If you would like to make your five-year-old daughter scream, location is in the alt text.

unfortunately (or fortunately?) i managed, in homeschool, to convey to my kids very intuitive understandings of a lot of science and math concepts and not a lot of "answer 10 multiple choice math questions in 5 minutes" kind of skill. i'm not super convinced the latter is useful outside school.

this is really neat! saving this to use with my grandkids lol

the strange thing is, i'm starting to feel this way about almost all online writing, not just LLM-generated writing. almost no one has anything new to say! no one is ever off the computer so everything they have to say is just recycled stuff people say on the computer!

chris has this memory for exact quotes, particularly when he heard them rather than read them but even from reading he seems to remember exact details, while i never remember exact quotes or details because my mind seems to always be "gisting" everything

one of my least popular opinions, surely, is that science fiction is pretty awful as a genre, but neal stephenson is an exception

i read a whole article about trying to recapture platinum from roadside dust just because they kept using the phrase "the complexity of the dust matrix"

good thread, and interesting to me that reid and chris landed in such a similar place on this topic

i said my husband talks about Claude a lot, and this is the upshot: it's about as helpful in his job as IntelliJ was 16 years ago, maybe a little more just because LLMs, with a deep history of machine translation, help with the translation tasks between the various languages a programmer has to know

me: why am i so tired chris: because you have been working ceaselessly for 20 years

i'm never going to recover from the incident in which i was re-telling James Marriott's "Post-Literate Society" to a table full of people younger than me and one bright young zoomer said, "oh yeah i think i saw a video about that"

i'm not quite at this stage, but, look, if your husband works with Claude, he is going to talk about Claude a lot and you, well, you're still going to be in the desert of the real

it's crazy to have lived through this cycle where shipping wasn't usually fast, through the onset of modern Amazon-driven logistics, to now it's so "over-optimized" that it's become unreliable again so now if i actually need something i have to go to a store, no matter how far away it is

we're going to democratize app-making what that means for you, the consumer, is that soon you'll be pestered by your neighborhood lemonade stand kids and church youth pastors to install their apps

part of my techno-askesis involves never flying and so i did not know that it's become a thing to not include a carryon bag in the regular ticket pricing and seriously how are people still putting up with this

apparently my husband's newest coworker just asked him why he has a shoutout in the preface to haskellbook L M A O

@karim.bsky.social maaaaan i been meaning to text you, i'm so sorry i haven't.

we had a sort of natural Chinese (Russian) Room thing going on in our house when our elder son, who did not speak Russian, memorized a bunch of Russian songs, apparently flawlessly, which fooled some Russian and Ukrainian people into thinking he spoke Russian

education standards aim toward skills that are easily evaluated by computers, which steers the content itself toward skills that are redundant to what computers can do

Ted Chiang memorably and metaphorically described AI as a “blurry JPEG of the web” but in this thread we see it functioning to blot out and sanitize history, quite literally.

if you have a premise that AI will be smarter than humans, it is always presumed you mean that there will be great improvements in the AI, but the degradation of the latter is another way to make the statement true.

a computer is a rube goldberg machine for copying strings

OH: "who would have thought kids would be spending so much time on the computer in school that we'd overrun a 32-bit integer"

me: ok, it's settled, next year will be garden sabbath year. what are we going to do with all our free time? husband: we should write a new operating system

i know the answer, but if you try to tell people they usually get super mad at you

enjoy PROGRAMMING? why not try Haskell Job? we got: - which of these processes ate the whole connection pool - no seriously why did the db just do that - wait it's working now - no the db's still fucked - idk what happened I guess it fixed itself - monad tutorial guy

our ancestors wallowing in the mud dreamed only of being able to quickly spin up a proof of concept for an app

Of what signal was received and translated, the only sentence perceptible with any certainty was: "Uncrossable distance between planets is essential to livestock management."

some pretty bad presidents own some pretty great pop culture moments, unfortunately

we planted some wild grape vines about five years ago and have been letting them climb all over our tall cedar hedges and YOU GUYS they are going to make grapes for the first time this year!

technically all education is PE

Natasha Bedingfield outlines a politically resonant theory of contingency in her 2004 single, “Unwritten.” In this essay, I will

last summer my son's gf brought me a bunch of green pine cones and wanted to make mugolio, an ingredient i have never tasted let alone made. been letting it sit and ferment and work for like ten months now and i've decided it's done and it's a such a strange flavor, like eating the forest floor.

1. pick a niche field that most people aren't paying attention to 2. invent a new name for some technique 3. use that technique to make incremental progress in that field 4. pretend the field didn't exist before and your result was starting from zero 5. assuming you started from zero […]

every time i complain about how we still have too many homegrown berries in the freezer from last summer, my darling husband says, "you can't grow a significant amount of food on your own"

trying to decide if having a "fleet of antique thinkpads" makes me sound cool or like an asshole, it's such a fine line if i mention they run nixos and i wrote a book about haskell on one of them, that clearly pushes it well over into "asshole" range

When people talk about "AI safety" in terms of tuning prompts to lower the probability that something bad will come out of the LLM, it reminds me of when kids are doing something stupid and you say "be careful" and they just say "okay!" instead of ceasing to do that thing

if you make wine at home, sometimes you can hear them screaming at each other, "it's not my fault! this is a collective action problem!"

once again thinking of how certain yeasts put into a vat of sugar water consume all the sugars so rapidly, converting them to alcohol, that they all die

> When Kamala Harris speaks, Nicole Holliday hears her multicultural background and distinctly California roots. if you need to maintain #OPSEC, you must never talk to linguists

What Guglielmo Marconi built was a fucking terrible radio system based on an entirely wrong guess about what wavelengths would be suitable for long-distance transmission, but it mattered because people just needed to see something at all work to believe that anything could work

look, i'm not saying i believe that the AI is the Antichrist, but sometimes the AI discourse does remind me of Bird Box

now that it's officially tick season, "touching grass" has an added layer of difficulty

> But for plenty of other computer applications, it seems that user identity has often crept thoughtlessly into systems simply because the technology and the programmer culture has inherited the practice from tech giants. big "are we the baddies" energy ctrlshifted.substack.com/p/the-web-ga...

told my husband tonight that this song is exactly how i imagine the internal experience of 18yo men and he just laughed so i think i was right www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3xc...

i've just caught up on the news that richard dawkins will in fact touch a poop for less than $20

i've been saying that the reals aren't real for years now, i'm glad math is finally catching up to me www.quantamagazine.org/what-can-we-...

still waiting to see this research-based edtech

rhubarb deserves so much celebration