New, in Honest Names for LLMs: “automation-assisted document production” - @biblioracle.bsky.social

Things I Spent Time on When I Should Have Been Writing my Thesis, an occasional series. Day 1: Song-reaction videos.+ An online-course-creation influencer.* Buying nerdy/fun stuff online for a friend.* * = at least partly useful + = just for fun and avoidance

What perfect album came out the year you turned 16?

On Friday at Noon (EDT) I am giving a talk in the New York Combinatorics Seminar. The title is: "Mathematical illustration through a combinatorial lens" in which I share my decade-long journey as a mathematical artist and jewelry maker and how it intertwines with my combinatorics research.

AI used to conduct a cyber-attack: #TeamCompSci fortune.com/2025/11/14/a...

I sometimes forget how much i loved product management. A good passage from the always lucid Jason Cohen: “A great strategy, that doesn’t align with your strengths, is a bad strategy for *you*.” Ah, but the alignment. There’s the rub. 😏

No no no begs every archivist. You are never going to be able to find anything. Please don’t start using emojis in file names. Who asked for this? What fresh hell is next?

Oh. Stopped in my tracks. This is kind of … me. Will my kids have this thought someday? 😧🥹😭

Maybe it’s just the Humanities professor in me, but let it be noted that events of today (ahem) have demonstrated the value of being able to assess a large volume of qualitative data and do careful textual analysis with deep attention to context.

this dude helping his bro pick up his stick should be highlight of the night but our bloodthirsty sports media only feeds us conflict

And — keeping some perspective as I shovel snow at my WWI-era brick townhouse in Montreal on #remembranceday — here’s a moving WWI account carried by a family member in the present day. Lots of interesting moments. Via CBC podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/t...

Really? ❄️😠

Always amusing how much I agree with @mrzachg.bsky.social, despite coming from different angles. Case in point: this podcast ep with @douglemov.bsky.social. Do you know you're *right on the edge* of amazing qual & inquiry research? 🤓❤️🤝 ... a good faith 🧵... educationrickshaw.com/2025/11/10/s...

“Watson was ‘self-taught.’ He saw his double-helix discovery as proof that outsiders, unburdened by establishment thinking, could see and achieve what insiders couldn’t.” Thing is, sometimes outsiders *do* make the breakthrough. It just sucks when they are awful and get the reason wrong.

Ok, @pambrett.bsky.social , you’ve mentioned it so many times in your podcast that Francis Su’s Mathematics for Human Flourishing ended up in my YouTube feed. 🤣 I’m enjoying this talk—and I totally get it now. 🤓 youtu.be/mhrunq8j3wk?...

Janelle Shane's AIWeirdness.com blog is the best. Still delivering! Tiny neural net Halloween costume ideas include "Bride of grocerie" and "potato skeleton" www.aiweirdness.com/tiny-neural-...

LLMs are now widely used in social science as stand-ins for humans—assuming they can produce realistic, human-like text But... can they? We don’t actually know. In our new study, we develop a Computational Turing Test. And our findings are striking: LLMs may be far less human-like than we think.🧵

In k-8 CS edu: “The fact that code blocks are present doesn’t mean that ‘computational thinking’ is being developed.” Kids can complete coding puzzles and tutorials by rote. We shouldn’t be satisfied with that.

1995 laser printer vibes. Top class.👌🏼

meta skeet, it turns out.

That 10-minute frenzied loop of rephrasing, deleting, and rephrasing again, ultimately arriving at something that ("right. whew.") you feel much better about, only it's *exactly* the sentence you started with. 🫠

#mtbos gang, assemble!

Ooh. This article + critique are gonna push my depth and my recollection of undergrad cogsci, linguistics, and CS. Excellent. [Opens browser tab]

I absolutely never appreciated how Green Day's "American Idiot" is about media literacy! "Don't wanna be an American idiot Don't want a nation under the new mania And can you hear the sound of hysteria? The subliminal mindf**k America..." 1/ #InfoLit #MediaLit #TLSky #EduSky #SchoolLibrarians

Next in our ongoing series, Honest Names for LLMs. "word schmear" 🤣 @garymarcus.bsky.social garymarcus.substack.com/p/why-do-lar...

On Nov. 3, 2004, a group of dedicated CS teachers formed CSTA with the intent to support each other. 21 years later, and we’re proud to be the world’s largest computer science department. Here's to another 20+ years! #HappyAnniversary

Even if you didn't watch the game, you owe it to yourself to watch this recap. Just an unbelievable level of drama.

Hey #mtbos #ITeachMath friends - @jedediyah.com and I will be hosting a free, @amplifyeducation.bsky.social webinar this Thursday evening on the basics of building an Amplify Classroom activity. We would love for you to join us! Here's the sign up link: amplify.com/event/intro-...

⚾️ Well, that didn’t end the way we wanted. So many chances to win. 😔 But my Montréal-bred kids got excited about baseball. So that’s a kind of win.

✋🏼Montreal household having proxy coronaries here. ⚾️

🫣 #thesis

Oh, yay! NCTM extended the call for proposals for 2026 Denver! No more typing between trick-or-treaters. 🎃 #mtbos DUE MONDAY NIGHT. www.nctm.org/speak/

Eminently reasonable proposed principles for professors’ use of AI, from a student refusinggenai.wordpress.com/2025/08/29/a...

Excellent Programmers are excellent wordsmiths. The data doesn’t lie.

 I say this as someone loves math, and even minored in Math myself.

 CS programs might unironically be better off recruiting writers.

 Link to the Study:
 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I will 100% be fetching Karen & Shelby’s “Same But Different” slides as I prep my own NCTM 2026 proposal based on that routine. You should too! 🫶🏼🤓

I remain baffled why commercial LLMs continue to focus solely on connectionist structures when the human mind has other modules (e.g., algorithmic thinking, episodic memory) that are necessary to "think" like a human. This book describes the disconnect between LLMs and the brain well. (4/4)

Canadian researchers should be aware the there is a motion before the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Science and Research to force Tricouncils to hand over disaggregated peer review data on all applications: Applicant names, profiles, demographics Reviewers names, profiles, comments, and scores

There's so much being researched and published about GenAI that I update the 'Against Generative AI' resource list almost every day. Check it out catherinedenial.org/blog/uncateg...

i'm doing my first ever getaway-as-writing-retreat soon. what did you do to structure your time? esp looking for advice from folks who had a lot of trauma baggage around what they were working on

If you want to implement an AI tutor, you need to study it’s performance in naturalistic settings with the kinds of context windows that student learners will provide. You can’t begin with a well formulated question about a single topic. Students don’t know how to formulate questions well at first.

To make a long story short, we went back-and-forth like this for a long time. Finally, it got the right answer. Can you imagine being a confused student and trying to use a system like this?

Really excited to share this new paper on "Data Visualizations as Propaganda", co-led by PhD students Priya Dhawka and Nina Lutz, which just won a Best Paper award at the CSCW conference: dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/... [Short thread]

🎯 “There is no AI literacy without computer science education.” And that means investing in “the people who teach them, the programs that welcome them and the standards that focus on foundational learning outcomes” - yup. #CSTA @csteachersorg.bsky.social

The left did not create the right through its own mistakes. The right is not some passing reaction to the left, some temporary fever that can be cured with just the right policy tweaks. The right exists! Reactionaries want what they want no matter what the left does or doesn't do.

The clearest sketch I’ve seen of “smart centrism” like Ezra Klein’s. It has accepted the supremacist premise, and only applies reasoning from that point onward. Nobody should accept this.

To be read as: “Nice... my student indirectly donated to Wikipedia.🥹” (A cool and generous little move, imo)

"I DON'T NEED YOU TO FUCKING REWRITE WHAT I'VE JUST WRITTEN!"

The Womack Sisters. Daughters of Womack and Womack. Granddaughters of Sam Cooke. youtu.be/vTl68TssjU0