I’m not a Mac person but using this as a home server is a different story… mini but mighty!

One frustrating thing about the tech world is how close we are to being able to decentralize everything, but, somehow, that never materializing. Companies keep wanting to centralize products and services, and people keep falling into those traps.

My own infra: VPS at Hetzner with a 5T storage box ($18/month) , gitea, Mac Mini ($850) at the winery with Gemma3 12b, VPN on all my devices. Ready to roll LLM agents.

That's a wrap, sort of. Today I am officially Emerita Professor. The most rewarding thing was being part of so many young people's bootstrap -- I gained close to 25 children, and they will be in my heart forever! 💖 The group pic here is my latest crop. On to lots of more coding but back to basics!

Self-producing solar energy and storage is very disruptive. Imagine being an energy company used to ppl needing your electricity/gas, and then ppl needing only 1% of that. No wonder there's a war on the decentralization of solar. They aren't going to let that happen without a fight. They may win.

Vibes

Apparently, we now run a hotel for barn swallows. Unfortunately, they don't know how to use the bathroom... 💩

To ppl in Central/Northern Europe: 20 years ago, Portugal became much hotter than it was 40 years ago. There was no A/C almost anywhere. Slowly but surely, people started installing A/C. Energy bills went up. Then people started installing solar panels. Heat => sun, so let the sun cool you.

Am I really going to buy a Beelink mini to code up an administrative assistant for Quinta das Queimas? Yes, yes I am. Local model, low power, harness-first generation-last. Do I have a gazillion other things to do this summer? Also yes. Was this my idea of retirement from UCI? Definitely yes.

I'm old enough to remember when GenAI was going to "solve" customer service. I guess that didn't happen yet?

Post-retirement mood

3 r’s

In Anthropic's own words: "persistent returns to expertise." Ppl shoving GenAI down students' throats need to stop right now. www.anthropic.com/research/cla...

I hope that some students somewhere will sue some of these universities that are pushing AI down students’ throats, for dereliction of duty

At the end of the term I asked my college creative wriing students to submit anonymous thoughts on AI. No real surprises: Mood ranges from resignation to despair, capitulation from embittered erosion of standards to total, feelings of betrayal from deep to furious. 1/

ICYMI www.youtube.com/watch?v=lI7t...

I am developing a strong allergy to "X is not Y. It's Z".

New form of protest just dropped blog.johanneslink.net/2026/06/09/t...

The amount of AI generated posts on LinkedIn, by real people, is mind boggling. We’re witnessing people losing their minds in real time.

Creating the final exam for a course is almost exactly the same as preparing test data for a model. Varied just enough to test whether they memorized it or generalized it.

This has been a traumatic experience, so I had to write it all down, with all the gory details. tagide.com/blog/llm/the...

Possibly the best way to phish academics would be to just send them email that looks like a request to review an article and embed your malware in the "decline to review" link

First time that I write "if you do that again, I will kill you" and mean it. Kill the session, that is.

Tonight in the ai reading group i was reminded of something that happened in 2006 after I dropped out of college, when I was living in a run-down old house next to jb alberto's in rogers park with a bunch of dudes. it was, as you can imagine, not clean.

Claude Code is mid at naming things.

I seem to have succeeded in scaring Claude. It now doesn't dare to change code without my permission and, more often than not, it shows me the proposed new code in the conversation. I honestly don't know what they were thinking having the bot do source code edits silently. Like, are you serious?

I like session limits. They force me to step away from the computer and do things IRL. They're like "time to do squats!"

Announcing Vow: a programming language for AI agents, not humans. "The language is not for you. Yours is only the product, plus the vow that it behaves." Self-hosted. Contracts verified by ESBMC. vow-lang.com #agenticcoding #formalverification #programminglanguages

This might nudge me to restart blogging youtu.be/tZbwiJW1uRA?...

This data is going straight to some LLM company for double the price of the ransom. Not much Instructure can do about it. www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-in...

Canvas was hacked. Brace for chaos.

Someone in Nature finally noticed how flawed this paper was. It only took them 1 year. www.nature.com/articles/s41... When it came out, I found multiple inconsistencies in their data just by looking at it for 20 minutes 👇

Personal news! I am retiring from UC Irvine at the end of June 😎 Retiring from UCI, but not retiring in general. What comes next is a combination of independent consulting 🔆📊, running my winery Quinta das Queimas 🍇🍷, and doing research at INESC TEC 👩‍💻. I will still be affiliated with UCI 🎓 (Emerita).

Creating a quiz for my course, I’m very tempted to include questions with “wrong answers only”

GenAI is not going to go away. It's super powerful tech; it's only going to get better. There will be adjustments -- e.g. cleaning up the legal mess -- but there is no going back. Its use will move from the engineering and business realms to the psychology&cognition, policy, and political realms.

It's quite ironic that the country that doesn't have national identity cards (because they are considered too intrusive & controlling) ends up with a private company doing that and much, much worse!

Wow

I really have no idea how to advise CS students these days on matters of career. The job market is brutal for juniors. Almost feel like telling them that if their goal is to get a job, they should switch majors or quit College and enroll in a trade school.

Good riddance, Hungary!

I always wanted to be an astronaut ever since I was a little girl, but clearly that's not gonna happen, and that makes me sad. I'm now considering the closest experience: 🍄 www.nasa.gov/wp-content/u...

As a research project, I built a needed tool with Claude Code. I though it would be a disaster, but It wasn't. I have some complicated feelings about it.

Rubrics these days... But, you know, real learning has always been about asking the right questions. It's harder to teach that, though, that's why it's typically done at graduate level.

🍓🐶🍓

Much will be written in years to come about the tech world's gradual shift from benign progressive irreverence to plain evil. Or maybe all has already been written since Macbeth, and we're just stuck in this human condition forever and ever.

Wow, what an autopsy from @kennethreitz.bsky.social about his experiences with mental health and life as a very public open source software maintainer.

Silver lining (maybe): Europe finally wakes up.

Producing wine is a unique art that I did not appreciate until recently. Comercial wines are like the wall decorations in IKEA. The boutique wines are the real art in liquid form. Every one of these wines embodies a personal story, a vision, and a complete disregard for profit.

NSF Update (Awards through 2/27/26) Directorates to follow 1/10

There is beauty in the world ☀️