“So you see, America, it is possible” works for so goddamn many things. 😔

hey, medical Twitter, I got a wild question prompted by a letter I got from Canadian Blood Services.

I know I've said this a trillion times but I have to say it periodically to keep from going insane: The right ran a huge, well-funded, & ultimately successful campaign to completely take over political media & the infosphere more generally. This is by far the most important political development...

When writing teachers present about AI, how often do they talk about using it vs. refusing it? So far in the #4C26 program, I count 75 sessions that explore uses of AI 7 sessions that advocate refusing AI 68 sessions that do not advocate use or refusal link.annarmills.com/sessions

Here for any and all "Hey, I know someone who thinks your work is rad" exchanges. 🤓💕

Steve Yegge believes coding by hand will gradually disappear, grudgingly acknowledges that devs no longer need to understand Assembly, and says most should NOT use Gas Town. I always enjoy Steve's energy: in this conversation as well. Watch/listen: www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFsA... (cont'd)

I'm still laboriously moving my writing over to my new site. As I do so, I get to re-read and enjoy older posts. Here's a short one I wrote about: "A simple model for teacher sustainability and growth" christianmooreanderson.com/a-model-for-...

Raisin’ ‘em right, #436:

My book is extremely vulnerable. Call me brave for that if you like. I have learned that being vulnerable is an extremely strong thing to do. 4/6

Write specific, personal stuff, to find out who likes it. Not "if." If you write anything decent, some will like, some will not. The worst case is no one cares at all. But then, in that case, still might as well just publish. So, all roads lead to: Publish.

I've been bouncing between having a silly amount of fun building with AI, and feeling sort of weird and uncomfortable with it. This blog post gets close to describing how I feel in my more reflective moments.

Yeah, we’re raffling. You donate to help keep MN neighbors housed. You email me your receipt pic at [email protected] I enter you to win these. Every $5 is an entry. This is mitten pair #4. #2 and #3 got more than $4k and less than $5. Let’s break $5000 donated, shall we?

The mistake is confusing detail vs fidelity. Vibe prototypes let you add a lot of detail quickly, just like how component libraries do. But all of that detail is essentially distraction and waste. Showing off your tasteful drop shadow on the card view is not stress-testing the merit of the solution

Grain of salt: 🇨🇦 Canadians *do* tend to paper things over with niceness… and we have our cranks and extremest too… Still, this the result you’d want to see from the country you live in. 👇🏼

“I mean, it’s unbelievable.” It’s the must read baseball story of the day from Tyler. Incredible to learn what went into the series of bold managerial moves by Dave Roberts that won his team a World Series.

Thoughts & prayers to the EPA :(

5. There are criticisms of LLMs that are much more plausible. They are built on a large scale expropriation of the intellectual commons. Demonstrably true! They involve a radical and extremely worrying derangement of power relations in favor of a tiny number of men with weird beliefs. Also true imo.

4. I think that it is important that critics of LLMs get this. The 'LLMs are useless which is terrible and everyone is using them which is also terrible' shtick contained contradictions even in the beginning, which took a lot of work to maintain . Now it contradicts people's lived experiences.

Just in time to tidy up my lit review ✨

I’ve unmasked a white nationalist fight club in my city: Montreal. After weeks of work (with help!), I can reveal an Olympian as a member of the Frontenac Active Club — one who, unbeknownst to the owners, brought them to a local gym for training and propaganda photos. Here’s my investigation:

🚨 Math Ed friends in MA! ATMIM is hosting a professional learning event on March 19. There are two pathways, each with two half-day workshops K-6: @sneffleupagus.bsky.social & me 5-12: @amyschang.bsky.social & @davidporas.bsky.social Come join us! atmim.wildapricot.org/event-6549529

You know you want to spend the day with me and Jenna, or with Dave and Amy!

Where I live in Ontario it should be possible to see the total phase from around 6am until the Moon sets around 7. I am setting an alarm!

Were you riveted by “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” (Rebecca Skloot, 2010) like I was? This is very good present-day news for her family. Terms are undisclosed, but there's got to be real money there.

When teaching about LLMs I’ve often made a point about training data including all the Wrong Online Talking as well as all the Right Online Talking—and also the Everyday Talking that goes uncaptured… But maybe I also need to emphasize the Talking that *Never Gets to Occur*. 😳

Keeping an eye on LLM projects like this because “Hey, it seems like this emergent ability that absolutely is *not* entailed by how LLMs are known to work… nonetheless seems to be happening?” is an interesting thing and calls for skepticism AND humility AND practicality at the same time. 👀

Spent three minutes checking back in, seeing what i was missing on twitter. Yup. Still a cesspool. 🤮

Forced to use AI at work, hate it. Usage is monitored so I can't avoid it. I've set up mine to play a Sim City clone. It burns through tokens, making crap cities that quickly go bankrupt. Just been told that I'm getting a bonus for being a top user.

The most important thing is convincing as many people as possible that Trump doesn't mean anything he says. He wants freedom for Iran. No, he doesn't. He wants to end wars. No, he doesn't. He wants the appearance of being principled in order to con you. This is from 2011 when Obama was president.

This whole thread. ✨ In the hands of a clear thinking software person, for the right use case, LLM-boosted coding is an *incredible* unlocking tool.

I’ve only ever seen posed photos of Willie O’Ree… This action shot makes it clear: dude was a beast. 👀

If you can't trust the machine to give you non-false citations, you can't trust the machine. People really need to stop recommending folks trust systems that are inherently untrustworthy on a fundamental and non-resolvable level.

God help me, I’m reposting the Cato Institute. They’re 100% right. 🗽🫠

They love the idea of an LLM that they can tell to spit out the answer because deep down, they hate the fact that they can pontificate and someone will be like "okay, so to your point, (a) happens but the timescale for it empirically varies from five to five thousand years, and (b)...."

There are a lot of people who resent the entire concept of subject matter expertise and believe that they, a person who read a breezy overview, know just as much and because they're a Great Thinker, should be trusted over actual experts.

Chat, is it bad when one tech dude having a modicum of a conscience is the only thing hindering the plans of the worst people in the world to use hallucinatory robots to automate crimes against humanity?

A new preprint, co-authored with @johnwkrakauer.bsky.social: The Deliberation Taboo Cognitive science is, nominally, the science of thinking. We argue that the field has no theory of what thinking is and, even worse, that the topic has largely dropped out of focus. 1/ osf.io/preprints/ps...

I’ve been working toward this for years, and it finally happened. Canada now has a parliamentary petition to require secure coding in federal software. If you care about cybersecurity, public safety, and better government tech, please sign: 👉 https://twp.ai/9Pa6Wa 1/2

There’s a nascent democratization effect brewing in AI/software. It’s still coalescing but it’s real. Regular folks are getting charged up about things they can now think about and try to do. And they should! Great thread on a side of AI that’s getting overlooked: 🧵

An affront to bagels AND to topology. 😳

I'll say, in the late 90s I read Roger Schank's site pretty regularly. He had insightful things to say about cognition, constructivism, and education. But there was no mistaking: he *really* thought a lot of himself. Not shocked by any of this. 😠

AI makes me so much more productive as a coder! Now I can produce thousands of lines of code a day to do the work of hundreds. That leaves me much more time for debugging, which is quite a lucky coincidence since I've unexpectedly been seeing a lot more bugs lately. I'm finally a 10x developer!

✋🏼 living in 🇨🇦 for 25 y now. ✋🏼 also, a dude+husband+dad. I’m at Canadian Tire ~ 1x/mo. I thought I knew Canadian Tire. Behold, the lore…

many years ago, we heard an (NPR) segment about brain differences between people who like to listen to singers like Bob Dylan who, for lack of a better description, are not technically good, vs. those of us who do not. is anyone familiar with this or similar research?

I'm listening to @drewperkins.bsky.social 's new podcast with John Sweller and can't help but think: CLT pursues something interesting. But it's stuck in a dead-end epistemology: classical computational metaphors. To move forward, it needs to be burnt down and rebuilt in-line with modern cogsci.

The #Pycon Ed Summit in 2013 literally changed my career. Folks, if you’re adjacent to this in any way and can get there, do! 🐍

Over the last year, we've built an innovative model of writing assessment that blends human & AI judgement. If you would like to see how it works & try it for free, sign up for our webinar next Wednesday at 4pm. We will give all attendees 30 free AI credits. us02web.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

Here are the slides from my lesson and discussion at UT Austin the other day, "Designing Historical Games with the Historical Problem Space Framework".

There’s a certain kind of Software/Startup Guy I’ve known that sounds an awful lot like Logistics Guy. (below) I wonder if they’ve ever been seen together in the same room. 🤨

Also, the idea that the people born in one country could be ontologically evil is fascist shit.