Imma be real with you guys the "TESCREAL" stuff is basically the libleft version of rightist paranoia over "Cultural Marxism", where you just smash together a half-dozen things that annoy you and go "these things are all connected and being pushed by a nefarious secret cabal of my political enemies"

I've already been blocked by one mutual follow ( @moiradonegan.bsky.social ) Here's what I said to her (since it is now otherwise inaccessible), which I'm leaving as my general statement of what I think, and not engaging further for a while.

He wants this because the alternative is that we don't have a liberal democracy or an open society, as we are currently witnessing all around us.

Just told ChatGPT to make a plot nicer by following @kjhealy.co's book (with no further details). It was quite effective.

Indiana University was ranked at No. 255 out of 257 U.S. colleges and universities, making it the lowest-rated public institution in the country.

I always think one reason people get so mad about this is the worry that it's actually the right strategy, and what that says about our fellow Americans.

Restoring health insurance for poor people is good, actually.

It's weird how he's posting like this and a bunch of guys who were 12 at the time think that Obama being mean to Romney is cause for destroying democracy.

Help test via snapshots: parallel threads racket.discourse.group/t/help-test-...

The answer to one of the most universal questions in computing education. It's not what you're expecting. At all. parentheticallyspeaking.org/articles/fir...

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The central issue is that what people want is "new construction at the price point/level of amenity of the Levittown developments". IZ delivers this in very small amounts. YIMBYs (correctly) say that this is not feasible but that's of course unpopular.

This is an important point, and also points to the need on the left for those of us who want Tokyo housing policy, Parisian transit, Norwegian public safety, and Finnish social democracy to emphasize that these go together as well as the current configuration of US left ideas.

Code is usually not the bottleneck because we have oriented our processes around only being able to produce small amounts of it. Once you can write code infinitely fast, you need to change what code you write and your processes for using it.

Another award that is announced at PLDI is the SIGPLAN Programming Languages Software Award. This year, the award was received by the LEAN theorem prover, which has had and continues to have broad impact on mathematics, hardware and software verification, and AI!

There's a lot, good and bad, to say about AI, but this is still pretty incredible.

I like how explicit How To Design Programs is about the process that takes place in my head but that I never named. "IDK all the details right now but this function surely will access the three numbers in the input list. Put those accesses in there surrounded with ..., deal with the rest later"

to me the biggest problem with bluesky is that politics dominates this place. that makes sense, i assume most of us left twitter for political reasons. but there's not enough chat about other things on here. there used to be, but not anymore. you get a little of the old twitter on big sports nights

Over the 10 days, I wrote a new Racket library for "expect testing", a style that @yminsky.bsky.social has advocated for in OCaml. github.com/samth/recspe... As an experiment, I built it entirely with Codex (the OpenAI async AI programming tool). I have some thoughts.

Outside the Brown County Courthouse in Nashville, Indiana #NoKings

Here's a paper describing quantum computing using standard programming constructs, w/o the linear algebra! The hope is that this will demystify quantum computing and serve as a formal foundation for reasoning about quantum programs. paper eprint.iacr.org/2025/1091.pdf code github.com/qqq-wisc/qwla

Bluesky is less fun because it's 100% about the current events that are horrifying and bad.

Hot take: a lot of posting about this is based on anxiety that maybe this does poll well with swing voters in Ohio.

I think decision making in school siting is an important frontier in land use policy reform. Lots of states have regulations or guidelines that either require or suggest very large sites for new schools.

I genuinely don't understand what makes people act like this on the internet.

The thing that's interesting here is that every previous advance has involved raising the level of abstraction, often very high, and then requiring precision at that new level. AI coding is most different because it doesn't require precision.

This would be very bad.

if you want to know how cities value the safety of cyclists take stock of where they install bollards to protect electrical equipment or parking payment terminals and then see how they protect bike lanes

One of the big problems in this discourse is that Americans care objectively way too much about fairness and competitiveness in youth sports.

When I say "general purpose" what I mean is "the things I'm optimizing for are more important than the things you're optimizing for".

the hard part of education has always been teaching people who don't really give a shit. the hard part of education discourse is that everyone in it gave a shit.

Cannot reiterate enough: Clear Creek, anyone south of Switchyard, safe place, now. (7:34 pm)

A few thoughts on AI and education, from someone who uses AI and also teaches many levels of student. 1. Most importantly, it's not possible to know what will happen because no one knows what skills AI will or will not replace in the next few years.

PhD Timeline xkcd.com/3081

In Bluesky, identity is confirmed by two separate, yet equally important tools. These are their skeets.

People responding to this are really underestimating the all-in cost of hiring people with PhDs in technical fields.

Anecdotally, I know a lot of people who were in the prime millennial-educated-mom Target demographic who have stopped shopping there.

Bloomington, Indiana #handsoff

BREAKING: Faculty from Indiana University’s computer science department just issued a statement asking the university to rescind the termination of cybersecurity professor XiaoFeng Wang. ▶ @weiss-a-woni.bsky.social indianapublicmedia.org/news/iu-comp...

I don't care what side of the Israel-Palestine conflict your sympathies lie on, snatching up people with a valid student visa for the crime of writing an OpEd is naked fascism and if you don't oppose this you are a threat to this country's most basic values

who's on what platform, 2025 edition

There is no stark tradeoff between 1) making housing and energy more abundant through targeted deregulation and 2) expanding the social welfare state and collective bargaining rights. All of these would make our economy more prosperous and just www.vox.com/politics/405...

Proposed compromise: the effective altruists admit that maybe the tech gajillionaire crowd should not be in charge of everything, and the rest of us concede that we probably should be giving more money to the poor.

Rhombus is ready for early adopters. Learn more and get it now at rhombus-lang.org