I'm enjoying the open-ended exit slip questions in my course this quarter

My very spicy take on LMS vs. GenAI is maybe best characterized by the “let them fight” gif. It's an arms race that I am happy to simply sidestep with other syllabus design decisions.

❯ How has your impression of my experience as a developer impacted this session? ... What I've picked up from context: - You built this full-stack app yourself and wrote a detailed implementation plan with specific API shapes and architectural trade-offs ... No, Claude, you did that lol.

horseshit has more of a “preposterous(ly bad), likely through negligence or malice” connotation IMO. Sort of in the vector space between bullshit (vacuously false and a waste of time) and dogshit (low quality, potentially through no fault of its own, like it's just dogshit tier stuff).

This is a post about animal excrement and the English language. bull$#!% = nonsense/lies chicken$#!% = petty or cowardly horse$#!% = nonsense/lies dog$#!%= low quality ape$#!% = wild bat$#!%= crazy Ordered above from oldest to newest: bull$#!% (1914), bat$#!% (1971).

Should just do Captain Teach again but mix agent code in. dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

WTAF steve-yegge.medium.com/gas-town-eme...

Solana Beach

Had two playdates this week where it became obvious that my kid is the one with an embarrassing amount of practice in Mario Kart.

How To Do New Year's Resolutions

Santa Claus 💀🔥🌲 Creature — Rogue Horror Cannot be blocked by walls When attacked and not blocked, put 3 Battery-Powered Present tokens into play under the defending player’s control with “at the beginning of your upkeep, pay 1 or lose 1 life” 2/5

I also want to say thank you to the person who introduced me to the French word 'beaucoup' this year. It means a lot.

At some point this quarter in a meeting I said “students can’t regret skipping lecture for its own sake if all the lectures were incentivized. Feeling that regret can be a college-level learning outcome beyond a single course” Anyway it's likely that's pure cope but it sounded cool when I said it.

Feels good to be 20 again.

1. “We are the only poets, everyone else is prose.” 2. “My life had stood a loaded gun.” 3. “Jealousy is the cousin, the cousin of greed.”

fighting for the good cause

I need to know more. Melee, Brawl, Ultimate, OG? Which stages, stock counts, timer? As written this is way underspecified and not reproducible. www.frontiersin.org/journals/imm...

Has anyone done a tower defense game set in a (my) living room where the mobs are toddlers?

they didn't tell me that the donkey was dying when i picked him. they were just like "your donkey update is that your donkey has died. sorry." and transferred us to another donkey

I was pretty pleased with this program I used as a motivation for understanding virtual memory.

Have expertise with functional programming, interpreters, and Web technology? Like Rust, wasm, etc.? Looking for a job with a great team (like @adamchalmers.com )? Please see this job ad, and share with others you might know! zoo.dev/jobs/4619187...

Just told my course staff that variable-length arrays have been part of C since “the late 1900s”.

When you open the game in an emulator so it's in its own window but the emulator miscalculates the size because it thinks it's fullscreen, that's Doom scrolling.

Modern developement: “Anyway, computers appear to be running somewhere in the country and serving the Pyret compiler and the UI.” (After my investigation into impacts of today’s outage on code.pyret.org)

Are there any benchmarks (etc) which show the costs of the SysV x64 ABI relative to a somewhat-or-perfectly-optimal ABI for that program? [Not for single microbenchmarks, because I can definitely create horrible overheads there, but on larger programs / benchmarks.]

[Werner Herzog voice]: The computer… it is a cruel, unfeeling god. Left too long in its ceaseless hum, it festers with demons. The human, fragile and insignificant, clings to the ritual of restarting… as if this act could stave off the abyss of digital chaos. But the darkness always returns.

I've now given my talk “High Standards, Multiple Tries – How I've Been Grading” a few times. I wrote it up as a blog post: jpolitz.github.io/notes/2024/0... 3 principles: 1. Standards-based grading with high-fidelity assessments 2. Retries for everything 3. Coarse rubrics (0-4 not 0-100)

useful overview of what's going on in Wasm land, from Andy Wingo in ACM Queue

Super excited to release the latest version of "A Data-Centric Introduction to Computing" (DCIC). See release notes for 2025-08-27 for what's changed and new (a LOT!): dcic-world.org/2025-08-27/R.... dcic-world.org

1/ Super-excited to release the first complete rewrite to the Pyret home page in 10 years, corresponding to major language improvements! So many cool new things, let me give you a brief tour: ↵ pyret.org

New Pyret stuff! A cool new homepage showcasing the new embeddable editor, and a VScode extension that embeds the full-featured editor from code.pyret.org, among other goodies. Check it out! pyret.org pyret.org/release-note...

Working on two versions of my spring course offering.

TIL about document.currentScript macarthur.me/posts/curren...

The LLM^w customer is always right www.holovaty.com/writing/chat...

I have also thought this about valgrind

Probably dumb/ignorant language questions: Why is the gap between Rho and Sigma, and not between Pi and Rho? I could see wanting to keep some latin <-> greek-ish correspondence, but Rho is more like R than Q, right?

Kwaay Paay Peak Trail

"Pg. 12: Turns out there is no God. Though the Catholic priests pray for you, their prayers fail to relieve the cramping in your gut. You die of dysentery. Two days later, the very small clown dies of grief."

Hmmmmm

I am installing tip preventing straps on a dresser that we moved. I have: - snapped off a drill bit - stripped a screw - gotten a screw stuck that I can’t get in or out - gone through a full charge of the electric drill These hands were just made for VScode and email, I’m afraid.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: I had a joke about Theseus’s ship, but I had to replace it

Teaching large classes running up against real engineering limits! (I don't really need to be “watching” all student repos from 2017. But I usually do “watch” the few hundred for an active class!)

I saw a post where someone had to log in to an app “to continue their Oral-B brushing experience”. They had a brush with dystopia.

Del Mar dog beach

👀 Not sure if Copilot has learned from me, my workspace, or all developers that comments are likely to begin with “NOTE(joe): this is a bit of hack...” I'll just assume this isn't me-specific and carry on.

A common programmer beliefs is that our main way of programming — editing mixed imperative/functional languages in text files — is suboptimal, and we need to advance beyond this. The "improvements" include structural editing, visual languages, "dynabooks", etc. Some thoughts on this:

Starting an email with “I have good news and bad news: this is working as designed.”

I feel like at this point I’ve heard the full combinatorial matrix of opinions in [AI is for, AI will replace] x [junior engineers, mid-career engineers, senior engineers]

As far as I can tell, --umdGlobalName option has been entirely hallucinated by Google's search results here. I can't find any reference to it in any official issue or documentation, and the discussion of the relevant issue doesn't mention it: github.com/microsoft/Ty...

Someone once said NextDoor is the social network for dogs if they could type. It’s always “what’s that noise?” and “who’s that stranger?” which is exactly what I imagine my dogs would text other neighborhood dogs.