Tootfinder

If you've watched a YouTube video in the last few years, you know this is going to work. 😂 Who isn't holding their microphone these days? https://www.threads.com/@chriswelch/post/DOvmOquDkIa

Chris Welch (@chriswelch) on Threads
Nothing's Ear 3 earbuds add some metal flair to the company's signature transparent look. But their biggest new trick is the ability to use the charging case as a microphone for clearer voice calls. ...Is that something you'd do? https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-18/nothing-debuts-179-ear-3-earbuds-with-microphone-in-the-charging-case?srnd=phx-technology

🔌 UEC-LLR: The Future Of Loss Recovery In Ethernet For AI And HPC
(... not just useful for AI but these days some people can't write a heaadline without it!)
https://semiengineering.com/uec-llr-the-future-of-loss-recovery-in-ethernet-for-…

UEC-LLR: The Future Of Loss Recovery In Ethernet For AI And HPC
Link layer retry fixes packet loss locally and avoids expensive recovery mechanisms.

@… #ListeningClub Are you feeling any better these days? Over a month on your back after a round of chemo sounds rough!

🇺🇦 Auf radioeins läuft...
Waldeck:
🎵 One Of These Days
#NowPlaying #Waldeck
https://open.spotify.com/track/37wmHUvJl1XFdwcXADvDSs

I'm prejudiced towards barbed wire. Whenever I see a recent house, with children playing in the front yard, surrounded by a fancy fence with a barbed wire on top, I can't help but think "a nazi".
However, the brick fences with pieces of broken glass on top are even worse. But I really do hope these are only historical relics these days.

"Air pollution from wood burning and gas cooking is massively costly to our healthcare systems and the economy. These are the conclusions of a peer-reviewed study from New Zealand that calculated the cost of hospital treatment, days off ill and early deaths from the air pollution produced by fireplaces, stoves, gas cooking and un-flued room heaters."

Day 23: Thi Bui
Indirect CW: parental neglect, war, intergenerational trauma
Bui is the author of "The Best We Could Do", a graphic memoir which explores her relationship with her parents and unpacks some of the intergenerational trauma coming out of the Vietnam War. It has a lot of wisdom to offer about both dealing with troubled parents as a 1.5th-generation immigrant, and it delves deeply into her parents' histories in Vietnam and the complexities of the situation there both in the north and in the south. It's beautifully illustrated and very nicely plotted together given all the disparate threads it is working with.
I haven't read any of Bui's other work, but it looks like she's published a picture book for kids as well as a series of short comics during the pandemic. Besides Oseman who also writes non-illustrated fiction and the two manga artists Ice mentioned, Bui is the first graphic novel author I've included here, but I've actually got quite a few of them in my longer list, one of whom may make it into the 30 I'll include in this thread. These days I'm reading a bunch of graphic novels since they're easy to get through, and the variety of stories and perspectives in that space is wonderful these days, with a huge array of indie stuff that probably never would have gotten off the ground in traditional publishing/comics spaces.
#30AuthorsNoMen

Folks, Mohammed ( @…) has taken ill after his trip to the South to try and secure a place for his family.
It’s likely Covid.
It’s the second account I’m seeing of someone who visited the South falling ill with Covid in as many days.
Please help him cover cost of treatment in addition to everything else.
This is his fundraiser:

No shelter, no safety - Help Mohammed survive genocide in Gaza
My name is Thomas and I live in France and in the UK. I'm hosting Mohammed's campaign because Palestinians cannot host their own campaigns. If you've got any questions or if you'd like any proofs, I'm happy to provide you with these. Please support! Peace ✌️

I don't think the Fourth Estate has a backbone any more. Protoplasmic cowards, the major outlets like CBS/Paramount are more concerned about clicks & lawsuits than providing the spotlight on government they're supposed to serve these days.
Original post: https://bsky.app/profile/di…

Smartphone user experience designs still don't have decent intelligent graphical interfaces, speech interfaces, or text interfaces... though maybe a few things have changed since 2017. https://bookofadamz.com/when-will-smartphones-be-intelligent/

I'm giving a talk next week to a group of high school media teachers on the future of the film industry, and how they can prepare their students for it. In that context, of course, I need to touch on AI since you can’t get away from it these days.
And so I came across the new offering from Open AI: ChatGPT Pulse, a personalized news aggregator and for the first time I feel physically ill reading about the latest AI offerings. This agent uses your chat history and encourages you to …

🐗 A major shift in the US landscape: 'Wild' disturbances are overtaking human-directed changes
https://phys.org/news/2025-09-major-shift-landscape-wild-disturbances.html

A major shift in the US landscape: 'Wild' disturbances are overtaking human-directed changes
If it feels like headlines reporting 100 or 1,000-year floods and megafires seem more frequent these days, it's not your imagination.

Where do people go to host video content these days, let’s say for an online course? Asking for a friend, of course… 😉

I watched "Sunset Boulevard" (1950), directed by Billy Wilder. I don't know of any film like this one. It's a great film, and it draws you into a whole, stifling little world. Honestly, it's harder for me to watch these days, but it's no less brilliant. Among Von Stroheim's performances, I would rank this just below "Grand Illusion".

I really gotta get around to installing Fittrackee one of these days...
https://docs.fittrackee.org
@…

Quick and easy #PHP code generation testing.
https://peakd.com/php/@crell/quick-and-easy-php-code-generation-testing

A great article on Wikipedia and some of the big problems it is facing these days, also within the context of former events. If you hear about Wikipedia being biased, this article offers a great discussion about that.
https://www.theverge.com/cs/features/71732

How Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks
How the world’s largest encyclopedia became the factual foundation of the web, but now it’s under attack from the right wing, tech billionaires, and AI.

During the days after the murder of George Floyd, the Minneapolis police actively prevented firefighters from fighting fires. Buildings in my neighborhood burned because the police wouldn’t let anyone put out the fire.
Out of control is right. And it’s what these people do.
@…:
https://front-end.social/@grigs/115375875836066251

It’s not like I can just switch to prawn toast. The delivery guy will give me that same, unnerving look. https://beige.party/@TheBreadmonkey/114698463250580997

Ben (@TheBreadmonkey@beige.party)
Attached: 1 image You can't do anything these days. Bloody woke brigade.

I’m in a strange mood today, Kind of down, but also relaxed at the same time. I’ve got really tired of all the social media noise these past few days, and I am consuming more than usual as I am off work, and working on my home computer, so I have more opportunity to see all the bullshit out there.

Alone at the (seeming) end of the world. The Hochjoch Hospiz at the end of the Rofental, near the former confluence of three (formerly) major glaciers in the central Alps: Hintereisferner, Kesselwandferner and Hochjochferner. Vernagtferner is also nearby, which at times interrupted the outflow of these other glaciers, caused an ice lake to form, which when it burst led to widespread destruction in the valleys below (several times since the early 1600s). These days all of these glaciers are s…

I wish mastodon had a “throttle” feature. https://merveilles.town/@lrhodes/115379960146577252

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #MiddayShow
Byland:
🎵 These Days
#Byland
https://acloudforest.bandcamp.com/track/into-the-silent-land
https://open.spotify.com/track/2hUZ2Dz3Wx2huhrNtz3gH1

How are you doing these days? If you’re looking at the news or opening social media feeds, it’s a lot, I know.
I continue my practice of writing back to posts on social media. Also its antidote: writing back to works of art served up at random. It’s a little like surfing, taking the waves as they come. It’s a little like dancing. It’s one way to reclaim my attention, one way to stay alive to the present.
#Art

Ever-refreshing Hells and a few Heavens
Writings in response to social media posts and works of art.

@… rarely misses, these days
Trump Takes Over SPD, No One Notices | The Needling
https://theneedling.com/2025/08/13/trump-take…

Trump Takes Over SPD, No One Notices
Although President Donald Trump made good today on this threat to take over the city via the Seattle Police Department, there seemed to be no obvious reaction from the community that did not appear…

REFN: A Reinforcement-Learning-From-Network Framework against 1-day/n-day Exploitations
Tianlong Yu, Lihong Liu, Ziyi Zhou, Fudu Xing, Kailong Wang, Yang Yang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10701

REFN: A Reinforcement-Learning-From-Network Framework against 1-day/n-day Exploitations
The exploitation of 1 day or n day vulnerabilities poses severe threats to networked devices due to massive deployment scales and delayed patching (average Mean Time To Patch exceeds 60 days). Existing defenses, including host based patching and network based filtering, are inadequate due to limited scalability across diverse devices, compatibility issues especially with embedded or legacy systems, and error prone deployment process (manual patch validation). To address these issues, we introdu…

These days you can simulate anything you want
Driving a train or truck, flying a plane, surgeon, hotel assistant, motel operator, influencer, OF model, goat simulator, power wash simulator, football team manager, breakup simulator
When I was a kid, we barely had sim city, sim ant, flight stimulator, crazy taxi, and katamari
Now you can simulate being a tree or a rock, or a corporate slave tearing apart spaceships

On the topic of inflation, the biblical principle of "an eye for an eye" seems to be more like "a thousand eyes for an eye" these days.

A “made for TV” series about everything that’s going down these days. How long until it drops? Is it a comedy? Straight drama? Or fan favorite, dramedy? Who plays who?
I know it’s considered uncool around here to even think it, but what would an AI come up with for a script?
Speaking of which, has anybody thought to ask any of these AIs what their prediction is for how it’s all gonna play out? Anybody know what they’re saying?

The 13yo just told me to turn down my music. Kids these days!
(it was Metallica - For Whom The Bell Tolls)

I’ve been checking out #Erlang these past few days.
As someone with a strongly OOP background, it’s both incredibly fun, and at times incredibly puzzling, to solve functional problems.
#Programming

Most #tech these days promises to help us get things done faster. That premise is sending humanity off a cliff these days.
What does tech that helps us slow down look like instead?

Always funny when I watch a 1970s movie and instead of a happy ending it gets darker and darker a then the movie is over with no resolution.
They should do this more these days.

Why are all my channels clogged with spam these days

Because this has shown up trending every couple of days for the last week or so, these are not clowns from #Portland. These are clowns from Germany in 2007. #PDX has it's own creative resistence. Let's celebrate the real things they're doing right now.
If you see this picture with the wrong info, please help correct it and don't boost it. It's a great picture. I understand wanting it to be what's happening right now.
I'm just pulling all this info from the other folks who've been debunking it. Thanks to everyone who works hard to keep us all honest.
Receipts:
https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/police-injured-in-germany-as-radicals-disrupt-2557545.php

The Polar Orbit of TOI-2374 b, a Planet in the Neptunian Ridge
Samuel W. Yee, Patrick Tamburo, Gudmundur Stef\'ansson, Juliana Garc\'ia-Mej\'ia, David Charbonneau, Khalid Barkaoui, Karen A. Collins, Richard P. Schwarz, Norio Narita, Akihiko Fukui, Andrew W. Howard, Howard Isaacson, Benjamin J. Fulton, Fei Dai
https://arxiv.org/…

The Polar Orbit of TOI-2374 b, a Planet in the Neptunian Ridge
The ``Neptunian ridge'' is a recently identified peak in the frequency of planets with sizes between that of Neptune and Saturn orbiting their host stars with periods between 3 and 6 days (A. Castro-González et al. 2024). These planets may have formed similarly to their larger, hot Jupiter counterparts in the ``three-day pile-up'', through a dynamically excited migration pathway. The distribution of stellar obliquities in hot Neptune systems may therefore provide a vital clue as to their origi…

Ew, Philz Coffee uses paid secret shoppers these days. Even more reason to no longer give them any money.

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.

Sonnet 068 - LXVIII
Thus is his cheek the map of days outworn,
When beauty lived and died as flowers do now,
Before these bastard signs of fair were born,
Or durst inhabit on a living brow;
Before the golden tresses of the dead,
The right of sepulchres, were shorn away,
To live a second life on second head;
Ere beauty's dead fleece made another gay:
In him those holy antique hours are seen,
Without all ornament, itself and true,…

@… is someone who has done more than most to help her compatriots in this dreadful #GazaGenocide. To see her express such despair breaks my heart.
There must be rebuilding.
There must be reparations.
Palestine must be free.
There is no pea…

I'm considering installing some extremely simplified #Linux #distro on my grandpa's #laptop. He basically only wants to use a word processor, print stuff and maaaybe use email.
Google sucks these days (t…

US ethnic cleansing and what to do about it
Reposting link to source article instead of screenshot of tweet that had no alt text:
Data on arrests shows that ICE was heavily engaged in racial profiling in LA, because their arrest numbers fell by ~66% after that were ordered to stop making arrests based just in factors like skin color, with place, or language spoken.
#ICE #USPol

There are good days in software development and then there are days like these when your brain melts onto your desk and your soul shrivels after hours of video conference calls, communications proofreading, and, the horrors of all horrors, bash and powershell scripting. #npm

According to Home Office data, 1097 migrants arrived on Saturday on 17 "small boats".
That's an average of 64 *passengers* per small boat - these boats must be larger than the zodiacs I've been imagining.

Small boat arrivals: last 7 days

How about we stop producing and using plastic? This is getting absurdily ridiculous..
"Scientists have discovered that waxworm caterpillars can break down polyethylene plastic, one of the most common and persistent pollutants on Earth. These “plastivores” metabolize plastic into body fat within days, offering a striking potential solution to the global waste crisis. But there’s a twist: on a plastic-only diet, the caterpillars weaken and die quickly."
These “plastivore…

These “plastivore” caterpillars can devour a plastic bag in just 24 hours
Scientists have discovered that waxworm caterpillars can break down polyethylene plastic, one of the most common and persistent pollutants on Earth. These “plastivores” metabolize plastic into body fat within days, offering a striking potential solution to the global waste crisis. But there’s a twist: on a plastic-only diet, the caterpillars weaken and die quickly.

Hearst will own major news outlets in Texas's four largest metropolitan areas with its Dallas Morning News purchase, pending a September 23 shareholder vote (Mark Stenberg/Adweek)
https://www.adweek.com/media/onbackground-hearst-dallas-news-texas-newspapers…

Why Is Hearst Buying So Many Texas Newspapers?
The 138-year-old company might be the only one trying to get into the news business these days.

Earth's rotation is randomly speeding up,
and nobody is quite sure why.
These speedups, which have occurred several times over the last few years, haven't had any effect on daily life,
but they also haven't gone unnoticed by science.
Tuesday, Aug. 5 is the next date when Earth's rotation is expected to speed up, shortening the day by between 1.25 and 1.51 milliseconds. 
On Aug. 5, 2025, the moon will be quite a bit further south than the equato…

Earth Is Spinning Weirdly Faster, Making This Tuesday One of the Shortest Days Ever
The Earth will complete its daily rotation between 1.25 and 1.51 milliseconds faster than usual, and scientists aren't quite sure why.

Excited to have a layover in Istanbul—my first visit. Have a great sense of the city map in my head. Minor detail: it's from ~500CE, hope not much has changed. Like, how's the chariot traffic these days between the Forum of Theodosius and the Boukoleon?

Izzy loves to sit in the sunlight on these cooler fall days, as the sun finally is low enough in the sky to shine in appropriate locations in our living room. #DogsofMastodon

#3goodthings I try very hard to find these on difficult days to make me look on the bright side.
1. I'm sitting in beautiful Leintwardine listening to the river race.
2. Fish and chips for tea!
3. Thank the gods for the NHS.

sp_high_school_new: High school dynamic contacts (2011-2012)
These datasets contain the temporal network of contacts between students in a high school in Marseilles, France. The first dataset gives the contacts of the students of three classes during 4 days in Dec. 2011, and the second corresponds to the contacts of the students of 5 classes during 7 days (from a Monday to the Tuesday of the following week) in Nov. 2012.
This network has 126 nodes and 28561 edges.
Tags: Soc…

Apparently quantum physics is taught in gradeschool these days, and why the heck not! I also learned today how Kepler was nearly finished his ultra-laborious book when he learned Lord Napier had just discovered how logarithms would have made those calculations SO much simpler.
Kepler's book, published posthumously, was banned anyway, but whatever…
Quantum Technology : Education Resources
https://resources.perimeterinstitute.ca/products/quantum-technology

What's the go-to for non-Microsoft non-Google email hosting these days?
Requirements:
* Supports proper RFC compliant SMTP/IMAP TLS access. No oauth, no EWS, no exchange nonsense. Needs to be usable on e.g. a headless box without a web browser, command line clients, etc.
* Reasonably priced for a handful of accounts across a bunch of domains
* Setup and forget third party hosting, I don't have an IP block suitable for mail hosting in house and I don't want …

@…
Does elementaryOS has an internal upgrade mechanism to new major versions these days?
Last time I installed elementaryOS 5. it hadn't, and I remember that to avoid a fresh install of Jólnir 6.1 I had to edit the repositories manually - which worked, but was no fun.
Back in the day I thought: Hm. Can't be that hard to offer an …

Why does all #software insist on being your buddy these days?
Can we go back to the old days where instead of trying to slide into your DMs, and be your best frend, software was a recalcitrant old hag in a back alley who spat out an obscure error code that at least when you looked it up in a knowledge base told you exactly what you had done wrong and what, if anything, you could do about it? This…

Just finished Uzumaki. Feels like documentation these days.

Nice day planned today although I won't have time for our usual walk.
Worked as much as I could this morning.
Now I'm just about to dress for the outside world. Uniform for these sorts of days, in this sort of weather, is jeans, t-shirt, suit jacket, runners, and some fun earrings.
Lunch with husband at Gary's at Erindale.
Then I'll bus it into Civic for ANU's First Generation Celebration event.
Then bus it back home in time for a Zoom meeting…

Imagine having this issue with a kid...
It isn't exactly common but it happens occasionally with K being about 120lb. these days and me being a hard-rode 60yrs. He's not stupid but he has never fully internalized that if he tries to fight me when I'm picking him up, he can succeed in sabotaging that process and it is NOT GOOD.

This week's #MusicWomenWednesday is something I've been listening to a lot the last few days - the new EP 'Comes to Reap...' by MANTIS, who describe themselves as 'manic goblin punk' from Öresund (a region between Denmark and Sweden). That description is fairly accurate. These are 7 great, ripping punk songs screamed and smashed out and FREE - they're name your own p…

OH: "bring your whole self to work" is still a thing these days -- but they mean "get in the car and drive to the office"

It has come to my attention that there is a DJ on BBC 1Xtra called Snoochie Shy and I was about to do one of those old person rants about kids these days.
Until I remembered that back in my day DJs had sensible names like Kid Jensen, Fluff Freeman, Whispering Bob so yeah, if they want to be Snoochie let them be Snoochie.

Drew a napkin #doodle while talking about how some workers these days mostly just copy-paste from #AI tools....
Why need a full keyboard when the “efficient, AI-empowered worker" (whatever that nonsense means) only needs like 4 buttons?

from my link log —
CRDTs are built on an elegant kernel, but offer a leaky abstraction that misleads a lot of developers and researchers.
https://jhellerstein.github.io/blog/crdt-intro/
saved 2025-08-29

I very rarely check my facebook account these days.
And it's even rarer to find there anything remotely interesting or shareable.
It happened today, though.

This is what a genocide denialist looks like.
Genocide denial is the last stage of genocide.
Phil, you’re complicit in genocide. And history is taking notes.
***
“Hamada Ice Cream shop, which has not been open for weeks, recently posted a highlight reel of the pastries, cakes and drinks the cafe once served.
‘Me and 2 million Gazans are waiting for this moment Oh God, make things easy and these days pass safely, O Lord,’ reads the video’s Arabic caption.”
…

I don't know why I was being so lazy about switching my email off Google Workspace. Every time I log in these days it's got a bigger banner trying to sell me a shitty AI tool to write long, saccharine emails nobody wants to read.
I'm moving to Proton. I opened their client for the first time, and it's beautiful. It's just email. It's thoughtfully put together. It's not trying to stuff ads down my throat. It's 30% the cost. It loads in a snap.
Wonde…

Isn't it worrying that the most prominent leaders of their faithful flocks and 'defenders of Christianity' these days are Trump, Putin, Orban, and figures like that?

Cross-Platform Narrative Prediction: Leveraging Platform-Invariant Discourse Networks
Patrick Gerard, Luca Luceria, Leonardo Blas, Emilio Ferrara
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09464

Cross-Platform Narrative Prediction: Leveraging Platform-Invariant Discourse Networks
Online narratives spread unevenly across platforms, with content emerging on one site often appearing on others, hours, days or weeks later. Existing cross-platform information diffusion models often treat platforms as isolated systems, disregarding cross-platform activity that might make these patterns more predictable. In this work, we frame cross-platform prediction as a network proximity problem: rather than tracking individual users across platforms or relying on brittle signals like share…

“Honestly, I feel like web developers are constantly being gaslit into thinking that complex over-engineered solutions are the only option. When the discourse is being dominated by people invested in frameworks and libraries, all our default thinking will involve frameworks and libraries. That’s not good for users, and I don’t think it’s good for us either.”
Mic drop by @…

Simplify
Reminding myself just how much you can do with CSS these days.

I think the thing that really gets me is the confidence with which people are wrong these days

Defender who has banked $115 million is ideal option for Cowboys https://cowboyswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/cowboys/2025/08/09/stephon-gilmore-fallback-dallas-cowboys-secondary/85582714007/

From DeSmog International
Mark Carney these days could learn a lot from Mark Carney ten years ago
https://www.desmog.com/2025/09/02/mark-carneys-climate-warning-from-2015-and-the-perils-of-pragmatism/

Mark Carney’s Climate Warning from 2015 and the Perils of Pragmatism
Canada’s PM once cautioned that most fossil fuel reserves will become unburnable. What happened?

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #MiddayShow
People Under the Stairs:
🎵 Days Like These
#PeopleUndertheStairs
https://clav.bandcamp.com/track/people-under-the-stairs-days-like-these
https://open.spotify.com/track/1mXslL4HV2zE53dJ5oN0DK

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

At 79, Dr. Jeffrey Bland hikes mountain ranges, surfs in the ocean, and sailed over 40,000 miles on his boat.
Dr. Jonny Bowden plays tennis two hours a day, hikes five days a week and conquered the Fight for Air Climb.
In this fireside chat, these two respected pioneers share science-backed secrets for living younger, longer.
As thriving examples of what’s possible through smart nutrition, functional medicine, and lifestyle design.
This conversation will explore h…

PanelPicker | SXSW Conference & Festivals
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We have raspberries growing. When we lived in Seattle we grew kale and picked wild blackberries. All were so much better than anything you get in a grocery store.
I don't eat a lot of fruit these days because its so disappointing to take a bite out of a bland or bitter berry from a plastic carton..
https://m…

"""
Once the distinctions had been made, and the first punishments applied, the venereal were accepted into the hospital. And they were crammed inside. In 1781, 138 men occupied 60 beds in the Saint-Eustache quarter of Bicêtre, and in the Miséricorde in the Salpêtrière there were 125 beds for 224 women. Patients in the terminal stages of the disease were simply left to die. 'Grand Remedies' were applied to the others: never more, and rarely less than six weeks of care, starting of course with blood-letting and purging, then a week of baths for two hours per day, then purging again, followed by a full and complete confession to bring this first part of the treatment to a close. Rubbing with mercury could then begin, with all its efficacy. Each course of treatment lasted one month, and was followed by two more purges and one final bleeding to chase out the remaining morbific humours. Fifteen days of convalescence were then granted. After he had definitively made his peace with God, the patient was declared cured and sent away.
This 'therapeutic' demonstrates a rich tapestry of fantasy, and above all a profound complicity between medicine and morality, which give their full meaning to these purification practices. For the classical age, venereal disease was less a sickness than an impurity to which physical symptoms are correlated. Accordingly, medical perception is ruled by ethical perception, and on occasion even effaced by it. The body must be treated to remove the contagion, but the flesh must be punished, for it is the flesh that attaches us to sin. Mere corporal punishment was not enough: the flesh was to be pummelled and bruised, and leaving painful traces was not to be feared, as good health, all too frequently, transformed the human body into another opportunity for sinful conduct. The sickness was to be treated, but the good health that could lead to temptation was to be destroyed.
"""
(Michel Foucault, History of Madness)

Anyone else getting these ridiculous repo scraping spikes? A clean checkout of the https://thi.ng/umbrella monorepo is ~370MB. Over the past 14 days there were 222k clones (only 117 unique) of this repo which have caused downloads of a whopping ~78TB. WTF! 🤯

thi.ng/umbrella

sp_high_school_new: High school dynamic contacts (2011-2012)
These datasets contain the temporal network of contacts between students in a high school in Marseilles, France. The first dataset gives the contacts of the students of three classes during 4 days in Dec. 2011, and the second corresponds to the contacts of the students of 5 classes during 7 days (from a Monday to the Tuesday of the following week) in Nov. 2012.
This network has 180 nodes and 45047 edges.
Tags: Soc…

"These days you get arrested and thrown in jail if you say you're English, don't you?"
These days you can't even openly advocate for the murder of vulnerable groups without the police getting involved.
https://www.theguard…

Why is everything on the cloud these days?
I’m kind of getting tired of every piece of professional and business software being a SaaS or cloud-based solution these days.
I have a good computer, it can run a lot of complex programs on it locally. I wish I had the option to do so.
Not everything needs to be synced 24/7. And I’d much rather have some tools include a cloud sync functionality that backs up changes with some kind of regular frequency for version control and cross-device access, but otherwise runs on my device.
These days, when I’m trying to go work somewhere without an internet connection or am traveling and have spotty data - I can’t access 90% of my work. Files don’t back up locally even when there’s a native desktop client app. Why?
It feels wasteful, sending so much data to the internet and back with constantly required online sync and web apps.
I feel nostalgic now, remembering the days of software that would require buying a license every couple of years, that would run on your device and could be accessed even from the top of a remote mountain if you wished, and that didn’t log you out every other week.
#tech #software

Ridiculously long day today but took 20 minutes out to completely and utterly appreciate the husband's homemade sausage rolls for a late lunch. These were pre-cooked and just had to be heated up. He made slabs of them a few weeks ago and froze them in small lots for just these sort of days. Perfect.
#HomeMade #Lunch

Quick and easy #PHP code generation testing.
https://peakd.com/php/@crell/quick-and-easy-php-code-generation-testing

These days I almost always drink my coffee black. I quit sugar years ago.

Today's was one of those days if I had any sense I would have stayed home and developed photographs but no, I had to go step in deep mud to take a picture that wasn't a keeper so I rinsed my shoes at Flatrock
#photo #photography

Just how *does* one go about buying #tactical and smoke #grenades these days, like the ones they found in the house of the guy who shot the kid in Texas? #askingForAFriend

This is bizarre - I made a typo and accidentally ran a #Google search for a comma. Not the word, the punctuation mark.
And yet, somehow, Google thinks that is:
1. A valid enough search to be showing a bazillion results
2. A search that needs short-form vertical videos at the top from a bunch of white women (who are they? Why them? What in the world is relevant to a singular punctuation mark that makes them pull up these videos?)
3. A search with enough inferred intent to show me a whole Q&A interface?
I know we complain about the state of #search online a lot these days and I've been part of the #SEO industry for years but something like this is so blatantly ridiculous it's hard not to stop and wonder.... what the actual fuck?

sp_high_school_new: High school dynamic contacts (2011-2012)
These datasets contain the temporal network of contacts between students in a high school in Marseilles, France. The first dataset gives the contacts of the students of three classes during 4 days in Dec. 2011, and the second corresponds to the contacts of the students of 5 classes during 7 days (from a Monday to the Tuesday of the following week) in Nov. 2012.
This network has 126 nodes and 28561 edges.
Tags: Soc…

I get the most interesting spam these days.
Sorry pal, I'm not interested in a new fume hood even if it's 10% off. I have two already and there's physically no bench space I could possibly fit a third (nor do I need more).

Doing #Gentoo these days feels like being a small cell of unpaid volunteers opposing the enshittification of software. On one side, we're put up against a horde of full-time corporate developers. On the other, against young ambitious volunteers with lots of free time. And both can rapidly spew tons of mediocre code, and doing things wrong is so much easier than doing things right.
(Just to be clear, I'm not saying every corporation or every youngster does things wrong — there are people who care on the other side too.)

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

sp_high_school_new: High school dynamic contacts (2011-2012)
These datasets contain the temporal network of contacts between students in a high school in Marseilles, France. The first dataset gives the contacts of the students of three classes during 4 days in Dec. 2011, and the second corresponds to the contacts of the students of 5 classes during 7 days (from a Monday to the Tuesday of the following week) in Nov. 2012.
This network has 126 nodes and 28561 edges.
Tags: Soc…

My laptop a few years ago: being the most powerful of my build machines.
My laptop these days: unable to preprocess C sources fast enough to keep distccd occupied on my PC.
#Gentoo

sp_high_school_new: High school dynamic contacts (2011-2012)
These datasets contain the temporal network of contacts between students in a high school in Marseilles, France. The first dataset gives the contacts of the students of three classes during 4 days in Dec. 2011, and the second corresponds to the contacts of the students of 5 classes during 7 days (from a Monday to the Tuesday of the following week) in Nov. 2012.
This network has 126 nodes and 28561 edges.
Tags: Soc…

Today one of these rare days when all that was "necessary" is done, and out of less necessary things I don't feel like doing anything else, so I have some leisure time.
I have a bunch of series with new episodes to watch — except what's the point of starting another season if I won't find time for the second episode for at least a week? So I've started looking for a movie to watch instead…
And before I started watching it, I found something "unnecessary" to work on, so…
#Gentoo

sp_high_school_new: High school dynamic contacts (2011-2012)
These datasets contain the temporal network of contacts between students in a high school in Marseilles, France. The first dataset gives the contacts of the students of three classes during 4 days in Dec. 2011, and the second corresponds to the contacts of the students of 5 classes during 7 days (from a Monday to the Tuesday of the following week) in Nov. 2012.
This network has 180 nodes and 45047 edges.
Tags: Soc…

This is one of these days when you discover that you left your shoes out to dry, and now you have very cool shoes.

sp_high_school_new: High school dynamic contacts (2011-2012)
These datasets contain the temporal network of contacts between students in a high school in Marseilles, France. The first dataset gives the contacts of the students of three classes during 4 days in Dec. 2011, and the second corresponds to the contacts of the students of 5 classes during 7 days (from a Monday to the Tuesday of the following week) in Nov. 2012.
This network has 126 nodes and 28561 edges.
Tags: Soc…

Did you know that statistically, people born on February 29th live through four times fewer anniversaries of their birth than people born on other days? There must be some doom over that day, that all these people die so young.
#shitposting