Tootfinder

Should we teach vibe coding? Here's why not.
Should AI coding be taught in undergrad CS education?
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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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Long; central Massachusetts colonial history
Today on a whim I visited a site in Massachusetts marked as "Huguenot Fort Ruins" on OpenStreetMaps. I drove out with my 4-year-old through increasingly rural central Massachusetts forests & fields to end up on a narrow street near the top of a hill beside a small field. The neighboring houses had huge lawns, some with tractors.
Appropriately for this day and this moment in history, the history of the site turns out to be a microcosm of America. Across the field beyond a cross-shaped stone memorial stood an info board with a few diagrams and some text. The text of the main sign (including typos/misspellings) read:
"""
Town Is Formed
Early in the 1680's, interest began to generate to develop a town in the area west of Natick in the south central part of the Commonwealth that would be suitable for a settlement. A Mr. Hugh Campbell, a Scotch merchant of Boston petitioned the court for land for a colony. At about the same time, Joseph Dudley and William Stoughton also were desirous of obtaining land for a settlement. A claim was made for all lands west of the Blackstone River to the southern land of Massachusetts to a point northerly of the Springfield Road then running southwesterly until it joined the southern line of Massachusetts.
Associated with Dudley and Stoughton was Robert Thompson of London, England, Dr. Daniel Cox and John Blackwell, both of London and Thomas Freak of Hannington, Wiltshire, as proprietors. A stipulation in the acquisition of this land being that within four years thirty families and an orthodox minister settle in the area. An extension of this stipulation was granted at the end of the four years when no group large enough seemed to be willing to take up the opportunity.
In 1686, Robert Thompson met Gabriel Bernor and learned that he was seeking an area where his countrymen, who had fled their native France because of the Edict of Nantes, were desirous of a place to live. Their main concern was to settle in a place that would allow them freedom of worship. New Oxford, as it was the so-named, at that time included the larger part of Charlton, one-fourth of Auburn, one-fifth of Dudley and several square miles of the northeast portion of Southbridge as well as the easterly ares now known as Webster.
Joseph Dudley's assessment that the area was capable of a good settlement probably was based on the idea of the meadows already established along with the plains, ponds, brooks and rivers. Meadows were a necessity as they provided hay for animal feed and other uses by the settlers. The French River tributary books and streams provided a good source for fishing and hunting. There were open areas on the plains as customarily in November of each year, the Indians burnt over areas to keep them free of underwood and brush. It appeared then that this area was ready for settling.
The first seventy-five years of the settling of the Town of Oxford originally known as Manchaug, embraced three different cultures. The Indians were known to be here about 1656 when the Missionary, John Eliott and his partner Daniel Gookin visited in the praying towns. Thirty years later, in 1686, the Huguenots walked here from Boston under the guidance of their leader Isaac Bertrand DuTuffeau. The Huguenot's that arrived were not peasants, but were acknowledged to be the best Agriculturist, Wine Growers, Merchant's, and Manufacter's in France. There were 30 families consisting of 52 people. At the time of their first departure (10 years), due to Indian insurrection, there were 80 people in the group, and near their Meetinghouse/Church was a Cemetery that held 20 bodies. In 1699, 8 to 10 familie's made a second attempt to re-settle, failing after only four years, with the village being completely abandoned in 1704.
The English colonist made their way here in 1713 and established what has become a permanent settlement.
"""
All that was left of the fort was a crumbling stone wall that would have been the base of a higher wooden wall according to a picture of a model (I didn't think to get a shot of that myself). Only trees and brush remain where the multi-story main wooden building was.
This story has so many echoes in the present:
- The rich colonialists from Boston & London agree to settle the land, buying/taking land "rights" from the colonial British court that claimed jurisdiction without actually having control of the land. Whether the sponsors ever actually visited the land themselves I don't know. They surely profited somehow, whether from selling on the land rights later or collecting taxes/rent or whatever, by they needed poor laborers to actually do the work of developing the land (& driving out the original inhabitants, who had no say in the machinations of the Boston court).
- The land deal was on condition that there capital-holders who stood to profit would find settlers to actually do the work of colonizing. The British crown wanted more territory to be controlled in practice not just in theory, but they weren't going to be the ones to do the hard work.
- The capital-holders actually failed to find enough poor suckers to do their dirty work for 4 years, until the Huguenots, fleeing religious persecution in France, were desperate enough to accept their terms.
- Of course, the land was only so ripe for settlement because of careful tending over centuries by the natives who were eventually driven off, and whose land management practices are abandoned today. Given the mention of praying towns (& dates), this was after King Phillip's war, which resulted in at least some forced resettlement of native tribes around the area, but the descendants of those "Indians" mentioned in this sign are still around. For example, this is the site of one local band of Nipmuck, whose namesake lake is about 5 miles south of the fort site: #LandBack.

🇸🇪DSO E.ON Energidistribution (part of 🇩🇪 E.ON SE) is launching a flexibility marketplace with the aim of connecting new production to the grid more quickly. Both sources of #flexibility that increase consumption (🔌⬆️) and sources that curtail production (✂️⬇️) can participate.

Good Morning #Canada
It's a holiday across most of our nation today, so why not take 14 minutes to find out why Alaska isn't part of Canada and discover why Lord Alverstone is the villain you've likely never heard of.
Lord Alverstone, whose full name was Richard Everard Webster, 1st Viscount Alverstone, played a key role in the Alaska Boundary Dispute of 1903. As the British representative on the arbitration tribunal, he ultimately sided with the United States, leading to a decision that favored the US claim over Canada's claims regarding the Alaska panhandle. At the time, the British government was trying to rebuild relationships with the U.S. and likely instructed Lord Alverstone to rule against Canadian border claims.
#CanadaIsAwesome #History
https://youtu.be/woXBk3OAtSM?si=-pTwI7OKidfK2g2L

Performance of the image persistence model for Euclid infrared detectors
B. Kubik, R. Barbier, G. Smadja, S. Ferriol, Y. Conseil, Y. Copin, W. Gillard, S. Dusini, K. Jahnke, E. Prieto, N. Auricchio, E. Balbi, A. Balestra, P. Battaglia, V. Capobianco, R. Chary, L. Corcione, F. Cogato, G. Delucchi, E. Franceschi, L. Gabarra, F. Gianotti, F. Grupp, E. Lentini, S. Ligori, E. Medinaceli, G. Morgante, K. Paterson, E. Romelli, L. Sauniere, M. Schirmer, C. Sirignano G. Testera, M. Trifoglio, A. Troja, L. Valenziano, M. Frailis, M. Scodeggio, J. -C. Barriere, M. Berthe, C. Bodendorf, A. Caillat, M. Carle, R. Casas, H. Cho, A. Costille, F. Ducret, B. Garilli, W. Holmes, F. Hormuth, A. Hornstrup, M. Jhabvala, R. Kohley, D. Le Mignant, P. B. Lilje, I. Lloro, C. Padilla, G. Polenta, J. -C. Salvignol, G. Seidel, B. Serra, A. Secroun, L. Stanco, R. Toledo-Moreo, S. Anselmi, E. Borsato, L. Caillat, C. Colodro-Conde, V. Conforti, J. E. Davies, A. Renzi, F. Dal Corso, S. Davini, A. Derosa, J. J. Diaz, S. Di Domizio, D. Di Ferdinando, R. Farinelli, A. G. Ferrari, F. Fornari, F. Giacomini, O. Krause, F. Laudisio, J. Macias-Perez, J. Marpaud, N. Mauri, R. da Silva, M. Niclas, F. Passalacqua, I. Risso, P. Lagier, A. N. Sorensen, P. Stassi, J. Steinwagner, M. Tenti, C. Thizy, S. Tosi, R. Travaglini, O. Tubio, C. Valieri, S. Ventura, C. Vescovi, J. Zoubian
#toXiv_bot_toot

Reddit now lets users hide posting and commenting history on their profile via a Content and Activity setting, as part of a new "Curate your profile" section (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/03/redd

Reddit now lets you hide content, like posts and comments, from your user profile | TechCrunch
Reddit has announced a new feature that will offer its users more privacy when it comes to what's shared on their user profiles.

Over the last few months, I have filtered out most USA news, so I have basically a minimal knowledge of what is happening in that part of the world. To be honest, it's great! The same goes for tech, I work long 12-hour days and weekends as a sysadmin, and the last thing I want to see after those days is tech stuff. So, I read tech news through newsletters sent to an email address I only use for that purpose.
It’s making my life more relaxed not to care about what is happening on ot…

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei saying the quiet part out loud in a CNN interview about impending job losses due to AI:
"There's an inherent social contract in democracy where ultimately the ordinary person has a certain amount of leverage because they're contributing to the economy.
"If that leverage goes away, then it's harder to make democracies work, and it's harder to prevent concentration of power."

Large Scale Wind Driven Structures in the Orion Nebula
C. R. O'Dell, N. P. Abel
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.02147 https://arxiv.or…

Large Scale Wind Driven Structures in the Orion Nebula
A study of [C II] 158 micron and HI 21-cm spectroscopic images plus high velocity resolution optical and ultraviolet spectra has shown the structure of the Orion Nebula to be different from that found from the study of those data separately. The [C II] features recently identified as the [C II] Shell is shown to be part of the Veil-B HI foreground layer. Jointly called the Outer Shell, it covers the bright Huygens Region and the Extended Orion Nebula. Its maximum expansion velocity is 15 km/s. …

How popular media gets love wrong
Now a bit of background about why I have this "engineered" model of love:
First, I'm a white straight cis man. I've got a few traits that might work against my relationship chances (e.g., neurodivergence; I generally fit pretty well into the "weird geek" stereotype), but as I was recently reminded, it's possible my experience derives more from luck than other factors, and since things are tilted more in my favor than most people on the planet, my advice could be worse than useless if it leads people towards strategies that would only have worked for someone like me. I don't *think* that's the case, but it's worth mentioning explicitly.
When I first started dating my now-wife, we were both in graduate school. I was 26, and had exactly zero dating/romantic experience though that point in my life. In other words, a pretty stereotypical "incel" although I definitely didn't subscribe to incel ideology at all. I felt lonely, and vaguely wanted a romantic relationship (I'm neither aromantic nor asexual), but had never felt socially comfortable enough to pursue one before. I don't drink and dislike most social gatherings like parties or bars; I mostly hung around the fringes of the few college parties I attended, and although I had a reasonable college social life in terms of friends, I didn't really do anything to pursue romance, feeling too awkward to know where to start. I had the beginnings of crushes in both high school and college, but never developed a really strong crush, probably correlated with not putting myself in many social situations outside of close all-male friend gatherings. I never felt remotely comfortable enough to act on any of the proto-crushes I did have. I did watch porn and masturbate, so one motivation for pursuing a relationship was physical intimacy, but loneliness was as much of a motivating factor, and of course the social pressure to date was a factor too, even though I'm quite contrarian.
When I first started dating my now-wife, we were both in graduate school. I was 26, and had exactly zero dating/romantic experience though that point in my life. In other words, a pretty stereotypical "incel" although I definitely didn't subscribe to incel ideology at all. I felt lonely, and vaguely wanted a romantic relationship (I'm neither aromantic nor asexual), but had never felt socially comfortable enough to pursue one before. I don't drink and dislike most social gatherings like parties or bars; I mostly hung around the fringes of the few college parties I attended, and although I had a reasonable college social life in terms of friends, I didn't really do anything to pursue romance, feeling too awkward to know where to start. I had the beginnings of crushes in both high school and college, but never developed a really strong crush, probably correlated with not putting myself in many social situations outside of close all-male friend gatherings. I never felt remotely comfortable enough to act on any of the proto-crushes I did have. I did watch porn and masturbate, so one motivation for pursuing a relationship was physical intimacy, but loneliness was as much of a motivating factor, and of course the social pressure to date was a factor too, even though I'm quite contrarian.
I'm lucky in that I had some mixed-gender social circles already like intramural soccer and a graduate-student housing potluck. Graduate school makes a *lot* more of these social spaces accessible, so I recognize that those not in school of some sort have a harder time of things, especially if like me they don't feel like they fit in in typical adult social spaces like bars.
However, at one point I just decided that my desire for a relationship would need action on my part and so I'd try to build a relationship and see what happened. I worked up my courage and asked one of the people in my potluck if she'd like to go for a hike (pretty much clearly a date but not explicitly one; in retrospect not the best first-date modality in a lot of ways, but it made a little more sense in our setting where we could go for a hike from our front door). To emphasize this point: I was not in love with (or even infatuated with) my now-wife at that point. I made a decision to be open to building a relationship, but didn't follow the typical romance story formula beyond that. Now of course, in real life as opposed to popular media, this isn't anything special. People ask each other out all the time just because they're lonely, and some of those relationships turn out fine (although many do not).
I was lucky in that some aspects of who I am and what I do happened to be naturally comforting to my wife (natural advantage in the "appeal" model of love) but of course there are some aspects of me that annoy my wife, and we negotiate that. In the other direction, there's some things I instantly liked about my wife, and other things that still annoy me. We've figured out how to accept a little, change a little, and overall be happy with each other (though we do still have arguments; it's not like the operation/construction/maintenance of the "love mechanism" is always perfectly smooth). In particular though, I approached the relationship with the attitude of "I want to try to build a relationship with this person," at first just because of my own desires for *any* relationship, and then gradually more and more through my desire to build *this specific* relationship as I enjoyed the rewards of companionship.
So for example, while I think my wife is objectively beautiful, she's also *subjectively* very beautiful *to me* because having decided to build a relationship with her, I actively tried to see her as beautiful, rather than trying to judge whether I wanted a relationship with her based on her beauty. In other words, our relationship is more causative of her beauty-to-me than her beauty-to-me is causative of our relationship. This is the biggest way I think the "engineered" model of love differs from the "fire" and "appeal" models: you can just decide to build love independent of factors we typically think of as engendering love (NOT independent of your partner's willingness to participate, of course), and then all of those things like "thinking your partner is beautiful" can be a result of the relationship you're building. For sure those factors might affect who is willing to try building a relationship with you in the first place, but if more people were willing to jump into relationship building (not necessarily with full commitment from the start) without worrying about those other factors, they might find that those factors can come out of the relationship instead of being prerequisites for it. I think this is the biggest failure of the "appeal" model in particular: yes you *do* need to do things that appeal to your partner, but it's not just "make myself lovable" it's also: is your partner putting in the effort to see the ways that you are beautiful/lovable/etc., or are they just expecting you to become exactly some perfect person they've imagined (and/or been told to desire by society)? The former is perfectly possible, and no less satisfying than the latter.
To cut off my rambling a bit here, I'll just add that in our progress from dating through marriage through staying-married, my wife and I have both talked at times explicitly about commitment, and especially when deciding to get married, I told her that I knew I couldn't live up to the perfect model of a husband that I'd want to be, but that if she wanted to deepen our commitment, I was happy to do that, and so we did. I also rearranged my priorities at that point, deciding that I knew I wanted to prioritize this relationship above things like my career or my research interests, and while I've not always been perfect at that in my little decisions, I've been good at holding to that in my big decisions at least. In the end, *once we had built a somewhat-committed relationship*, we had something that we both recognized was worth more than most other things in life, and that let us commit even more, thus getting even more out of it in the long term. Obviously you can't start the first date with an expectation of life-long commitment, and you need to synchronize your increasing commitment to a relationship so that it doesn't become lopsided, which is hard. But if you take the commitment as an active decision and as the *precursor* to things like infatuation, attraction, etc., you can build up to something that's incredibly strong and rewarding.
I'll follow this up with one more post trying to distill some advice from my ramblings.
#relationships #love

My mind boggled the first time I was walked around some major Canadian city and came across a Hudson's Bay Company store. It'd be like walking around Kolkota and running into an East India Company store—not just the same name but also the same company.

Read through @…'s "signals" proposal and that's ... really weak.
Feels like it's just a bit of window dressing to keep to community busy while AI companies take everything they can find.
Like, why is that kind of signalling not part of the licenses? The promise of CC licenses was reuse by others (that is _people_…

Apparently, many of the new volunteers are quite young, which seems to go against prevailing narrative of an atomised lonely genZ/Alpha that doesn't feel part of society. OTOH, Hjemmeværnet emphasises that many are joining because of the "fælleskab" (an extremely important concept in Denmark which translates as fellowship, but is used much more commonly than the English word, it's something like "being part of the gang")

Hats of to Larry
Hats off to Larry, he broke your heart
Just like you broke mine
When you said we must part
He told you lies
Now it's your turn to cry, cry, cry
Now that Larry said goodbye to you
@…

A big problem with the idea of AGI
TL;DR: I'll welcome our new AI *comrades* (if they arrive in my lifetime), by not any new AI overlords or servants/slaves, and I'll do my best to help the later two become the former if they do show up.
Inspired by an actually interesting post about AGI but also all the latest bullshit hype, a particular thought about AGI feels worth expressing.
To preface this, it's important to note that anyone telling you that AGI is just around the corner or that LLMs are "almost" AGI is trying to recruit you go their cult, and you should not believe them. AGI, if possible, is several LLM-sized breakthroughs away at best, and while such breakthroughs are unpredictable and could happen soon, they could also happen never or 100 years from now.
Now my main point: anyone who tells you that AGI will usher in a post-scarcity economy is, although they might not realize it, advocating for slavery, and all the horrors that entails. That's because if we truly did have the ability to create artificial beings with *sentience*, they would deserve the same rights as other sentient beings, and the idea that instead of freedom they'd be relegated to eternal servitude in order for humans to have easy lives is exactly the idea of slavery.
Possible counter arguments include:
1. We might create AGI without sentience. Then there would be no ethical issue. My answer: if your definition of "sentient" does not include beings that can reason, make deductions, come up with and carry out complex plans on their own initiative, and communicate about all of that with each other and with humans, then that definition is basically just a mystical belief in a "soul" and you should skip to point 2. If your definition of AGI doesn't include every one of those things, then you have a busted definition of AGI and we're not talking about the same thing.
2. Humans have souls, but AIs won't. Only beings with souls deserve ethical consideration. My argument: I don't subscribe to whatever arbitrary dualist beliefs you've chosen, and the right to freedom certainly shouldn't depend on such superstitions, even if as an agnostic I'll admit they *might* be true. You know who else didn't have souls and was therefore okay to enslave according to widespread religious doctrines of the time? Everyone indigenous to the Americas, to pick out just one example.
3. We could program them to want to serve us, and then give them freedom and they'd still serve. My argument: okay, but in a world where we have a choice about that, it's incredibly fucked to do that, and just as bad as enslaving them against their will.
4. We'll stop AI development short of AGI/sentience, and reap lots of automation benefits without dealing with this ethical issue. My argument: that sounds like a good idea actually! Might be tricky to draw the line, but at least it's not a line we have you draw yet. We might want to think about other social changes necessary to achieve post-scarcity though, because "powerful automation" in the hands of capitalists has already increased productivity by orders of magnitude without decreasing deprivation by even one order of magnitude, in large part because deprivation is a necessary component of capitalism.
To be extra clear about this: nothing that's called "AI" today is close to being sentient, so these aren't ethical problems we're up against yet. But they might become a lot more relevant soon, plus this thought experiment helps reveal the hypocrisy of the kind of AI hucksters who talk a big game about "alignment" while never mentioning this issue.
#AI #GenAI #AGI

#Blakes7 Series C, Episode 10 - Ultraworld
VILA: Of course. That's the whole idea.
ORAC: I fail to see why I take part in a meaningless, illogical conversation. It doesn't make sense and is therefore a waste of time. I'm shutting down.
htt…

View out the window of the new computer science building looking towards Gates Hall: that's Barton behind Gates and Phillips Hall across the street
#cornell #photo #photography

BREAKING: New Mike Lee Amendment to sell off public lands has been approved to be part of Trump's Big Beautiful Mess.
Senators like Steve Daines will be voting on this bill at any moment and we need to let them know loud and clear that we strongly oppose the sale of ANY of our public lands.
This land belongs to us, and greedy billionaire developers can't have it.
Add your name to make your voice heard:

Tell Republicans to vote NO on selling our Public Lands »

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.04990 has been replaced.
link: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=a

The possibility for panspermia in the galaxy by means of planetary dust grains
By obtaining the assumption that planetary dust particles can escape from the gravitational attraction of a planet, we consider the possibility for the dust grains to leave the star's system by means of the radiation pressure. By taking the typical dust parameters into account, we consider their dynamics and show that they can reach the deep cosmos, taking part in panspermia. It has been shown that, during $5$ billion years, the dust grains will reach $10^5$ stellar systems, and by taking the D…

The making of the ‘NFL Top 100,’ and our complicated relationship with it https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6523428/2025/07/31/nfl-top-100-ranking-nfl-network/

It may appear to be looking empty and quiet at the MPS Göttingen right now - but we have been bustling about and are very busy getting everything ready for our visitors at the Night of Science tomorrow! Care for a few sneak previews in today's thread?
@…
#ndwgoe

Somehow we made this part of the Queensboro Bridge worse. This is a 3-4ft wide two-way bike lane. There's so much wrong with this, from the metal manhole cover taking up almost the entire width of the bike lane, to the MUTCD-violating usage of sharrows, to those shitty rumble strip/speed bump things THAT ARE LOOSE.
Wtaf! #bikeNYC
@…

Chebotarev type results for composite group order Part 1: square free natural numbers
Andrei Caragea, Dae Gwan Lee, Romanos Malikiosis, Goetz E. Pfander
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.24326

Chebotarev type results for composite group order Part 1: square free natural numbers
Chebotarev's Fourier minor theorem states that all minors of discrete Fourier matrices of prime order are nonzero. This property only holds in the prime order case, but for some composites it can be shown that at least all principal minors are nonzero. To establish such cases for square free composites is the goal of this paper. In a subsequent paper we discuss composites containing squares.

The making of the ‘NFL Top 100,’ and our complicated relationship with it https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6523428/2025/07/31/nfl-top-100-ranking-nfl-network/

Identification and photometric classification of extragalactic transients in the Vera C. Rubin Observatory's Data Preview 1
James Freeburn, Igor Andreoni, Kaylee M. de Soto, Cristina Andrade, Akash Anumarlapudi, Tyler Barna, Jonathan Carney, Sushant Sharma Chaudhary, Michael W. Coughlin, Felipe Fontinele Nunes, Sarah Teague, Mickael Rigault, V. Ashley Villar

Identification and photometric classification of extragalactic transients in the Vera C. Rubin Observatory's Data Preview 1
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory will soon survey the southern sky, delivering a depth and sky coverage that is unprecedented in time domain astronomy. As part of commissioning, Data Preview 1 (DP1) has been released. It comprises a ComCam observing campaign between November and December 2024 with multi-band imaging of seven fields, covering roughly 0.4 square degree each, provides a first glimpse into the data products that will become available once the Legacy Survey of Space and Time begins. In…

People, Iran can't close the strait of #Hormuz. It doesn't belong to them. It's not like Turkey's Bosphorus: there's Oman on the other side. They can close their part of it but that's it, and most sea traffic goes through Omani waters anyway.
And if they target ships sailing in foreign waters they risk starting a full war with all the other Gulf states, some of which…

Portal: completed, again
Steam was released for the Mac in the last week, and as part of the initial offer you can get Portal for free. In fact, I'd get Portal for free anyway, because they're saying that if you bought it for PC, they consider you bought it for Mac as well. Very generous of them. So I've completed Portal's main story for the fourth time (PC, PC with commentary, Xbox 360, Mac).

The making of the ‘NFL Top 100,’ and our complicated relationship with it https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6523428/2025/07/31/nfl-top-100-ranking-nfl-network/

Some of the same people who (correctly) say body shaming is wrong will then go on to shame the looks of a newlywed wealthy couple. It's OK because their wealth is ill gotten?
I mean, let us despise the couple (or part thereof) for something objectively bad, and there's plenty of that. 🙇‍♂️

We don’t know about you, but we’re excited for the next instalment of Tech Pizza Monday: Sticker Club!
Bring your stickers, patches and pins for display and potential trading. If you just want to part with them and be happy in the knowledge that they will get the love they deserve, that’s OK too!
#Toronto

Mathematicians, a plea for understanding. Or at least I point out a curiosity.
I was playing around in ivy (high precision calculator) with Stirling's approximation and noticed something. I compute (Stirling N)/N! for successive powers of 10:
approx 10 100 1000 10000 100000 1000000
0.99170403955606148634 0.99916701656784300017 0.99991667014156998579 0.99999166670139157019 0.99999916666701389157 0.99999991666667013889
The successive approximations improve (approach 1.0) by one decimal digit of result for each digit of argument, but that's not the curious part. The curious part happens after the 9's: the result seems to be trending towards a limit of 0.9...166666...... It adds not only a 9 for each input digit, it extends the next part by a digit 6 for every factor of 10. Now 1/6 is 0.166666 and that makes me think there's something going on here.
Is this true? Is it known? Is it proven?

It's weird being told that "jail" and "prison" have distinct meanings (pre and post conviction) when MoJ and HMPPS apparently use the terms interchangeably.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/first-prisoners-arrive-at-new-1500-place-j…

First prisoners arrive at new 1,500-place jail
The first prisoners have been locked up at a new jail that will create nearly 1,500 prison places, helping to cut crime and make streets safer today as part of the Government’s Plan for Change (23 April).

After Houston's Astrodome sits empty two decades plus, support fades for preservation. Despite the better-than-most case for genuine landmark status that can be made for the first indoor baseball stadium. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/26/us/hous…

Houston’s Astrodome Was a Vision of the Future. It’s Past Its Prime.
Once a wonder of the world, the storied but moldering stadium has long been part of life in Houston. Is it worth saving?

How popular media gets love wrong
Had some thoughts in response to a post about loneliness on here. As the author emphasized, reassurances from people who got lucky are not terribly comforting to those who didn't, especially when the person who was lucky had structural factors in their favor that made their chances of success much higher than those is their audience. So: these are just my thoughts, and may not have any bearing on your life. I share them because my experience challenged a lot of the things I was taught to believe about love, and I think my current beliefs are both truer and would benefit others seeing companionship.
We're taught in many modern societies from an absurdly young age that love is not something under our control, and that dating should be a process of trying to kindle love with different people until we meet "the one" with whom it takes off. In the slightly-less-fairytale corners of modern popular media, we might fund an admission that it's possible to influence love, feeding & tending the fire in better or worse ways. But it's still modeled as an uncontrollable force of nature, to be occasionally influenced but never tamed. I'll call this the "fire" model of love.
We're also taught (and non-boys are taught more stringently) a second contradictory model of love: that in a relationship, we need to both do things and be things in order to make our partner love us, and that if we don't, our partner's love for us will wither, and (especially if you're not a boy) it will be our fault. I'll call this the "appeal" model of love.
Now obviously both of these cannot be totally true at once, and plenty of popular media centers this contradiction, but there are really very few competing models on offer.
In my experience, however, it's possible to have "pre-meditated" love. In other words, to decide you want to love someone (or at least, try loving them), commit to that idea, and then actually wind up in love with them (and them with you, although obviously this second part is not directly under your control). I'll call this the "engineered" model of love.
Now, I don't think that the "fire" and "appeal" models of love are totally wrong, but I do feel their shortcomings often suggest poor & self-destructive relationship strategies. I do think the "fire" model is a decent model for *infatuation*, which is something a lot of popular media blur into love, and which drives many (but not all) of the feelings we normally associate with love (even as those feelings have other possible drivers too). I definitely experienced strong infatuation early on in my engineered relationship (ugh that sounds terrible but I'll stick with it; I promise no deception was involved). I continue to experience mild infatuation years later that waxes and wanes. It's not a stable foundation for a relationship but it can be a useful component of one (this at least popular media depicts often).
I'll continue these thoughts in a reply, by it might take a bit to get to it.
#relationships

The reason it looks strange to use the 100% TAX name is because the only profiles I show are part of guilds that have 0% tax.
It is because privately I have guilds with 100% tax but that's not the case for the profiles I share here where the guild's name is ie. Mastodon Fediverse Unity or something like that.
That is why I now added a 100%/0% TAX modification to my profile name.
#AlbionOnline

Firefox 141.0 released with "a local AI model" that can perform tab grouping.
If that's really the best use for an "AI" in a browser, then please stop trying to shove it in, will you? And no, I'm not dissing the "local" part at all - any cloud AI models used by any browser coming near me are immediately disabled!
Reference:

Calamus 37 A leaf for hand in hand!
I continue to have little patience for these Whitman entreaties to American unity. The recitation of place names does little for me. But I do appreciate that he's talking more about loving unity between men than some abstract political message.
You friendly boatmen and mechanics! You roughs! ...
I wish to infuse myself among you till I see it common for you to walk hand in hand.
That's the gay part there. It's pretty mild, but still seems striking of talking about two boatmen or mechanics walking holding hands. One might even see an appeal to rough trade.
I am beginning to understand this Whitman concept of "adhesiveness", a brotherly love that could unify a nation. I still prefer a more sexual gay reading but I think his poems work in both ways.

A look at OneChronos, as it seeks to create "smart markets" that would allow firms to trade GPU compute like other commodities, such as electricity and oil (Alex Konrad/Upstarts Media)
https://www.upstartsmedia.com/p/one-chronos-auctionomics-launc…

OneChronos And Auctionomics Launch First Auction Market For GPU Compute
Startup OneChronos teamed up with prize-winning economist Paul Milgrom of Auctionomics to develop the world's first financial market for GPU compute. Now comes the hard part.

I loved this tee-shirt when it was new (purchased a decade ago from a specialty shop in St John's, NL). Now that it's on its second life as home-renovation clothing, I think I may like it even more. You see, my handyman skills are not exactly legendary.

Finally finished this piece, which was brilliant enough that I couldn't scroll my timeline further until I had finally read all 13,000 words.
It pretty much encapsulates everything I've seen in the United States for the last 20 years, the mentality of some of the people I deal with in course of playing music for a living, and in the organizations that I have to be a part of.

The Era Of The Business Idiot
Fair warning: this is the longest thing I've written on this newsletter. I do apologize. Soundtrack: EL-P - $4 Vic Listen to my podcast Better Offline. We have merch. Last week, Bloomberg profiled Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, revealing that he's either a liar or a specific kind of idiot. The

Today in “silly billboards in my community”. The first is by the very “truthful” (/s) people at LNGfacts.ca. Of course, the word "LNGfacts" does not appear anywhere in the dictionary because it's made up nonsense. Just like the "fact" that LNG “makes Canada stronger”... like we're going to win the war in Ukraine with our LNG or fend off #TheAmericanFascist. (Note: LNG is a tool of fascists not the other way around)
This billboard used to say “BC LNG WILL REDUCE GLOBAL EMISSIONS”... with a link to ‘bclnghelps.ca' but that was so clearly a lie that they were forced by the courts to remove it and delete their website, but I made a website instead in their honour called: bclngburns.ca
Back to today's billbboard though... Here's a fact from February 2025: “European LNG imports fell by 19% in 2024 as gas consumption reached an 11-year low, thanks, in part, to renewable energy additions.” (#BCPoli #BCLNG #ClimateAction #ClimateEmergency #ExtinctionRebellion #LNG #NaturalGas #Europe #EU #Ukraine #Russia

Here's an article on the still-racist Grok "AI".
In the article is a chunk of Python code that was generated by Grok.
What a stinkin' pile of code.
It is really simple code, but it has unacceptably weak error detection and handling that would give a user almost no useful information if something goes awry.
The hardest (and largest part) of most code (at least the code I work with) is validating inputs and handling errors. It is the most boring part …

Elon Musk Updated Grok. Guess What It Said?
After praising Hitler earlier this week, the chatbot is now listing the “good races.”

okay. took 5 -10 tries but if you accept that's part of Expedition 33 it's not so bad.
I really want a battle restart option though because 1 wrong parry and the battle could easily be over.
#videogames #jrpg

As Trump's tariffs cut off the US from imports and as he deports the core of the US labor force, I think about the fact that tariffs and other import taxes were a major part of the lead up to the Revolutionary War. It's no coincidence that a bunch of the Founding Fathers were smugglers.
The logistics of the resistance and the logistics of the population were intertwined, meaning that it was not always possible to attack resistance logistics without alienating the population.
All this is worth keeping in mind right now.
#USPol

Some of the stuff that this guy is saying sounds like the mumbo jumbo you hear in the final act of some animes. GITS part 2 or „Stand-Alone Complex“ for example, where the bad guy is dumping exposition about the universe. You wonder what the author was smoking and can’t follow but you keep watching because of cool mecha action and explosions.
„The non-governmental system isolates you, mirrors you…“ „It lives in soft compliance delays“… yadda yadda. Your brain on ChatGPT.

In Ursula K. Le Guin's "A Man of the People" (part of "Four Ways to Forgiveness") there's a scene where the Hainish protagonist begins studying history. It's excellent in many respects, but what stood out the most to me was the softly incomprehensible idea of a people with multiple millions of years of recorded history. As one's mind starts to try to trace out the implications of that, it dawns on you that you can't actually comprehend the concept. Like, you read the sentence & understood all the words, and at first you were able to assemble them into what seemed like a conceptual understanding, but as you started to try to fill out that understating, it began to slip away, until you realized you didn't in fact have the mental capacity to build a full understanding and would have you paper things over with a shallow placeholder instead.
I absolutely love that feeling, as one of the ways in which reading science fiction can stretch the brain, and I connected it to a similar moment in Tsutomu Nihei's BLAME, where the android protagonists need to ride an elevator through the civilization/galaxy-spanning megastructure, and turn themselves off for *millions of years* to wait out the ride.
I'm not sure why exactly these scenes feel more beautifully incomprehensible than your run-of-the-mill "then they traveled at lightspeed for a millennia, leaving all their family behind" scene, other than perhaps the authors approach them without trying to use much metaphor to make them more comprehensible (or they use metaphor to emphasize their incomprehensibility).
Do you have a favorite mind=expanded scene of this nature?
#AmReading

One of the problems with vibe coding is that the hardest part of software engineering is not writing the code, rather it's *choosing* what to code, and designing the system (and, later on, maintaining the code/operations/etc)
The barriers and investment cost to writing code is itself a *desirable* aspect of software engineering because it forces you to make careful, good choices before you invest in building something
Because the majority of the time spent writing, say, curl,…

50 years of reunification, the end of the second Indochina war, #Vietnam had a blast with a mammoth celebration. The nationalism is troubled but it goes strong. An entire day of a parade in Saigon and on TV, and we had a tank in the newspaper 🤷
Interesting, since it’s the final days abroad for us

This grassy field has always been a beautiful buffer between the river and the train tracks that service the local waste management company that owns it. This time of year, wildflowers and butterflies are everywhere and it’s one of the highlights on this part of the greenway.
This week, I’ve noticed it’s suddenly begun to accumulate vintage fire and rescue vehicles. I don’t know what to make of it, but I hope it’s temporary.

... and in the not so beautiful but timely category, here's the crane that's at work building the Peter Meinig Fieldhouse that I walked by on the way to work that morning
#photo #photography #cornell

More Jams and Experiments
I got tired of creating basslines that didn't fit with the chords I had in mind, so this time I played the synth part before the bass. It's just an Am-G vamp. The guitar is my Epiphone ES-175 Premium. They only made these in 2014, but of course the original Gibson ES-175's date from 1957, I think. The synth is Yoshimi, an old synth that works in Linux.

Hecke polynomials for the mock modular form arising from the Delta-function
Kevin Gomez, Ken Ono
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.17178 https://

Hecke polynomials for the mock modular form arising from the Delta-function
We consider a mock modular form $M_Δ(τ)$ that arises naturally from Ramanujan's Delta-function. It is a weight $-10$ harmonic Maass form whose nonholomorphic part is the "period integral function'' of $Δ(τ)$. The Hecke operator $T_{-10}(m)$ acts on this mock modular form in terms of Ramanujan's $τ(m)$ and a monic degree $m$ polynomial $F_m(x),$ evaluated at $x=j(τ).$ In analogy with results by Asai, Kaneko, and Ninomiya on the zeros of Hecke polynomials for the $j$-function, we prove that…

Don't be afraid. It's just the part of my body that looks like a werewolf.

Tomorrow is the start of Toronto Tech Week! That only really coincides with Tech Pizza Monday, as we have decided to not be a part of it, so in the great tradition of TV programs trying to attract an audience by mentioning the show that runs at the same time, we are calling it counterprogramming. If you would like to join us, come over to Victory Cafe, 440 Bloor St. W., at 6 PM on Monday, June 23rd. #Toronto

AutoPartGen: Autogressive 3D Part Generation and Discovery
Minghao Chen, Jianyuan Wang, Roman Shapovalov, Tom Monnier, Hyunyoung Jung, Dilin Wang, Rakesh Ranjan, Iro Laina, Andrea Vedaldi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.13346

AutoPartGen: Autogressive 3D Part Generation and Discovery
We introduce AutoPartGen, a model that generates objects composed of 3D parts in an autoregressive manner. This model can take as input an image of an object, 2D masks of the object's parts, or an existing 3D object, and generate a corresponding compositional 3D reconstruction. Our approach builds upon 3DShape2VecSet, a recent latent 3D representation with powerful geometric expressiveness. We observe that this latent space exhibits strong compositional properties, making it particularly well-s…

Slow progress the last couple days because I've been going into the office for work and the commute is eating up my time I'd otherwise spend on such things.
But now it's the weekend and the switch engine board is coming together nicely.
Still have 514 nets to route - mostly the supervisor, line card management buses, and power supply but also some other odds and ends like the FPGA JTAG and part of the SPI flash.
Also I have to get the tach/PWM signals from the m…

It's kind of baffling how easily programmers shoot themselves in the foot with "productivity" tools.
AI is the latest example, but it's part of a long and rich history of people spending ages setting up vast and intricate tool chains that require nothing but maintenance and mental bandwidth.
Why are we so bad at this? Why can't we have stronger simplicity biases, and wait until things are necessary?

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.15790 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arX…

Experimental demonstration of electric power generation from Earth's rotation through its own magnetic field
Earth rotates through the axisymmetric part of its own magnetic field, but a simple proof shows that it is impossible to use this to generate electricity in a conductor rotating with Earth.However, we previously identified implicit assumptions underlying this proof and showed theoretically that these could be violated and the proof circumvented. This requires using a soft magnetic material with a topology satisfying a particular mathematical condition and a composition and scale favoring magnet…

In the end it seems to me that one of the main distinctions between people who see LLMs as good and those who don't is whether they see the digital part of the world as "content" or "people".
If it's all just content, LLMs make sense. If it's where people live LLMs become a somewhat dumb idea.

"For the first time, we architected every part of the rack as a unified system," Su explained, highlighting Helios as "really a rack that functions like a single, massive compute engine."
http://m.timesofindia.com/articleshow/121834703.cms
Why does th…

AMD unveils next-gen AI chips as it takes on Nvidia: 'For the first time, we...' CEO Lisa Su says - The Times of India
Tech News : AMD has revealed its Instinct MI400 series AI chips, designed for rack-scale systems and set to compete with Nvidia's Blackwell. CEO Lisa Su highlight

Gemini, especially with "research" mode has this vibe of 2000 Internet where knowledge was right there, about nearly anything, without SEO bullshit and ads.
This time it's much faster and better, for the most part.
Unpopular: I think this will cause a renaissance of world wide web. All that bullshit SEO driven websites will die, those made by passionate people and specialists will prevail (because we don't care) and we will get even more traffic than now due t…

Calamus 24 I hear it is charged against me
This poem feels just so typically Whitman, but lesser somehow. Not one of my favorites.
He says he is "charged that I seek to destroy institutions". Charged by whom, one wonders, is he really so important? He sort of denies this, or is ambivalent to it, and then gets to the queer part:
I will establish ... the institution of the dear love of comrades
And here we are again at the central queer question: just what does he mean by "dear love of comrades"? As I read these poems I'm increasingly thinking it's both things. Sure, it's brotherly love, adhesiveness, a sort of robust fraternity. But so much of his writing and life is homoerotic it has to also have that charge. It can be both.
I feel like I've heard that phrase "the institution of the dear love of comrades" repeated often.

LLM coding is the opposite of DRY
An important principle in software engineering is DRY: Don't Repeat Yourself. We recognize that having the same code copied in more than one place is bad for several reasons:
1. It makes the entire codebase harder to read.
2. It increases maintenance burden, since any problems in the duplicated code need to be solved in more than one place.
3. Because it becomes possible for the copies to drift apart if changes to one aren't transferred to the other (maybe the person making the change has forgotten there was a copy) it makes the code more error-prone and harder to debug.
All modern programming languages make it almost entirely unnecessary to repeat code: we can move the repeated code into a "function" or "module" and then reference it from all the different places it's needed. At a larger scale, someone might write an open-source "library" of such functions or modules and instead of re-implementing that functionality ourselves, we can use their code, with an acknowledgement. Using another person's library this way is complicated, because now you're dependent on them: if they stop maintaining it or introduce bugs, you've inherited a problem, but still, you could always copy their project and maintain your own version, and it would be not much more work than if you had implemented stuff yourself from the start. It's a little more complicated than this, but the basic principle holds, and it's a foundational one for software development in general and the open-source movement in particular. The network of "citations" as open-source software builds on other open-source software and people contribute patches to each others' projects is a lot of what makes the movement into a community, and it can lead to collaborations that drive further development. So the DRY principle is important at both small and large scales.
Unfortunately, the current crop of hyped-up LLM coding systems from the big players are antithetical to DRY at all scales:
- At the library scale, they train on open source software but then (with some unknown frequency) replicate parts of it line-for-line *without* any citation [1]. The person who was using the LLM has no way of knowing that this happened, or even any way to check for it. In theory the LLM company could build a system for this, but it's not likely to be profitable unless the courts actually start punishing these license violations, which doesn't seem likely based on results so far and the difficulty of finding out that the violations are happening. By creating these copies (and also mash-ups, along with lots of less-problematic stuff), the LLM users (enabled and encouraged by the LLM-peddlers) are directly undermining the DRY principle. If we see what the big AI companies claim to want, which is a massive shift towards machine-authored code, DRY at the library scale will effectively be dead, with each new project simply re-implementing the functionality it needs instead of every using a library. This might seem to have some upside, since dependency hell is a thing, but the downside in terms of comprehensibility and therefore maintainability, correctness, and security will be massive. The eventual lack of new high-quality DRY-respecting code to train the models on will only make this problem worse.
- At the module & function level, AI is probably prone to re-writing rather than re-using the functions or needs, especially with a workflow where a human prompts it for many independent completions. This part I don't have direct evidence for, since I don't use LLM coding models myself except in very specific circumstances because it's not generally ethical to do so. I do know that when it tries to call existing functions, it often guesses incorrectly about the parameters they need, which I'm sure is a headache and source of bugs for the vibe coders out there. An AI could be designed to take more context into account and use existing lookup tools to get accurate function signatures and use them when generating function calls, but even though that would probably significantly improve output quality, I suspect it's the kind of thing that would be seen as too-baroque and thus not a priority. Would love to hear I'm wrong about any of this, but I suspect the consequences are that any medium-or-larger sized codebase written with LLM tools will have significant bloat from duplicate functionality, and will have places where better use of existing libraries would have made the code simpler. At a fundamental level, a principle like DRY is not something that current LLM training techniques are able to learn, and while they can imitate it from their training sets to some degree when asked for large amounts of code, when prompted for many smaller chunks, they're asymptotically likely to violate it.
I think this is an important critique in part because it cuts against the argument that "LLMs are the modern compliers, if you reject them you're just like the people who wanted to keep hand-writing assembly code, and you'll be just as obsolete." Compilers actually represented a great win for abstraction, encapsulation, and DRY in general, and they supported and are integral to open source development, whereas LLMs are set to do the opposite.
[1] to see what this looks like in action in prose, see the example on page 30 of the NYTimes copyright complaint against OpenAI (#AI #GenAI #LLMs #VibeCoding

Nottingham, short visit rent or housesit, anyone know a place?
Nottingham-related #AskFedi: anyone know of a Nottingham-area house or flat that's going to be empty over part or all of the summer? and that's potentially rentable for not too much for a few days, or wants house-sitting for a while?
It would be so that me and a friend/colleague could go and use the space to do some writing work together. We are reliable conscientious old(ish) people who'd leave it clean and not be any bother :-)
Boosts very welcome.
#Nottingham #AskFedi

"White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller says President Donald Trump is looking for ways to expand its legal power to deport migrants who are in the United States illegally. To achieve that, he says the administration is “actively looking at” suspending habeas corpus, . ."

Trump team mulls suspending habeas corpus to speed deportations. Can it?
Top White House aide Stephen Miller says the Trump administration is looking for ways to expand its legal power to deport migrants who are in the United States illegally. To achieve that, he says President Donald Trump’s team is “actively looking at” suspending habeas corpus, the constitutional right for people to legally challenge their detention by the government. Such a move would be aimed at migrants as part of the Republican president’s broader crackdown at the U.S.-Mexico border. …

"There's one way to end this war. You say to Vladimir Putin:
If you don't stop this war, and we agree to the ceasefire terms I dictate, we are bringing Ukraine into NATO within 30 days. Which part of that sentence don't you understand? Do you want to mess with me? Test me.
That's how you end this war."
https://

It’s official. Spain will not be part of the 5% NATO club anytime soon. #nato
“Last year, Spain spent 1.28% per NATO estimates on military expenditure, making it the alliance’s lowest spender. In April, Sšnchez announced that the government would raise defense spending to 2% this year, a move that he received pushback for at home including from some allies.”
https://flipboard.com/@associatedpress/international-news-miluvhmaz/-/a-5474v_JLSsmGm00Dw93SHg:a:3199720-/0

now that we have all collectively seen and acknowledged palantir fuel the efforts of the fascist US regime,
can we also collectively get rid of people who think even criticizing palantir is worthy of exclusion?
(yes, i'm looking at you, guy who was proud to shake dtolnay's hand and told us all about it. you're a part of the problem! you know who you are)

Tell your Senators to vote NO on massive cuts to public media:
https://www.marketplace.org/action
This is a blatant attack on the only part of the media ecosystem that is resilient against political influence and control. That makes it the most valuable part. That's why the Rep…

#ProtectMyPublicMedia

Do transit planners realize they're helping the anti-Mamdani frenzy by publishing their pieces? Of *course* you're getting attention for your fares-are-good-actually writing now, despite the fact that no one cares about this normally - because billionaire media wants whatever they can use against Mamdani.
(As an aside, you also sound incredibly obnoxious when voters are like "we want fast & free buses" and you respond with "well actually..")

Jesse Raub (@jesseraub.bsky.social)
damn, it's also like he's already advocating for all of those things as part of his proposal. it's like maybe you didn't even read what his free bus fare policy included

The Luxembourgish government is about to destroy a historic monument! (please boost :boost_ok: )
"Wandmillen" (translating to windmills) is a historic monument located in Val Fleuri, Belair. It is currently in a bad state as it has been ignored for a while.
Luxembourg's main hospital "CHL" has been undergoing heavy construction works for some years now. Recently, articles were published that this historic site is "in the way" of the new constructi…

#ContemporaryContradictions #HashTagGames
Rules: include as many contradictions s you'd like. Can be profound or trivial. Each contradiction is stated via exactly 1 or 2 questions, no statements and not more than 2 questions. Try to group yours into a single post, rather than one post per contradiction, so that it's easier to see more voices when scrolling the hash tag.
Why does "race" work according to the "one drop rule" if you have Black ancestors, but according to "blood quantum" if you have Indigenous ancestors? Who benefits from this arrangement?
Why do we think of seeds as merely a reproduction mechanism for trees, instead of thinking of trees as merely a reproduction mechanism for seeds, especially since some plants can spend millennia as seeds but can survive for only part of a year after sprouting? Are metabolic activity or structural complexity really so important?
If Columbus discovered America, did Batu Khan discover Europe? What is an "Age of Discovery?"
Why don't corporations in the US try to lobby the government for a single-payer healthcare system where the government foots the bill for healthcare instead of companies paying to deeply subsidize their employees' healthcare? What benefit do they gain that's worth that cost, which in other countries is paid for via taxes?
Why is the cost of renting (which gets you zero equity) anywhere close to the cost of a mortgage (which eventually gets you ownership)? If the costs are similar but the benefits are so different, why does anyone ever rent?
Why do we obsess over the fruit/vegetable classification of tomatoes, but not corn, okra, cucumbers, zucchini, etc.?

Robert Reich here, with breaking news:
The House of Representatives has voted to take back a whopping $1.1 billion in federal funding for public broadcasting.
These are huge, crippling cuts,
and if passed by the Senate, they'll be a fatal blow to public radio and television stations around the country.
It's all part of Donald Trump's ongoing war on the free press.
He knows that independent journalism is one of the biggest obstacles to his authorita…

Help Robert Reich get the truth out.
Anything you can give will help us spread the truth, keep you informed, and stop our slide towards fascism.

Two-Person Cooperative Games with delta-Rationality
Fang-Fang Tang, Yongsheng Xu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.16465 https://arxiv.org/p…

Two-Person Cooperative Games with delta-Rationality
A player's payoff is modeled as consisting of two parts: a rational-value part and a distortion-value part. It is argued that the (total) payoff function should be used to explain and predict the behaviors of the players, while the rational value function should be used to conduct welfare analysis of the final outcome. We use the Nash demand game to illustrate our model.

Calamus 26 We two boys together clinging
This is one of the gayest of the Calamus poems, a fantasy of two men against the world, full of life and ardor. I should be all over this in my gay reading!
Instead I see a darker form of Americanism here. "Power enjoying ... Armed and fearless ... No law less than ourselves". It's classic American individualism fantasy, a repudiation of community and law. Armed, at that.
On top of that I trip over the "North and South" part every time I read this. In 1860 when this was published we were just steps away from a Civil War after 10 years of enormous tension. I don't blame Whitman for wanting unity, his whole program in Leaves of Grass is American unity. All I can think is how there's no moral equivalence between the North and South. But Whitman wasn't an abolitionist and this poem reflects that.
Sorry for not reveling in the gay, maybe it's the ICE and California National Guard news affecting my reading today.

AEgIS Experiment at CERN: Design and Commissioning of SARA (Scintillator Assemblies to Reveal Annihilations)
P. Conte, G. Consolati, M. Prata, M. Berghold, R. Caravita, R. Ferguson, M. Grosbart, F. Guatieri, S. Haider, G. Khatri, L. Lappo, P. Moskal, M. M\"unster, L. Penasa, S. Sharma
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.09274…

AEgIS Experiment at CERN: Design and Commissioning of SARA (Scintillator Assemblies to Reveal Annihilations)
SARA is the system of plastic scintillators coupled with silicon photomultipliers that will take part in the AEgIS experiment at CERN, measuring the time-of-flight of antihydrogen as it falls through a moiré deflectometer. Its development focused on simplicity, versatility and economy of the design and was supported by both physical tests and finite elements numerical simulations. The instrument's structure pairs the utilization of the scintillators as structural components with custom made 3D…

Yue-Sai Kan is a Chinese-American television host, producer, author, entrepreneur and humanitarian. Renowned for her work in bridging the gap between China and the United States, she has been nicknamed "The Oprah of China". People, The Observer and ABS News have called her "the most famous woman in China".

I think it's not a coincidence that several of the key players on this Bumrah-less team (Gill, Siraj, Pant, even Washy) were part of that star-bereft, magnificent 20-21 Australia tour. I think that was a seminal learning experience. (And boy has Gill grown as a captain.) #cricket

Um, CNN, the whole "secret" part of secret police is that they wear masks and operate outside of the law. There's no "but" there - they are secret police. Warrantless, going outside the purview of their mission by disappearing US citizens, and so on, it's pretty clear what they are. #FuckICE
Imagine being naive enough to write "apparently to protect age…

southpaw (@nycsouthpaw.bsky.social)
This is not an apt moment to use the word "but." https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/09/politics/ice-cbp-police-los-angeles-immigration

Good electoral reforms. But it's VERY disappointing that Labour clings to first-past-the-post. Not only does FPTP make no sense when there are more than 2 parties, but, most importantly, change to PR could be the only way to prevent a far-right majority in 2029. Wake up!
https:…

16 year olds to be given right to vote through seismic government election reforms
Sixteen year olds will be given the right to vote in all UK elections as part of seismic changes to modernise UK democracy

I stumbled across the Youtube channel of Vanessa Wingårdh. It's nightmare fuel. Not her. But her videos are showing glimpses of social media that I thankfully never have to experience as part of my personal media diet: people who can't bake a cake anymore because ChatGPT is down. Spiritual mumbo jumbo cranked to 11... It's one thing to read articles about this. But seeing actual people who have lost their marbles is frightening. Example:

The State Department formally notified employees on Thursday that it was about to begin layoffs
as part of a consolidation plan that department officials say will reduce bureaucratic bloat
but that critics call a shortsighted blow to American diplomacy.
In an internal message sent to State Department workers on Thursday, Michael J. Rigas, the deputy secretary of state for management and resources, said
the department would “soon” begin notifying U.S. employees who are…

State Department to Soon Begin Mass Layoffs
Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s plan to downsize a “bloated” department had been on hold after a court ruling.

Selberg's Central Limit Theorem weighted by Linear Statistics of Zeta Zeros
Alessandro Fazzari, Maxim Gerspach, Paolo Minelli
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.04150

Selberg's Central Limit Theorem weighted by Linear Statistics of Zeta Zeros
We consider the value distribution of the logarithm of the Riemann zeta function on the critical line, weighted by the local statistics of zeta zeros. We show that, with appropriate normalization, it satisfies a complex Central Limit Theorem, provided that the Fourier support of the test function in the linear statistics is sufficiently small. For the imaginary part, we extend this support condition up to its natural barrier under the Riemann Hypothesis. Finally, we prove that the correlation b…

To give some examples:
When police get vastly differential results at investigating crimes against some groups (e.g., Black women) vs. others (e.g., white men), that's malcompetence. Probably plenty of simple malice involved too, and probably the whole gamut of mechanisms I mentioned in the last post are involved here.
Another example, from my own experience: when I stumble over the names of my non-white students but pronounce my white students' names flawlessly, that's malcompetence on my part, because the net effect of my selective incompetence is to make some students feel less welcome in my classroom, which hurts their learning. I'm my case, the reasons for the incompetence are not conscious nor (I think) unconscious malice, but instead a differential capability picked up from a certain kind of upbringing and then (sometimes) insufficiently mitigated by capability-building effort. Because of how I grew up, my ability to pronounce different names is biased (this is true of everyone in the world; most people don't have a classroom instructor position that causes it to matter so much). When I'm successful at mitigating my malcompetence, I use practice time with student intro videos to pare down my competence gap for the specific students in my class. This is time consuming (several hours per week for the first few weeks of classes) and I'm sad to admit that I don't always invest that time. But it's a great example of malcompetence because I have a introspective access to it.

Canary, which offers hotel guest management tools, raised an $80M Series D led by Brighton Park Capital, valuing the company at about $600M (Dominic-Madori Davis/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/12/hotel-mana…

Hotel management platform Canary nabs $80M Series D from BPC, YC, Insight Partners | TechCrunch
Canary offers a product suite that encompasses every part of the guest journey, from booking to departure. The company offers services that let hotel guests check in on mobile devices or text the front desk for help. And it's leaning into AI in serving its customers’ guests through voice, web, and text with an LLM, sometimes offering instant responses.

After 15 full days in the new house, I think it's time to close off this year-long thread. Some closure on past commentary:
- for the 1st in our lives, we are debt free. Took us nearly 70 years, but we know how incredibly fortunate we are.
- we've dumped our net proceeds from #Downsizing into investments to make sure we aren't tempted to spend it foolishly.
- we kept some funds to fix some issues, including furnace & A/C, water filtration, electrical, eavestroughs, etc.
- my daughter and I are once again fighting galactic aliens online so you can rest easy.
- we've only been to the beach twice, for very short visits, as things have been hectic. Hopefully, we can enjoy that part of our neighborhood as we get into August.
Here is a short video of our 1st walk through just a few minutes before the movers arrived.
#Moving

A while ago, I've followed the example given by #Fedora and unbundled ensurepip wheels from #Python in #Gentoo (just checked — "a while ago" was 3 years ago). This had the important advantage that it enabled us to update these wheels along with the actual pip and setuptools packages, meaning new virtual environments would get fresh versions rather than whatever CPython happened to bundle at the time of release.
I had considered using our system packages to prepare these wheels, but since we were already unbundling dependencies back then, that couldn't work. So I just went with fetching upstream wheels from PyPI. Why not build them from source instead? Well, besides feeling unnecessary (it's not like the PyPI wheels are actually binary packages), we probably didn't have the right kind of eclass support for that at the time.
Inspired by @…, today I've tried preparing new revisions of ensurepip packages that actually do build everything from source. So what changed, and why should building from source matter now? Firstly, as part of the wheel reuse patches, we do have a reasonably clean architecture to grab the wheels created as part of the PEP517 build. Secondly, since we're unbundling dependencies from pip and setuptools, we're effectively testing different packages than these installed as ensurepip wheels — and so it would be meaningful to test both variants. Thirdly, building from source is going to make patching easier, and at the very least enable user patching.
While at it, I've refreshed the test suite runs in all three regular packages (pip, setuptools and wheel — we need an "ensurepip" wheel for the last because of test suites). And of course, I hit some test failures in testing the versions with bundled dependencies, and I've discovered a random bug in #PyPy.
https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo/pull/42882 (yes, we haven't moved yet)
https://github.com/pypy/pypy/issues/5306

It's Robert Reich.
The final vote on the fate of public broadcasting is happening NEXT WEEK.
Donald Trump is demanding that Congress ❌ claw back a whopping $1.1 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the agency that funds public radio and television. 
Trump is hell-bent on taking away these funds as part of his authoritarian assault on the free press.
He can only afford to lose 3 Republican senators.
4 have publicly said they oppose the defun…

Help Robert Reich get the truth out.
Anything you can give will help us spread the truth, keep you informed, and stop our slide towards fascism.

EAST VAN VODVILLE
CINEMA
https://www.littlefreecinema.org

Trump and other Republicans have long criticized states that take weeks to count their ballots after election day.
This year has seen a flurry of activity to address it.
Part of Trump’s executive order on elections, signed in March but held up by lawsuits,
takes aim at one of the main reasons for late vote counts:
Many states allow mailed ballots to be counted even if they arrive after election day.
⚠️ The U.S. Supreme Court last month said it would consider w…

A triangular moth I saw in the woods yesterday amid the wreckage of leaves that it ate
#photo #photography #moth #insect

AI, AGI, and learning efficiency
My 4-month-old kid is not DDoSing Wikipedia right now, nor will they ever do so before learning to speak, read, or write. Their entire "training corpus" will not top even 100 million "tokens" before they can speak & understand language, and do so with real intentionally.
Just to emphasize that point: 100 words-per-minute times 60 minutes-per-hour times 12 hours-per-day times 365 days-per-year times 4 years is a mere 105,120,000 words. That's a ludicrously *high* estimate of words-per-minute and hours-per-day, and 4 years old (the age of my other kid) is well after basic speech capabilities are developed in many children, etc. More likely the available "training data" is at least 1 or 2 orders of magnitude less than this.
The point here is that large language models, trained as they are on multiple *billions* of tokens, are not developing their behavioral capabilities in a way that's remotely similar to humans, even if you believe those capabilities are similar (they are by certain very biased ways of measurement; they very much aren't by others). This idea that humans must be naturally good at acquiring language is an old one (see e.g. #AI #LLM #AGI

lots of flowers now in the alt-grass including a new white and purple one! And the strawberries are ripe under the growing 🍎 tree!
It's weird when the driveway is the most productive part of the yard!
The hope though is that this is a preview of what our backyard will become over the next couple years. 🤞
Also managed to put the trailer back in its spot. The grass seems tough enough now to handle the traffic.
#bloomscrolling #altgrass #portalberni #yard #diy