking deeply about a problem is a thorny pedagogical puzzle at the best of times, and allowing the use of AI "assistants" makes the problem much much worse. This is another area I hope to see (or even drive) pedagogical improvement in, for what it's worth.
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I run a gloriously dysfunctional website over at Codeberg, where the HTML cries itself to sleep every night:
You can check it out here: #WebsiteDevelopment…

NEW ART ALERT!
Hey Garden State Social! Thanks to everyone on the contributing to the cost of running the server I have commissioned more art for the server.
This new piece is by @… and be sure to boost and give them some huge thanks for this work!
This will be our new server header image and can be found on our about page here:

A look at DeepSeek's impact on the AI model race and market share landscape, roughly 150 days after DeepSeek R1 shook stock markets and the Western AI world (SemiAnalysis)
https://semianalysis.com/2025/07/03/deepseek-debrief-128-days-later/

DeepSeek Debrief: >128 Days Later 
SemiAnalysis is hiring an analyst in New York City for Core Research, our world class research product for the finance industry. Please apply here It’s been a bit over 150 days since the launc…

psst
you! yes, you
would you like to see a piece of fantastic investigative journalism, uncovering an international tax fraud scheme (in minecraft)?
do you want to see how some kids invented CDOs-but-worse and how it ended?
here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQLm-QFzrxA

If the goal truly is to
“make America healthy,”
why are HHS life-saving programs for babies and young children being eliminated?
Here are just two examples,
of small and inexpensive live-saving programs being cut or gutted.
⭐️At a time when sudden unexpected infant deaths are on the rise,
the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has quietly pulled funding for the "Safe to Sleep" campaign,
a program that cut deaths from Sudden Infant Death S…

Just updated Gaza Verified to reflect that @… and I are running it together now :)
https://gaza-verified.org/
Thank you, Joy, for doing this with me in the middle of eve…

Gaza Verified
I’ve personally had video conversations on Signal with the people from Gaza whose Mastodon accounts on the fediverse are listed here and I verify that their accounts are genuine. – Aral Balkan

What is Aaron Rodgers' jersey number with Steelers? Here's what Super Bowl-winning QB will wear this fall

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/new…

Valencia Street desperately needs wider sidewalks: they're absurdly substandard for the pedestrian traffic they carry. But there’s no plan for that, so the city is about to plant a new tree here that will then be an obstacle in the middle of the sidewalk when finally widened 🫠

Here We Goooo: Can Dak Prescott, Jake Ferguson re-establish connection? https://www.dallascowboys.com/news/here-we-goooo-can-dak-prescott-jake-ferguson-re-establish-connection

A June ranking of the top 25 local public radio/TV websites in the US based on traffic shows MPR at the top, followed by LAist and Oregon Public Broadcasting (Joshua Benton/Nieman Lab)
https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/08/these-pu

These public radio stations have built online audiences that’ll help them survive federal cuts
They may have been born on the airwaves, but these public media stations compete on the web as well. Here's our first monthly ranking of the top 25 local public media websites in the United States.

Wanted to find out how many calories are in poop to make a nice fat-positive post on here, but after wading through 5 separate results from the top to the bottom of the first page of results, every single one of them showed signs of AI authorship, so none of the info was trustworthy (several contradicted each other or themselves). The one article that cited legit sources didn't include a straightforward answer to the question. Of course, I could dig past the first page, or look through the cited sources do some math myself, and that's not even that hard to do. But 10 years ago, a trustworthy answer would have been among the first 5 search results. When we say #AI is destroying the digital commons, this is what we mean.
Gonna go find some academic papers to answer this and report back.

Why the Eagles still haven't received their Super Bowl rings with training camp almost here

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/why-the

The bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee unanimously found in 2020 that the ICA was “coherent and well constructed”
-- and reconfirmed that Russia “engaged in an aggressive, multi-faceted effort to influence” the 2016 election in Trump’s favor.
Durham’s work is particularly instructive here.
Durham was a Trump U.S. attorney whom Attorney General William Barr tasked with leading an investigation into the origins of the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane probe into alleged Trump-…

Bondi’s Obama Grand Jury: The Authoritarian Moment We’ve All Feared
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Fading Philly? If Eagles fall short in bid to repeat as Super Bowl champs, here are 5 reasons why

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/fading-

Bills GM Brandon Beane speaks on James Cook contract stalemate, hold in: 'I wish we weren't here'

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/bills-g