"AI is just another tool" No. Tools don't have logins, subscriptions, or silent updates that change how they function. You own tools. You control tools. AI is a *platform* until this is what coding with LLMs means (and if it becomes a tool we should remember that some tools require training to use)

I tried to use the AI in colab and it fucking sucks it takes forever to do something, doesn't let me see or edit the code it generates before running, generates a bunch of text to describe what it thinks I want then inserts a bunch of md and can't fix its own error how do people work like this

I don't normally listen to podcasts but people have been sending them to me and I find it really odd that podcast people keep saying that generated code "either runs or it doesn't" and that is why AI works for code like...software has never worked that way? Some bugs are not obvious? Am I crazy?

unfortunate that PrairieLearn is snappiest on Friday night when demand is low but it makes my grading go a lot faster so ig I'm staying in

damn i really told a room full of social scientists that i use emacs

how long before vibe-coded software starts including ads in the form of comments or print statements or log messages

instagram has an auto-scroll feature now, which I hate

Remember: LLMs and bots and AI-generated things should always be called ‘it’. Regardless of the style or tone of voice, there is only an ‘it’ there. Don’t humanize it.

it's only a tool if you own it, otherwise it's just a service

feeling growth as a grad student because I'm filling out IRB paperwork for the first time

a second gray hair has hit my head

still in shock that I got this book, which was published this year, for $6 in a coffee shop & used book store in Maryland this weekend

UIUC CS is offering at least two "applied AI" courses in the spring, targeted at non-majors. Adapting curricula in this way makes sense in the current moment, but a CS department is the last place I'd want to take this kind of course. Urban planners don't learn about vehicles in a MechE class. 1/

I'm editing a final paper for one of my classes and got stuck so many times on sentence-level edits. Yesterday I printed it and did read-only marking of changes I wanted to make and its helped me make progress but also gave me a better idea of structural changes that would enhance clarity

Sony is trying to use digital signatures and depth information from camera sensors to prove authenticity of images authenticity.sony.net/camera/en-us...

did google replace their entire web presence with vibe code because so much stuff has been broken in the last two weeks

updating my CV requires writing OCaml. I've built a library that "compiles" my various experiences and skills into a self-contained HTML document with a nice visualization of how my previous work has contributed to my competencies. The PDF version I get by printing the web page is much less nice tho

proud of myself for getting through the ~60 papers assigned in my first grad-level humanities class. that is probably less than a real humanities person would read in a semester but as someone who didn't consider a reality other than technological determinism in august, I feel accomplished

description list is is my favorite html element

Halloween decreases the amount of social media posts that I understand to basically zero

why do I need to restart my wifi driver every time I send an email

And all new programming languages that contain abstractions to help humans reason about computation need to provide a huge corpus of correct programs covering a wide range of use cases if they want to succeed, because why should we have to know how to use the language if we want to use the language?

some of my reading in the past week (Braverman, Noble, Zuboff) focused on the impact of automation in the mid/late 20th century and in addition to rhyming with AI discourse, it made me nostalgic for when blue collar work meant skilled machinists and wasnt just a euphemism for amazon delivery serf

we should have revolted back when web pages stopped being mostly html

i miss building stuff

university policy on prelims + course schedules are starting to put me in a corner and I'm not sure I'm going to get the things I want out of my program anymore

I was looking through some photo memories today and saw that 2 years to the day before my talk at ICFP I was at the first US-RSE conference in Chicago trying to find a PhD advisor. That me could have never imagined I'd be here

I chatted with so many awesome people at ICFP yesterday but woke up with basically no voice and decided to do some vocal rest today so I don't sound like RFK Jr during my talk on Friday. I really missed interacting with folks though

libc

I still haven't fully processed the fact that I'm going halfway around the world later this week

only spent 12.5 hours setting up LaTeX and biblatex and biber to format my annotated bibliography, this is gonna save me so much time

writing a ppx feels like such a hack but idk what else to do

Wrote a mini research statement today and I'm already seeing how the humanities courses I'm taking this semester are helping me be more articulate about my interests

Remember, its called LaTeX because it makes your work look sexy

is my trackpad dead or is it just arch linux

wait maybe if I don't made them polymorphic

de bruijn indices solved λ.0 of my problems

wow the video production quality at fun ocaml is really good

a few friends had gatherings at different places yesterday and i was able to walk from home to all of them. this is the future liberals want.

implications for society generally are worrisome. but also consider that this happened at a place of higher education, an institution that is already very damaged. can universities survive a response that is directed at them?

the paper i was trying to read was *really good*...now I'm distracted

will 9/10 be as pivotal as 9/11

using python for a web dev project after a few months of not using it and I really miss OCaml. Even with pydantic and pyright, I just don't trust the code the same way. There are so many more tests I feel like I have to write. how does anyone live like this

in the 1960s they really just pondered their theories for 16 pages, no citations just vibes

as is standard practice

I wish google drive had not de-emphasized directory structure. The suggested stuff is not often what I am looking for and I'm so used to remembering hierarchies instead of filenames

one of those videos where someone who is really good at excel expeditiously solves a bunch of reformatting challenges but instead its emacs and text files

Some scientists writing software: make it up as you go, don't accept improvements out of fear that things will break, watch ignorant people copy parts of it into their own scripts. Software engineering as a process is not that different from the scientific method.

just spent many dollars on conference travel to guilt myself into doing work

meeting the new Informatics students this morning has really put me in the right head space for the beginning of the school year