If sandwich shops don’t start offering a sandwich named “the acquittal” then what are we even doing

Oh good! Someone from the @racketlang community can weigh in on the benefits. Oh wait… Anyway, sooner or later the time for computable reals will come. I'm still HODLing stock in continued fractions (and teaching them every year to my first-year students).

BJ Pryor is a professional Ben Franklin impersonator. Every day he distributes one of Franklin's writings. Today: Franklin reports on seeing "from the terrace of my house near Paris, the first flight through the air by human beings", and meets Montgolfier! bjpryor.substack.com/p/flight

Realizing that I live in a city with lots of artists and hence proper art stores. Going to go try one of those for a proper ball-point.

Lost my ball-point pen. Went to Staples to get a new one, and felt depressed. Remembered that I had this old box of fountain pens my dad had given me. Decided to revive one of them, impractical as it is. So the Sheaffer inlaid nib it is for now, for the ~10-15 words/month that I write by hand…

Hey @ftrain.bsky.social ! I just listened to your reply-all podcast episode from like 2014 (what can I say, I'm a slowpoke). It seems to me your anxiety bot should have a field day in the GenAI era! Did you ever rewrite it to use that?

15 years ago, "personalized learning" enthusiasts cited a small 1984 study of *human* tutoring as evidence that technology could improve student learning. Amazingly, OpenAI's idiot VP of Education cites the same study to support AI tutoring today. This is all so dumb. Via @mattbarnum.bsky.social:

Have expertise with functional programming, interpreters, and Web technology? Like Rust, wasm, etc.? Looking for a job with a great team (like @adamchalmers.com )? Please see this job ad, and share with others you might know! zoo.dev/jobs/4619187...

"First, many anti-trafficking groups rarely interact with the types of abuse victims that they say they do. Second, the rehabilitation-style work programs they operate can cause as much harm as they do good." www.brownalumnimagazine.com/articles/202...

Planning out a UK tour ~ mid-Feb/mid-March 2026. Stopping by U's of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Oxford, Cambridge, King's London, Imperial (say hi if you're at these places!). Anything else going on in that timeframe that I should know about, before I finalize plans?

In Bolzano/Bozen Italy, this May, I saw a restaurant that had a brunch sign that used this image. I wondered how many people even recognized it. (Wish I'd taken a photo; when I went back to do so, it was gone, since it was no longer time for brunch.)

BREAKING: Kane Williamson has announced his immediate retirement from T20 internationals. The former New Zealand captain retires with 2575 runs from 93 appearances in the format, with his final match coming at last year's T20 World Cup

This is the first time I'm seeing this Mamdani-explains-RCV video, and OMG, the number of in-group references! You can't help but laugh, which is a very difficult thing for a *political* ad to even attempt, much less pull off. As a *campaigner*, this guy is like nothing I've seen.

Popped into a store to get a beer to go with tonight's Game 7, and this seemed rather appropriate given the dramatis personae…

From reporting about last night's World Series Game 6: This is the kind of amazing act that makes someone a professional. Not only the sensory ability but also the ability to act on it in a fraction of a second. And it completely changed the game's outcome.

INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE SECOND INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE OVER ZOOM TO MEET MORE OF THE TEAM UNFORTUNATELY, YOU HAVE NOT BEEN SUCCESSFUL ON THIS OCCASION, BUT WE HOPE YOU'LL APPLY FOR FUTURE POSITIONS WITH THE VAMPIRE

Working on a new piece laying out why we are experiencing a jobless boom. Research by JP Morgan suggests that AI and related investment in infrastructure accounted for 3/4 of the 1.6% average growth of the first half of the year.

This is the same mindset as "how dare people on food stamps buy themselves a bit of ice cream", which is more a tell on the person saying it than the person buying it.

Hey the university did some PR about our game!

Very unusual to see Australia get Australia'ed, that too by India. What a gripping pair of semi-finals in the women's ODI world cup! Just hope the final doesn't prove to be a damp squib. #cricket

What can a German studies and gender studies professor have to say about tech and thinking? Quite a bit! Well-written and insightful, with a bit of SV "inside baseball" thrown in. The quotes at the bottom of this page are surprisingly accurate. #BookReview www.adriandaub.com/books/what-t...

But just imagine if he'd given him a Papal Bulls jersey.

One of the most remarkable episodes of The Analyst Inside Cricket is this one from 2020 of "The special sounds of cricket", featuring commentator Dean du Plessis, who is BLIND. Even by the amazing standards of visually impaired people, he's next-level. podcasts.apple.com/nz/podcast/e...

He is beloved by despicable people. A real amuse-douche

This is the end-point of extractive AI. First get people to upload everything, then suck everything out of it, then get AI to generate all the answers. I wonder how this cycle continues. (If it means Chegg can't continue the cycle…paint me so sad.)

Me: You're from Toronto, right? Student: Yeah! M: Is there joy in Mudville? S: ?!? M: That's a baseball reference! S: Oh, I hate baseball. I have a whole list. [We spent 15min on it. Mostly fair; some even map to cricket. Some were just wrong!] Education takes many forms! 🙂

Gotta watch *the episode* in her honor tonight. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/28/a...

It's forbidden to play this game on the Singapore subway. [Game designer says "we designed a fast-paced, educational game that teaches players to differentiate durian types while maintaining the original's chaotic fun". www.sgboardgamedesign.com/post/creator... ]

Turn it back into cricket.

Was discussing w/ friends how I think Mamdani would perform as mayor. I was curious to see what prediction markets had to say. Surprised that only Kalshi had any on post-election acts; Polymarket and Manifold only on election itself. (I don't really use them; is this typical?)

So if you are someone who cares about people going hungry in RI, please help out Higher Ground 4/ secure.lglforms.com/form_engine/...

please enjoy: my Wasm-hosted, Wasm-targeting build of Clang/Clang++/LLD: a self-contained, 25 MiB (gzipped) pure function www.npmjs.com/package/@yow...

Arundhati Roy on John Berger —

A very offline cousin sent this to fam group chat. This story is breaking containment.

“Modern cryptography primitives implemented in Scratch” by @retr0.id github.com/DavidBuchana...

I routinely say that learning how to use the Unix shell is a superpower, because all kinds of basic analytics tasks that would take a day to program in (say) Java take 5 minutes and you can rapidly prototype. That completely alters the range of things you even *contemplate trying*. This is the same.

listen, I didn't stop listening to Nirvana when they started selling the smiley face shirts at Urban Outfitters; I'm not gonna stop using em-dashes just because chatGPT uses them

Kathi asks ChatGPT "how to test a graph algo". Repeats the query 6 months later…now it mentions PBT. Huh! We ask it why it mentioned PBT. It cites back… Our own papers and blog, and specifically mentions our own education research work on why graph algos are a great eg. Moving the needle!

Please repost: We're looking for an excellent writer/editor with strong data journalism skills to join the religion team at @pewresearch.org. pewtrusts.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Center...

If you're into music this might interest you. Basically it's a piano keyboard wrapped in a spiral so e.g. all the C notes are on the same radial. Equal angle means equal interval. E.g. a perfect fifth is always one past 180 degrees

Really funny how CNN set up this very fun interactive site to show how ranked-choice voting works, with lots of flavors in the mix, and after all is said and done, the two final contenders are…chocolate (51.4%) and Vanilla (48.6%). Almost like Rs and Ds. www.cnn.com/interactive/...

You can actually see some of the great work from that group on Rust, in a talk Will recently gave at Jane Street: www.janestreet.com/tech-talks/r...

We've had an exciting couple of weeks full of opportunities to teach people about the exciting (and mildly bewildering) features of OxCaml. And...we're looking to hire an experienced educator to help us in this work. Please share this with anyone you think might be a good fit!

I updated the examples from the Answer-Set Programming chapter of our Procedural Content Generation in Games textbook to current syntax, and added web demos via clingo-wasm. Check it out if such things interest you!

How do you think the unthinkable? With an ithberg

NEW: AP investigation finds over 420 anti-science bills attacking longstanding public health protections have been introduced in statehouses across the US this year, part of an organized, politically savvy campaign to enshrine a conspiracy theory-driven agenda into law. w/ @lauraungar.bsky.social

For reference, we have an oddly epic 1950s post office that resembles zero other buildings in the city.

The fact they were able to find their way out of The Louvre is the most remarkable part of this story.

Psst! She is doing this 'infinite scrolling'. In the public, and in 1793. #skystorians #socialmedia

just backed the Atlas of Fourier Transforms on kickstarter! www.kickstarter.com/projects/hla...