Tootfinder

Melania Trump says she hopes to become the First Lady of Technology as she leads the Presidential AI Challenge to inspire children and teachers to embrace AI (Miranda Devine/New York Post)
https://nypost.com/2025/08/25/opinion/

Exclusive | First lady Melania Trump will head effort to teach next generation about AI
First lady Melania Trump will lead the Presidential Artificial Intelligence Challenge to inspire children and teachers to embrace AI technology and help accelerate innovation in the field.

What They Forgot to Teach You About R: #rstats

On several input channels I’m seeing rage about the new Android Phone and Contacts apps, big redesigns with no warning. If there are people for whom you provide tech support, e.g. elderly relatives, you'd better get in touch and teach them how to answer a phone call, because tapping the green button doesn’t work any more. Also it’s hard to find call history, and more.
Some Product Manager needed a promotion. As usual, when doing cost/benefit analysis, the pain inflicted on users w…

The answer to one of the most universal questions in computing education: "Which Programming Language Should I Teach First?" It's not what you're expecting. At all.
https://parentheticallyspeaking.org/articles/first-language-wrong-question/…

Which Programming Language Should I Teach First?
Parenthetically Speaking: Articles by Shriram Krishnamurthi

What Wrongfully Imprisoned Amanda Knox Can Teach Us About Forgiveness https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/what_wrongfully_imprisoned_amanda_knox_can_teach_us_about_forgiveness

What Wrongfully Imprisoned Amanda Knox Can Teach Us About Forgiveness
After serving jail time for a murder she didn't commit, Amanda Knox went on a journey of compassion, healing, and forgiveness.

@… I would prefer to have a lot more time to teach these! I didn’t want people to go away thinking that TDD cannot be used in real-world scenarios.

I do sometimes use the trick of pretending to be looking at my phone while crossing the street to make drivers more likely to stop
One time though I had one play chicken accelerating at me. I shouted stop and they heckled me through their window saying they did it to teach me a lesson. Lesson learned: cars suck

Event-Based Visual Teach-and-Repeat via Fast Fourier-Domain Cross-Correlation
Gokul B. Nair, Alejandro Fontan, Michael Milford, Tobias Fischer
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.17287 h…

Event-Based Visual Teach-and-Repeat via Fast Fourier-Domain Cross-Correlation
Visual teach-and-repeat navigation enables robots to autonomously traverse previously demonstrated paths by comparing current sensory input with recorded trajectories. However, conventional frame-based cameras fundamentally limit system responsiveness: their fixed frame rates (typically 30-60 Hz) create inherent latency between environmental changes and control responses. Here we present the first event-camera-based visual teach-and-repeat system. To achieve this, we develop a frequency-domain …

From an interview I heard with May Mailman (the lawyer behind President Trump’s battles with Harvard and Columbia), I got the impression that American universities without teachers and professors who teach creationism and climate scepticism (and other crackpottery) are not sufficiently "balanced" and "merit based".
Proper science is apparently "leftist".

Replaced article(s) found for cs.CL. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.CL/new
[1/5]:
- TALEC: Teach Your LLM to Evaluate in Specific Domain with In-house Criteria by Criteria Division ...
Kaiqi Zhang, Shuai Yuan, Honghan Zhao

Cyber Security Educational Games for Children: A Systematic Literature Review
Temesgen Kitaw Damenu, \.Inci Zaim G\"okbay, Alexandra Covaci, Shujun Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.17414

Cyber Security Educational Games for Children: A Systematic Literature Review
Educational games have been widely used to teach children about cyber security. This systematic literature review reveals evidence of positive learning outcomes, after analysing 91 such games reported in 68 papers published between 2010 and 2024. However, critical gaps have also been identified regarding the design processes and the methodological rigour, including lack of systematic design, misalignment between proposed and achieved learning outcomes, rare use of control groups, limited discus…

So you teach your kids to respect revealed truths and not question authority and then wonder how sociopaths and malignant narcissists come to power and why you find yourself living under the yoke of fascism?
#microNonfiction

"If you only ever move forward, you’ll end up crunched in a corner with nowhere else to go." -- more @ #activism

The Backward Step
why progress isn't always forward, and what dance, tides, and breath can teach us about real growth

On yesterday's Teaching, Learning, and Everything Else podcast, I talked about AI's impact on the environment and classrooms—and argued that it isn’t reinventing education so much as exposing bad habits we should’ve let go years ago https://www.link…

Ryan Walters’ Plan To Teach OK Students Election And COVID Conspiracies Put On Hold By State Supreme Court | Techdirt
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/09/19/ryan-walters-plan-to-teach-ok-students-election-and-covid-conspiracies-put-on-hold-by-state-supreme-court/

》give man stew he eat one day. teach man to gay son he stew forever

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #Roadhouse
The New Seekers:
🎵 I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing (In Perfect Harmony)
#TheNewSeekers
https://open.spotify.com/track/42LmCuHr4XkXHTDqmVlNkB

Learning to Use AI for Learning: How Can We Effectively Teach and Measure Prompting Literacy for K-12 Students?
Ruiwei Xiao, Xinying Hou, Ying-Jui Tseng, Hsuan Nieu, Guanze Liao, John Stamper, Kenneth R. Koedinger
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13962

Learning to Use AI for Learning: How Can We Effectively Teach and Measure Prompting Literacy for K-12 Students?
As Artificial Intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly integrated into daily life, there is a growing need to equip the next generation with the ability to apply, interact with, evaluate, and collaborate with AI systems responsibly. Prior research highlights the urgent demand from K-12 educators to teach students the ethical and effective use of AI for learning. To address this need, we designed an Large-Language Model (LLM)-based module to teach prompting literacy. This includes scenario-based d…

Excellent article by Ibrahim Diallo that serves as a quick overview of image formats for the web! ^^
What Learning React Won't Teach You: Image Formats
https://idiallo.com/blog/react-and-image-format?utm_source=tldrwebdev

War veterans teach civilians how to handle weapons #shorts: https://benborges.xyz/2025/09/06/war-veterans-teach-civilians-how.html

General Intuition, which trains AI agents in spatial reasoning using Medal.tv game clips, raised a $133.7M seed led by Khosla Ventures and General Catalyst (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/16/gene

General Intuition lands $134M seed to teach agents spatial reasoning using video game clips | TechCrunch
Late last year, OpenAI reportedly tried to buy Medal and its vast trove of video game data for $500M. Today, the company spun out a frontier research lab that's using that data to build AI agents that understand how they move through space and time, a concept called spatial-temporal reasoning.

I read this article about inattention while eating my breakfast at work and dropped sardine paté down my top and trousers in the process, the very definition of irony. I usually get quite grubby at work so I got away with it but really.
‘We’re exhausted – but not from doing too much’: can this woman help us survive the age of distraction? | Health & wellbeing | The Guardian

What an idiot. There is no "antifa" organization.
As I said before, "antifa" was what schools used to teach (since public schools were created) as good citizenship.
#trump #antifa #uspol

My sister's ford is very broken and she has deemed it to be unreparable, but she still owes money on it so she can't get rid of it. It just sits in my parents' backyard. I'm thinking about trying to use it to teach my nephew how to fix a car.

How to Teach Large Multimodal Models New Skills
Zhen Zhu, Yiming Gong, Yao Xiao, Yaoyao Liu, Derek Hoiem
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08564 https://arxiv.org…

How to Teach Large Multimodal Models New Skills
How can we teach large multimodal models (LMMs) new skills without erasing prior abilities? We study sequential fine-tuning on five target skills while monitoring general ability on eight held-out benchmarks across three model families. We observe that apparent "forgetting" on held-out tasks after narrow fine-tuning can partly recover at later stages. We trace this behavior to a measurable shift in the output token distribution, manifested through a simple counting-bias probe that co-varies wit…

'Accept that quality matters more than velocity.
Measure actual resource usage, not features shipped.
Make efficiency a promotion criterion. Reward engineers who reduce resource usage. Penalize those who increase it without a corresponding value.
Stop hiding behind abstractions.
Teach fundamental engineering principles again.'
From: @…

Using Video Games to Teach Kepler's Laws and Orbital Dynamics
Brian DiGiorgio Zanger
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13259 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.13259

Using Video Games to Teach Kepler's Laws and Orbital Dynamics
Physics instructors often rely on demonstrations when teaching, using real-time examples to appeal to student intuition or tinkering with a physical system to develop a deeper and more natural understanding of a topic. However, some subjects, like Kepler's laws of planetary motion, are impractical to demonstrate at a human scale, and when reality proves difficult, it is often easier to move to simulations and video games. In particular, using video games in the classroom benefits student learni…

CHUCKLE -- When Humans Teach AI To Learn Emotions The Easy Way
Ankush Pratap Singh, Houwei Cao, Yong Liu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09382 https://arxiv.org…

CHUCKLE -- When Humans Teach AI To Learn Emotions The Easy Way
Curriculum learning (CL) structures training from simple to complex samples, facilitating progressive learning. However, existing CL approaches for emotion recognition often rely on heuristic, data-driven, or model-based definitions of sample difficulty, neglecting the difficulty for human perception, a critical factor in subjective tasks like emotion recognition. We propose CHUCKLE (Crowdsourced Human Understanding Curriculum for Knowledge Led Emotion Recognition), a perception-driven CL frame…

What News Recommendation Research Did (But Mostly Didn't) Teach Us About Building A News Recommender
Karl Higley, Robin Burke, Michael D. Ekstrand, Bart P. Knijnenburg
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12361

What News Recommendation Research Did (But Mostly Didn't) Teach Us About Building A News Recommender
One of the goals of recommender systems research is to provide insights and methods that can be used by practitioners to build real-world systems that deliver high-quality recommendations to actual people grounded in their genuine interests and needs. We report on our experience trying to apply the news recommendation literature to build POPROX, a live platform for news recommendation research, and reflect on the extent to which the current state of research supports system-building efforts. Ou…

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.
1/2

WATCH: Michael Phelps agrees to teach Ravens how to swim after Marlon Humphrey's hilarious video

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/watch-m

"If you speak against me, I'm coming to your home. If you speak against me, you may end up in jail. If you speak against me, you're going to incur millions of dollars in legal fees, so keep your mouth shut.”
"If you're a university and you teach things I don't like, I'm going to take your funding,” "
**Worst-case scenario' unfolding as Trump sends new 'message' to critics: legal expert** - Raw Story
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-retribution-2673910670/

SightSound-R1: Cross-Modal Reasoning Distillation from Vision to Audio Language Models
Qiaolin Wang, Xilin Jiang, Linyang He, Junkai Wu, Nima Mesgarani
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15661

SightSound-R1: Cross-Modal Reasoning Distillation from Vision to Audio Language Models
While large audio-language models (LALMs) have demonstrated state-of-the-art audio understanding, their reasoning capability in complex soundscapes still falls behind large vision-language models (LVLMs). Compared to the visual domain, one bottleneck is the lack of large-scale chain-of-thought audio data to teach LALM stepwise reasoning. To circumvent this data and modality gap, we present SightSound-R1, a cross-modal distillation framework that transfers advanced reasoning from a stronger LVLM…

WHO GON TEACH MY FRIEND HOW TO DO THE THINGS https://jorts.horse/@blossomlilija/115391348289631443

Wardley: Not a Fan of ChatGPT https://blog.bmannconsulting.com/3m3dmlo7t7k2t

Wardley: Not a Fan of ChatGPT - 3lxsr74rnk22h
Large language models are coherence engines not truth engines, we don't teach the critical thinking needed to properly evaluate the outputs.

Can Large Models Teach Student Models to Solve Mathematical Problems Like Human Beings? A Reasoning Distillation Method via Multi-LoRA Interaction
Xinhe Li, Jiajun Liu, Peng Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13037

Can Large Models Teach Student Models to Solve Mathematical Problems Like Human Beings? A Reasoning Distillation Method via Multi-LoRA Interaction
Recent studies have demonstrated that Large Language Models (LLMs) have strong mathematical reasoning abilities but rely on hundreds of billions of parameters. To tackle the challenge of poor reasoning in Small Language Models (SLMs), existing methods typically leverage LLMs to generate massive amounts of data for cramming training. In psychology, they are akin to System 1 thinking, which resolves reasoning problems rapidly based on experience and intuition. However, human learning also require…

@… I don’t know John personally, but I’ve listened to him talk about tech for long enough that I’m really confident in saying: I bet he *tried* to teach his children all the proper computer etiquette (Proper in his opinion, which is often controversial, hence the whole podcast thing).
But teaching a child something they don’t *want* to learn is… e…

You've got to respect the commitment to the bit.
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/what-can-a-34-year-old-sonic-level-teach-us-about-videogame-light

What can a 34-year-old Sonic level teach us about videogame light?
RPS explores the social and phantasmagorical nature of light by way of Star Light Zone, the most restful and hypnotic level of the original Sonic the Hedgehog.

Robust Visual Teach-and-Repeat Navigation with Flexible Topo-metric Graph Map Representation
Jikai Wang, Yunqi Cheng, Kezhi Wang, Zonghai Chen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09089 h…

Robust Visual Teach-and-Repeat Navigation with Flexible Topo-metric Graph Map Representation
Visual Teach-and-Repeat Navigation is a direct solution for mobile robot to be deployed in unknown environments. However, robust trajectory repeat navigation still remains challenged due to environmental changing and dynamic objects. In this paper, we propose a novel visual teach-and-repeat navigation system, which consists of a flexible map representation, robust map matching and a map-less local navigation module. During the teaching process, the recorded keyframes are formulated as a topo-me…

It’s fine to teach a child how to use a gun and how to hunt. It’s asking for trouble to take them to gun shows to play with submachine guns.

Teachers that teach the irrelevant: Pre-training machine learned interaction potentials with classical force fields for robust molecular dynamics simulations
Eric C. -Y. Yuan, Teresa Head-Gordon
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14205

Teachers that teach the irrelevant: Pre-training machine learned interaction potentials with classical force fields for robust molecular dynamics simulations
Machine learned interaction potentials (MLIPs) have become a critical component of large-scale, high-quality simulations for a range of chemical and biochemical systems. Yet, despite their in-distribution accuracy, molecular dynamics simulations using MLIPs exhibit numerical instabilities due to underlying data insufficiencies when encountering new regions of the potential energy surface. Here we propose a pre-training learning scheme that uses low-quality, practically free, single-molecule non…

If I ever have to teach ship stability, I now have a visual aid to demonstrating the distinction between roll, pitch, and yaw. #TOTP #1979Watch

Aristo tabletop pocket calculator. It was used in schools to teach the usage of pocket calculators. #vintagecomputing #retrocomputing #classiccomputing2025

Stories and Systems: Educational Interactive Storytelling to Teach Media Literacy and Systemic Thinking
Christian Roth, Rahmin Bender-Salazar, Breanne Pitt
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11059

Stories and Systems: Educational Interactive Storytelling to Teach Media Literacy and Systemic Thinking
This paper explores how Interactive Digital Narratives (IDNs) can support learners in developing the critical literacies needed to address complex societal challenges, so-called wicked problems, such as climate change, pandemics, and social inequality. While digital technologies offer broad access to narratives and data, they also contribute to misinformation and the oversimplification of interconnected issues. IDNs enable learners to navigate nonlinear, interactive stories, fostering deeper un…

WIP: Leveraging LLMs for Enforcing Design Principles in Student Code: Analysis of Prompting Strategies and RAG
Dhruv Kolhatkar, Soubhagya Akkena, Edward F. Gehringer
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11717

WIP: Leveraging LLMs for Enforcing Design Principles in Student Code: Analysis of Prompting Strategies and RAG
This work-in-progress research-to-practice paper explores the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into the code-review process for open-source software projects developed in computer science and software engineering courses. The focus is on developing an automated feedback tool that evaluates student code for adherence to key object-oriented design principles, addressing the need for more effective and scalable methods to teach software design best practices. The innovative practice inv…

Cue the "when the worst person you know says something you agree with" gifs
https://mastodon.xyz/@rms/115000694819761385

I'm involved now and then in hiring our department's sessional instructors (adjuncts, in the southern North American dialect). While there are always a few applicants who really have no business even thinking they could teach the course (often the same who argue they are "uniquely qualified"), a good chunk have CVs that are as impressive or more than many tenure-track colleagues. This isn't surprising (we all know the score), just always more than a little discouraging.…

Replaced article(s) found for cs.RO. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.RO/new
[2/3]:
- ReWiND: Language-Guided Rewards Teach Robot Policies without New Demonstrations
Zhang, Luo, Anwar, Sontakke, Lim, Thomason, Biyik, Zhang

Sometimes in life, like in dance, stepping back isn't a mistake or setback but an essential move to create space, rhythm, and shape for the next big leap forward. full article @ https://www.brichapman.com/p/the-backward-step

The Backward Step
why progress isn't always forward, and what dance, tides, and breath can teach us about real growth

An aspect of #ClimateLiteracy that isn't normally considered, and maybe should be.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep

An aspect of #ClimateLiteracy that isn't normally considered, and maybe should be.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep

What Lessons Week 1 Can Teach New-Look Raiders https://www.si.com/nfl/raiders/las-vegas-patrick-graham-new-england-patriots-geno-smith-maxx-crosby

90 day course - How to improve EQ of voices in your head - Teach active listening and more to head voices!

Next time, let's find a VP that is not Pro War Crimes. Seems like just a minimal requirement for the job.
-- Bernadette
@insolentpheasant.bsky.social

https://bsky.app/profile/annabower.bsky.social/post/3ly6m54k2wk2y

Anna Bower (@annabower.bsky.social)
Yale Law School never beating the “they don’t teach law at Yale” allegations

So one of my clients hired a new person (remote) & they’re borderline computer illiterate. Had to teach them to use a trackpad on a MacBook Air; it’s a good reminder for tech folks that there’s no such thing as “intuitive” computer shit.
And hell, I charge by the hour1️⃣ for this, so…😂

If you watch YouTube on your TV, do you also keep pressing back on videos until the ad is under 5 seconds? That’s my desperate attempt to teach them that I’m not going to buy shoes, food, book a trip—whatever—no matter how long they shove this pointless content at me.
Honestly, I’m pretty sure ads must be used as a form of torture in wars these days. At the very least, I definitely feel tortured whenever I’m forced to sit through this empty, drawn-out content.

Prompting the Professoriate: A Qualitative Study of Instructor Perspectives on LLMs in Data Science Education
Ana Elisa Lopez-Miranda, Tiffany Timbers, Rohan Alexander
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12283 …

Prompting the Professoriate: A Qualitative Study of Instructor Perspectives on LLMs in Data Science Education
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shifted in just a few years from novelty to ubiquity, raising fundamental questions for data science education. Tasks once used to teach coding, writing, and problem-solving can now be completed by LLMs, forcing educators to reconsider both pedagogy and assessment. To understand how instructors are adapting, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 42 instructors from 33 institutions in 10 countries in June and July 2025. Our qualitative analysis reveals a …

When I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful,
a miracle, oh it was beautiful, magical.
And all the birds in the trees, well they'd be singing so happily,
oh joyfully, oh playfully watching me.
But then they send me away to teach me how to be sensible,
logical, oh responsible, practical.
And then they showed me a world where I could be so dependable,
oh clinical, oh intellectual, cynical.
I was 10 when i first heard Supertramp & The L…

"...from an executive perspective, lighting comically large piles of money on fire trying to teach graphics cards how to read is, surprisingly, the logical play. The rest, well, that’s all just creative marketing. It’s very difficult to show up to a quarterly shareholder meeting and tell your investors you just vaporized another $10 billion for absolutely no return-on-investment. At least, that is, without them questioning if you’ve completely lost your mind. Which is where leaning into…

We're half way through the week at the Library, hosting classes each day this week. It takes effort and is especially worth it with:
- great lecturers who teach to the manuscripts
- engaged students who ask questions
#Archives
#CollectionCare

Fable, a startup offering AI-generated security training for employees, comes out of stealth having raised $31M, a source says at a $120M valuation (Thomas Brewster/Forbes)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewste

This $120 Million Startup’s AI Will Teach You How To Suck Less At Security
With a $31 million raise, Fable is aiming to take on multi-billion companies with its AI-generated security training targeted at employees who need it.

He "wants Democrats to stop saving Republicans from themselves"
Rick Wilson: Democrats Should Want To Teach Trump's Base A Painful Lesson | Crooks and Liars
https://crooksandliars.com/2025/10/rick-wilson-democrats-should-want-teach

Should we teach vibe coding? Here's why not.
2/2
To address the bigger question I started with ("should we teach AI-"assisted" coding?"), my answer is: "No, except enough to show students directly what its pitfalls are." We have little enough time as it is to cover the core knowledge that they'll need, which has become more urgent now that they're going to be expected to clean up AI bugs and they'll have less time to develop an understanding of the problems they're supposed to be solving. The skill of prompt engineering & other skills of working with AI are relatively easy to pick up on your own, given a decent not-even-mathematical understanding of how a neutral network works, which is something we should be giving to all students, not just our majors.
Reasonable learning objectives for CS majors might include explaining what types of bugs an AI "assistant" is most likely to introduce, explaining the difference between software engineering and writing code, explaining why using an AI "assistant" is likely to violate open-source licenses, listing at lest three independent ethical objections to contemporary LLMs and explaining the evidence for/reasoning behind them, explaining why we should expect AI "assistants" to be better at generating code from scratch than at fixing bugs in existing code (and why they'll confidently "claim" to have fixed problems they haven't), and even fixing bugs in AI generated code (without AI "assistance").
If we lived in a world where the underlying environmental, labor, and data commons issues with AI weren't as bad, or if we could find and use systems that effectively mitigate these issues (there's lots of piecemeal progress on several of these) then we should probably start teaching an elective on coding with an assistant to students who have mastered programming basics, but such a class should probably spend a good chunk of time on non-assisted debugging.
#AI #LLMs #VibeCoding

Using Containers to Speed Up Development, to Run Integration Tests and to Teach About Distributed Systems
Marco Mambelli, Bruno Moreira Coimbra, Namratha Urs, Ilya Baburashvili
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21464

Using Containers to Speed Up Development, to Run Integration Tests and to Teach About Distributed Systems
GlideinWMS is a workload manager provisioning resources for many experiments, including CMS and DUNE. The software is distributed both as native packages and specialized production containers. Following an approach used in other communities like web development, we built our workspaces, system-like containers to ease development and testing. Developers can change the source tree or check out a different branch and quickly reconfigure the services to see the effect of their changes. In this pape…

@… It doesn’t quite hit the brief, but Human Resource Machine does teach pointers, just not with C.

Learn "No Kings Here" protest song from Tom Paxton (@TomPaxtonMusic) and Cathy Fink for October 18, 2025 "No Kings" rally
https://social.trom.tf/display/dbc8dc44-1168-e10e-cd17-e3d333145274

Cathy Fink and Tom Paxton recommend and teach "No Kings Here" for Oct 18
> "Oct. 18 is the next day of @NoKings rallies. Cathy Fink & I want YOU to be able to play this on guitar, uke or the instrument of your choice, so here's a ...

Headed to first day back in the office for a while. Neighbor in the elevator: “want to swap? I’ll go to your work and you go teach my kids?”
Me: “no, I don’t really like kids!”
Her: “yeah, they’re assholes. But they can’t help it!”
🤣

Olympic gold: Phelps to teach Ravens to swim https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/45864313/ravens-employ-olympian-michael-phelps-teach-swim

I think he is trying to say he is an Avenger without realising he is the supervillain.
Also, does he know that while he is torrenting the world libraries into his bank account, you could set up for $10 a month your own Mastodon instance which is ten times better federated than his 'federated' Threads?

CLARity: Reasoning Consistency Alone Can Teach Reinforced Experts
Jiuheng Lin, Cong Jiang, Zirui Wu, Jiarui Sun, Yansong Feng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09278 https://

CLARity: Reasoning Consistency Alone Can Teach Reinforced Experts
Training expert LLMs in domains with scarce data is difficult, often relying on multiple-choice questions (MCQs). However, standard outcome-based reinforcement learning (RL) on MCQs is risky. While it may improve accuracy, we observe it often degrades reasoning quality such as logical consistency. Existing solutions to supervise reasoning, such as large-scale Process Reward Models (PRMs), are prohibitively expensive. To address this, we propose CLARity, a cost-effective RL framework that enhanc…

"Spanish schools to teach pupils how to cope with climate crisis disasters"
#Spain #Climate #ClimateChange #Education

Quark models: What can they teach us?
Alexey Nefediev
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.19256 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.19256

Quark models: What can they teach us?
Quark models have a more than 60-year history and through this time they served as a powerful investigation and prediction tool in hadronic physics. In recent years, a lot of new experimental information has been arriving on hadrons that do not qualify as simple quark model states. Yet, quark models remain the cornerstone of the classification scheme for hadrons, provide valuable insights into various phenomena inherent in QCD, and facilitate gaining a clear and physically transparent picture o…

lol, I was just going to complain about a tmux keybinding not being compatible w/ screen, but it turns out there are *two* keybindings for the behavior and one is screen-compatible. So yay!
(You *can* teach an old dog new tricks, btw. After decades of screen usage, I'm using tmux now.)

From Data to Insight: Using Contextual Scenarios to Teach Critical Thinking in Data Visualisation
Jonathan C. Roberts, Peter Butcher, Panagiotis D. Ritsos
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08737

From Data to Insight: Using Contextual Scenarios to Teach Critical Thinking in Data Visualisation
This paper explores the use of scenario-based visualisation examples as a pedagogical strategy for teaching students the complexities of data insight, representation, and interpretation. Teaching data visualisation often involves explaining intricate issues related to data management and the challenges of presenting data meaningfully. In this work, we present a series of data-driven scenarios. These concise stories depict specific situations, and are created to help the educators highlight key …

🚨Job Alert! 🚨 Low-Temperature and/or Environmental #Geochemistry - Missouri State Univ #geology
https://jobs.missouristate.edu/posti…

Assistant Professor (Geochemistry) -9 month appointment
The School of Earth, Environment, and Sustainability (SEES) invites applications for a tenure-track Geochemistry faculty position at the rank of Assistant Professor to begin August 2026 with expertise in Low-Temperature and/or Environmental Geochemistry. A Ph.D. in Geology or a closely related field is required at the time of appointment. The successful applicant will teach introductory geology general education courses, undergraduate and graduate courses in Geochemistry and the selected candid…

Teaching with AI: Human Days and AI Days
In my previous post I outlined a plan for a no-tech pedagogy that would prevent students from using AI to do the assignments. However, my colleagues tell me that current policy at the university where I used to teach requires the use of AI in some classes. They have also eliminated the budget for photocopying handouts and texts. Everything must be delivered through the Learning Management System, which in this case is Canvas.

There's a simple way for instance operators to comply: trust your users. Demand that they positively assert that they do not live in North Korea, Iran, Mississippi, etc. as a condition of joining. This creates a legitimate good faith belief that users are not legally barred from the system.
ALSO: No one should ever take advice from me as grounded in legality. I have no legal education beyond what life has forced upon me without my consent, and I am ill-suited to teach.

A look at training sessions hosted by robotaxi companies, like Zoox, to teach first responders how to handle emergencies involving self-driving cars (Lisa Bonos/Washington Post)

A new challenge for emergency workers: Learning how to handle a robotaxi
Police and firefighters are getting trained on how to respond to emergencies involving self-driving cars — or pull them over in a traffic stop.

music for the children, we can teach u how to crawl

Train Once, Deploy Anywhere: Realize Data-Efficient Dynamic Object Manipulation
Zhuoling Li, Xiaoyang Wu, Zhenhua Xu, Hengshuang Zhao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14042 https://…

Train Once, Deploy Anywhere: Realize Data-Efficient Dynamic Object Manipulation
Realizing generalizable dynamic object manipulation is important for enhancing manufacturing efficiency, as it eliminates specialized engineering for various scenarios. To this end, imitation learning emerges as a promising paradigm, leveraging expert demonstrations to teach a policy manipulation skills. Although the generalization of an imitation learning policy can be improved by increasing demonstrations, demonstration collection is labor-intensive. To address this problem, this paper invest…

Here are the three primary kinds of community-based events we’ll be sponsoring during 31 Days of Action:

Open/community lab meetings over Zoom or live-streamed lab tours/demos

Teach-ins at local community centers, churches, parks, basically anywhere that’s not a college campus

Stand Up For Science tabling and demos that include “Ask a Scientist” booths,
pond water under a microscope,
strawberry DNA extraction,
egg drop competitions, …

SUFS 31 Days of Action Guidebook
🧬 WHAT IS STAND UP FOR SCIENCE? Stand Up for Science (SUFS) is a 501(c)(4) non-profit organization born from the rallies held in cities throughout the United States and around the world on March 7th, 2025. We believe that science is a public good that benefits everyone, and we’re leading...

Lithuania to teach school children how to use drones to counter Russian threat | The Independent
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/lithuania-drones-children-russia-ukraine-war-b2808140.html

Everything is a linear model: #rstats #stats

Why Teach Quantum?: Elementary Teachers Initial Beliefs about Quantum
Xiaolu Zhang, Nancy Holincheck, Jessica L. Rosenberg, Stephanie Dodman, Ben W. Dreyfus, Jennifer Simons
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03849

Why Teach Quantum?: Elementary Teachers Initial Beliefs about Quantum
This paper examines the initial beliefs held by elementary educators (n=11) and their students about teaching and learning quantum concepts at the elementary level. All teachers were participants in a grant-funded project focused on developing teachers' quantum content knowledge and creating curricular resources to use in elementary classrooms. Although elementary teachers had limited knowledge of quantum at the beginning of the project, they expressed excitement and a belief that learning quan…

“Under this definition of antisemitism, which absurdly conflates criticism of a nation-state, Israel, and a political ideology, Zionism, with the ancient evil of Jew-hatred, it is impossible with any honesty to teach about topics such as the history of the creation of Israel, and the ongoing Palestinian Nakba”

Day 20: bell hooks.
Despite having decided to continue to 30, number 20 feels important, and hooks gets the spot in part because I haven't yet included a non-fiction feminist author, which feels like an obvious thing to include on such a list. The one category of author being bumped out of the first 20 here is anime writers, but I'll follow up with one of them, along with more academics and mangaka who I've been itching to include.
In any case, hooks is absolutely legendary as a feminist writer for good reason, and as a teacher I've especially appreciated her writing on pedagogy like "Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom" and "Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom". These have challenged me to teach at a higher level, and while I'm not sure I've completely succeeded, they're important to me. They also pair well with Paolo Friere's "Pedagogy of the Oppressed", but hooks always seems to be focused on very practical advice and it's incredibly direct in her writing, even though her advice isn't always straightforward to implement. In fact, that's one of the things I value about her writing: when the truth is complicated or the real work is messy interpersonal relationships that need to be negotiated with each student, she's not afraid to say so and give good advice for navigating those waters instead of trying to dispense simple-seeming platitudes or formulas for success that paper over the deeper issues. Her concern has always been truth, rather than simplicity or audience comfort and the popularity it might seem to entail, which I think is part of why her legacy endures so well.
#20AuthorsNoMen
#30AuthorsNoMen

Sirianni recruited Auriemma, Saban, Staley and more to teach the Eagles how to win, again https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/46224357/philadelphia-eagles-coach-nick-sirianni-post-super-bowl-win-geno-auri…

Learning by Teaching: Engaging Students as Instructors of Large Language Models in Computer Science Education
Xinming Yang, Haasil Pujara, Jun Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05979

Learning by Teaching: Engaging Students as Instructors of Large Language Models in Computer Science Education
While Large Language Models (LLMs) are often used as virtual tutors in computer science (CS) education, this approach can foster passive learning and over-reliance. This paper presents a novel pedagogical paradigm that inverts this model: students act as instructors who must teach an LLM to solve problems. To facilitate this, we developed strategies for designing questions with engineered knowledge gaps that only a student can bridge, and we introduce Socrates, a system for deploying this metho…

@… I tried jj a while back and bounced off hard for similar reasons. If you figure out a workflow, please teach me!

Columbia’s new policies intended to stop and punish any on-campus criticism of the Gaza genocide
by characterizing it as “antisemitism”
have made it impossible for Rashid Khalidi to teach his planned fall course.
See his explanation here, which ends with:
Columbia’s capitulation has turned a university that was once a site of free inquiry and learning
into a shadow of its former self,
an-anti university, a gated security zone with electronic entry controls,…

Learning from Natural Language Feedback for Personalized Question Answering
Alireza Salemi, Hamed Zamani
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10695 https://arxiv.org…

Learning from Natural Language Feedback for Personalized Question Answering
Personalization is crucial for enhancing both the effectiveness and user satisfaction of language technologies, particularly in information-seeking tasks like question answering. Current approaches for personalizing large language models (LLMs) often rely on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), followed by reinforcement learning with scalar reward signals to teach models how to use retrieved personal context. We believe that these scalar rewards sometimes provide weak, non-instructive feedback…

TL;DR: what if nationalism, not anarchy, is futile?
Since I had the pleasure of seeing the "what would anarchists do against a warlord?" argument again in my timeline, I'll present again my extremely simple proposed solution:
Convince the followers of the warlord that they're better off joining you in freedom, then kill or exile the warlord once they're alone or vastly outnumbered.
Remember that even in our own historical moment where nothing close to large-scale free society has existed in living memory, the warlord's promise of "help me oppress others and you'll be richly rewarded" is a lie that many understand is historically a bad bet. Many, many people currently take that bet, for a variety of reasons, and they're enough to coerce through fear an even larger number of others. But although we imagine, just as the medieval peasants might have imagined of monarchy, that such a structure is both the natural order of things and much too strong to possibly fail, in reality it takes an enormous amount of energy, coordination, and luck for these structures to persist! Nations crumble every day, and none has survived more than a couple *hundred* years, compared to pre-nation societies which persisted for *tends of thousands of years* if not more. I'm this bubbling froth of hierarchies, the notion that hierarchy is inevitable is certainly popular, but since there's clearly a bit of an ulterior motive to make (and teach) that claim, I'm not sure we should trust it.
So what I believe could form the preconditions for future anarchist societies to avoid the "warlord problem" is merely: a widespread common sense belief that letting anyone else have authority over you is morally suspect. Given such a belief, a warlord will have a hard time building any following at all, and their opponents will have an easy time getting their supporters to defect. In fact, we're already partway there, relative to the situation a couple hundred years ago. At that time, someone could claim "you need to obey my orders and fight and die for me because the Queen was my mother" and that was actually a quite successful strategy. Nowadays, this strategy is only still working in a few isolated places, and the idea that one could *start a new monarchy* or even resurrect a defunct one seems absurd. So why can't that same transformation from "this is just how the world works" to "haha, how did anyone ever believe *that*? also happen to nationalism in general? I don't see an obvious reason why not.
Now I think one popular counterargument to this is: if you think non-state societies can win out with these tactics, why didn't they work for American tribes in the face of the European colonizers? (Or insert your favorite example of colonialism here.) I think I can imagine a variety of reasons, from the fact that many of those societies didn't try this tactic (and/or were hierarchical themselves), to the impacts of disease weakening those societies pre-contact, to the fact that with much-greater communication and education possibilities it might work better now, to the fact that most of those tribes are *still* around, and a future in which they persist longer than the colonist ideologies actually seems likely to me, despite the fact that so much cultural destruction has taken place. In fact, if the modern day descendants of the colonized tribes sow the seeds of a future society free of colonialism, that's the ultimate demonstration of the futility of hierarchical domination (I just read "Theory of Water" by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson).
I guess the TL;DR on this is: what if nationalism is actually as futile as monarchy, and we're just unfortunately living in the brief period during which it is ascendant?

Social Simulation for Integrating Self-Care: Measuring the Effects of Contextual Environments in Augmented Reality for Mental Health Practice
Anna Fang, Jiayang Shi, Hriday Chhabria, Bosi Li, Haiyi Zhu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12081

Social Simulation for Integrating Self-Care: Measuring the Effects of Contextual Environments in Augmented Reality for Mental Health Practice
Despite growing interest in virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) for mental well-being, prior work using immersive interventions to teach mental health skills has largely focused on calming or abstract settings. As a result, little is known about how realistic social simulation may better support the transfer and application of skills to in-person environments. In this work, we present a 14-day user study with 43-participants comparing an augmented reality intervention simulating a realistic c…

'He just understands how to teach, how to motivate': Why new RBs coach Tashard Choice fits in Detroit https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/45909474/new-detroit-lions-rbs-coach-tashard-choice-isnt-new-jahmyr-gibbs

When a Robot is More Capable than a Human: Learning from Constrained Demonstrators
Xinhu Li, Ayush Jain, Zhaojing Yang, Yigit Korkmaz, Erdem B{\i}y{\i}k
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09096

When a Robot is More Capable than a Human: Learning from Constrained Demonstrators
Learning from demonstrations enables experts to teach robots complex tasks using interfaces such as kinesthetic teaching, joystick control, and sim-to-real transfer. However, these interfaces often constrain the expert's ability to demonstrate optimal behavior due to indirect control, setup restrictions, and hardware safety. For example, a joystick can move a robotic arm only in a 2D plane, even though the robot operates in a higher-dimensional space. As a result, the demonstrations collected b…

Established by the Black Guerrilla Family in San Quentin Prison in 1979,
Black August is an annual commemoration of the struggle for Black liberation
and a time to remember the freedom fighters who have passed
or who remain locked up in prison.
In 2025, as fascism rises in the US and around the globe,
what can the radical tradition of Black August teach us about keeping the fight for freedom alive in dark times?
In this on-the-ground edition of Rattling …

‘I believe in our people’s ability to find the light’: Celebrating Black August in dark times
“We don't want Black August to become like a new Black History Month, where [it’s] just about celebrations or parties. That's not the spirit of it. It's in resistance and how we can prepare ourselves to resist our own oppression.”

Replaced article(s) found for cs.RO. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.RO/new
[1/3]:
- Learn to Teach: Sample-Efficient Privileged Learning for Humanoid Locomotion over Diverse Terrains
Feiyang Wu, Xavier Nal, Jaehwi Jang, Wei Zhu, Zhaoyuan Gu, Anqi Wu, Ye Zhao

A Humanoid Social Robot as a Teaching Assistant in the Classroom
Thomas Sievers
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05646 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.05646

A Humanoid Social Robot as a Teaching Assistant in the Classroom
Although innovation and the support of new technologies are much needed to ease the burden on the education system, social robots in schools to help teachers with educational tasks are rare. Child-Robot Interaction (CRI) could support teachers and add an embodied social component to modern multi-modal and multi-sensory learning environments already in use. The social robot Pepper, connected to the Large Language Model (LLM) ChatGPT, was used in a high school classroom to teach new learning cont…