@mpsgoettingen@academiccloud.social2025-06-03 10:49:03
Face to face with solar telescopes, meteorites and exoplanets: For the 6th Night of Science on June 21st 2025 in Göttingen, the MPI for Solar System Research is offering a full program of hands-on activities, lectures, guided tours, and unique exhibits.
Infos by MPS: https://www.mps.mpg.de/night-of-science-20
@tiotasram@kolektiva.social2025-07-03 15:21:37
#ScribesAndMakers for July 3: When (and if) you procrastinate, what do you do? If you don't, what do you do to avoid it?
I'll swap right out of programming to read a book, play a video game, or watch some anime. Often got things open in other windows so it's as simple as alt-tab.
I've noticed recently I tend to do this more often when I have a hard problem to solve that I'm not 100% sure about. I definitely have cycles of better & worse motivation and I've gotten to a place where I'm pretty relaxed about it instead of feeling guilty. I work how I work, and that includes cycles of rest, and that's enough (at least, for me it has been so far, and I'm in a comfortable career, married with 2 kids).
Some projects ultimately lose steam and get abandoned, and I've learned to accept that too. I learn a lot and grow from each project, so nothing is a true waste of time, and there remains plenty of future ahead of me to achieve cool things.
The procrastination does sometimes impact my wife & kids, and that's something I do sometimes feel bad about, but I think I keep that in check well enough, and for things my wife worries about, I usually don't procrastinate those too much (used to be worse about this).
Right now I'm procrastinating a big work project by working on a hobby project instead. The work project probably won't get done by the start of the semester as a result. But as I remind myself, my work doesn't actually pay me to work during the summer, and things will be okay without the work project being finished until later.
When I want to force myself into a more productive cycle, talking to people about project details sometimes helps, as does finding some new tech I can learn about by shoehorning it into a project. Have been thinking about talking to a rubber duck, but haven't motivated myself to try that yet, and I'm not really in doldrums right now.
@Sustainable2050@mastodon.energy2025-08-02 19:27:19
Photo of the Day.
Israel threatened reprisals if the press filmed Gaza from above during airdrops.
This is why. A scene of destroyed & burnt out buildings in what is left of Gaza City, the pre-war home to 800,000 people.
Credit to Post photographer Heidi Levine who defied the ban & took this.
[Post by @newseye on Bluesky: …
@leftsidestory@mstdn.social2025-07-04 00:30:00
@deprogrammaticaipsum@mas.to2025-06-02 17:53:49
"My vision of a world with computers is a world in which people have a lot more time to do what they like. Playing tennis, jogging… they’ll have plenty of time to go to the shore. I’d go to the library. I could do my work at home. I could have a computer at home and talk to my office. I could live up on top of a nice mountain in New Hampshire and smell pine trees and it would be the same as if I were here in the sub-sub-subbasement of the Pentagon."
– Grace Hopper
@penguin42@mastodon.org.uk2025-06-02 17:57:26
It's June, so I've got my Javastation off the shelf for the first time in a couple of decades. This is a Javastation Krups, with 100MHz sparc, sold as a diskless workstation. I never realised it had a PPP ROM boot in! Anyway, I should get on and set up networking and a boot server.
(Note: the plastic on the clips on the doors is fragile, 2 just pinged off on me)
#retrocomputing
@Techmeme@techhub.social2025-07-02 16:40:40
ICEBlock, an app for reporting sightings of ICE officials, was the top free app in the US App Store on Tuesday; the app claims to collect no personal data (Emma Roth/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/696584/iceblock-tracking-app-white-house-…
@tiotasram@kolektiva.social2025-08-02 13:28:40
How to tell a vibe coder of lying when they say they check their code.
People who will admit to using LLMs to write code will usually claim that they "carefully check" the output since we all know that LLM code has a lot of errors in it. This is insufficient to address several problems that LLMs cause, including labor issues, digital commons stress/pollution, license violation, and environmental issues, but at least it's they are checking their code carefully we shouldn't assume that it's any worse quality-wise than human-authored code, right?
Well, from principles alone we can expect it to be worse, since checking code the AI wrote is a much more boring task than writing code yourself, so anyone who has ever studied human-computer interaction even a little bit can predict people will quickly slack off, stating to trust the AI way too much, because it's less work. I'm a different domain, the journalist who published an entire "summer reading list" full of nonexistent titles is a great example of this. I'm sure he also intended to carefully check the AI output, but then got lazy. Clearly he did not have a good grasp of the likely failure modes of the tool he was using.
But for vibe coders, there's one easy tell we can look for, at least in some cases: coding in Python without type hints. To be clear, this doesn't apply to novice coders, who might not be aware that type hints are an option. But any serious Python software engineer, whether they used type hints before or not, would know that they're an option. And if you know they're an option, you also know they're an excellent tool for catching code defects, with a very low effort:reward ratio, especially if we assume an LLM generates them. Of the cases where adding types requires any thought at all, 95% of them offer chances to improve your code design and make it more robust. Knowing about but not using type hints in Python is a great sign that you don't care very much about code quality. That's totally fine in many cases: I've got a few demos or jam games in Python with no type hints, and it's okay that they're buggy. I was never going to debug them to a polished level anyways. But if we're talking about a vibe coder who claims that they're taking extra care to check for the (frequent) LLM-induced errors, that's not the situation.
Note that this shouldn't be read as an endorsement of vibe coding for demos or other rough-is-acceptable code: the other ethical issues I skipped past at the start still make it unethical to use in all but a few cases (for example, I have my students use it for a single assignment so they can see for themselves how it's not all it's cracked up to be, and even then they have an option to observe a pre-recorded prompt session instead).
@leftsidestory@mstdn.social2025-08-04 00:30:06
@deprogrammaticaipsum@mas.to2025-06-02 17:49:30
"The RDBMS field is so young, we can actually see it grow through the pages of computer magazines of the 1980s. BYTE Magazine had its first issue dedicated to databases in November 1981, and then another one in October 1984. Dr. Dobb’s Journal did not feature an article about databases until 1984 and did not have many more throughout the decade; actually most of them were authored by Gene Head, and talk about dBASE."