while i am not the target audience, it's hard to read these paragraphs and not think this is an elaborate prank

massachusetts is about visiting a random island on a sunny day and finding a placard that says "welcome to Gerry Island! as in the Gerry from gerrymandering"

people often don't appreciate how dramatically the intensity of knowledge work, especially in STEM, has changed in the last 60 years even prior to the advent of AI. tough to imagine that a scientist would spend most of their time literally plotting data

making a hideout for the blizzard

take heart, friends — there's one shining spot in the games industry

clicked a broken link to khan academy's website. greeted by four popups and a hidden modal before realizing it's a 404 page. love modern web design

in 2026, we should be addressing anti-male discrimination like the fact that men can't be tetrachromats. what's up with that? where do i sign up to CRISPR my eyeballs and get some new cones

really good video even if you don't care about D&D, cool to see how people use hypertext for stuff like creative writing and worldbuilding, and a great intro to Obsidian

tough to read this stuff and come to any conclusion other than "every billionaire is a policy failure"

every time a former classmate / labmate raises $100MM to build a whatever AI startup i get this 🤏 much closer to selling out

it's so embarrassing to search for certain things on youtube because of the now-omnipresent hyperoptimized mr beast thumbnail

guess the computer luminary who wrote this

ok sorry it's pretty sick that i can paste this into opus4.6 and get back an accurate OCR + latin translation w/ historically accurate context on the passages

just learned that linear b is in unicode. who needs emojis when you have TRIPOD AMPHORA 𐃦 and WHEEL-LESS CHARIOT 𐃍

sorry babe, i didn't get the job. i was only at 53% tenure and 71% publications

I've been working on a new tool with @tonofcrates.bsky.social to make publishing easier called Rheo: rheo.ohrg.org In a nutshell, it lets you produce an EPUB, a PDF, and a static site (HTML) from a folder of @typst.app files. The Rheo doc site is naturally made with Rheo (PDF and EPUB linked).

"isn't that just a roguelike?" - wife

"there are no documented cases of pieces over 50 words long being recalled verbatim in any oral tradition"

the small handful of people who are actually using this stuff in a disciplined, thoughtful, and prosocial way are not the enemy. we will undoubtedly have to learn from them if we want to find ways for the human quest for meaning to survive into the future. that’s all i’ve got.

…BUT, i think that deciding to react to these fears by moralizing through a callout post of specific individual open source authors who have used LLMs at least once to contribute to the public good isn’t helping anyone, and i don’t want to share an ideological position with the people behind it.

i like writing code by hand because it makes me feel good, and i’m scared there won’t be opportunities to do that anymore. and i think the imminent crisis of meaning that occurs when you can just ask the computer to give you whatever you want will be disastrous for the human species…

feeling validated that i ran an mturk study exactly once in 2021 and made a rule against ever working with participants i don't trust

ai generated code seems akin to plastic: revolutionary, cheap, moldable, and in a few years we will be desperately looking for ways to reduce reuse recycle

Proposals for new types of "Cognitive Loads" for us to talk about in Software in 2026 because I'm tired of seeing the word Cognitive:

is there actually any good source/community that works around workflows for coding LLMs, or are we all still figuring out how we feel about the different tools and workflows one at a time?

i take great solace in the fact that my brother, the only true 10x software engineer that i know, has barely heard of IDEs let alone "generative AI"

to the median american there are exactly two forms of public transit: school bus and sky train

I wrote a piece on LLMs, citation metrics, and the institution of science. It's been up for a couple of days, but it is officially "out" now.

desperate measures at the airbnb

claude is now citing neonazi wikipedia, very cool

goddamn /A Small Matter of Programming/ is such a good book. it was relevant when everyone was convinced that "visual programming" was the future and it's still relevant now that everyone is convinced "conversational programming" is the future

woke 2 must include the abolition of the great male renunciation

lol it's cheaper to fly from boston to santiago, chile than to des moines

wtf ciabatta was invented in 1982

It was a three-man team that took the Grok hardpoint that day, and two of us were just there to guard the poet.Whistler was a sonnet slinger fresh from the Guatemalan meter wars, still waking up with the taste of a bloody metonym on his tongue.

“lazy use of unwrap blew up a process and took out the internet” bzzt. wrong. judicious use of unwrap blew up a process instead of allowing an Extremely Named CVE to happen and spraying your bank account credentials all over the public internet

#rustlang hot take: We should rename .unwrap() to .or_panic(). (And .expect() to .or_panic_with().) "Unwrap" is a terrible name for the panicking function, especially since we also have things like .unwrap_or() and .unwrap_or_default() which never panic.

“No way to prevent this” says only language where this regularly happens

a “Space Force”, if you will

don't know how to reconcile that i like working in coffee shops but also "study hall" is a horrible vibe

i hate doing cursed web development. what do you mean i can't use webassembly to dynamically decompress a zip file in a service worker for requests intercepted an iframe

- Vannevar Kush

ya our garbage collection is actually web scale

and really an emperor is not a king either, so

generational report from boston no kings: - boomers: unhinged facebook resistlib signs - gen x: generic no kings signs - millennials: andor or hamilton meme signs - gen z: inflatable costumes and signs with inscrutable references

I am recruiting PhD students to start in 2026! If you are interested in robustness, training dynamics, interpretability for scientific understanding, or the science of LLM analysis you should apply. BU is building a huge LLM analysis/interp group and you’ll be joining at the ground floor.

ah, erm, yes... i am actually quite parallel. it's a little embarrassing

an old man sits in the next row, watching fox news on the inflight tv. a pallid student speaks through airpods to a blonde anchor. the passenger, bored, pulls up TikTok. a young woman dances in an american flag bikini. swipe, it's sora footage of mr rogers talking to elvis presley. he lingers. swipe

i regret to inform you that the next 700 programming languages are going to be "types with baggage"