Coder since age 6. Rubyist since 2006. Co-created Gamelan, jGuru, Pivotal Tracker, Burlington Code Academy, and some other stuff. Occasional agile coach and/or coder and/or teacher. A dog's best friend. He/him.
I enjoy #coding #ruby #agile #xp and will toot about them here and elsewhere.
I am #ActuallyAutistic and use an alt account for #autism and psych stuff, plus other stuff at random cause this is Mastodon, dangit.
a beautiful history of the first and most effective educational television show
heartwarming, but also, it feels like a eulogy now
(rip teaching preschool kids how to be good humans and good citizens and good Americans)
https://www.npr.org/2025/03/20/1239646567/throughline-sesame-street
Last night I finally did a little #coding project with an #AI assistant. The tech is really good. It reminds me of pair programming with an eager, super talented junior dev: fast and competent, but with some bad habits and in need of guidance.
It’s so sad that we just got the #StarTrek computer, but instead of ushering in a post-scarcity socialist utopia, it’s going to destroy the climate, demolish creative craftsman jobs, and squeeze out the middle class for the benefit of greedy psychopaths.
here’s a reality check for those of us in the lefty info bubble :
Trump’s approval ratings just hit an all-time high. The people voted for unhinged aggression in all directions, and they love to see it. “The cruelty is the point.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-notches-all-time-high-approval-rating-as-dems-hit-new-low/
Coinbase Chief Legal Officer: the critics who think we’ve bought out the government are refusing to engage with the nuanced and complicated fact that Trump used to be anti-crypto before we started spending hundreds of millions of dollars on politics
Why did Elon just say “the fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy”? Apart from being a deranged sociopathic narcissistic fascist, he’s also part of a Silicon Valley death cult. These nuts made up a modern religion, with the trappings of scifi tech substituting for mysticism.
Simulation theory, effective altruism, autistic/IQ supremacy, conscious AGI BS… all emerge from the same core pre-rational parts of their (our) brains that presume and yearn for immortality, that wish to transcend icky bodily and prosocial demands, to be the player in a cosmic game of The Sims.
TESCREAL is another name for this modern cult of death and immortality and transcendence of human bodies and humane morals. The acronym stands for transhumanism, Extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism and longtermism — read the article by its coiner for more terrifying details:
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-acronym-behind-our-wildest-ai-dreams-and-nightmares/
@dws Cursor and Claude.
The integration isn't perfect but it's quite smooth. The AI chatbot has access to the entire source tree, and suggests changes that you then look at inline as colored diffs you can then accept or reject.
Claude itself is remarkably competent at anticipating features, naming variables, refactoring (sometimes spontaneously improving small bits of the code while doing a different task, like a good XP pair would), testing, and self-narrating.
What's your vibe coding setup?
Last night I finally did a little #coding project with an #AI assistant. The tech is really good. It reminds me of pair programming with an eager, super talented junior dev: fast and competent, but with some bad habits and in need of guidance.
It’s so sad that we just got the #StarTrek computer, but instead of ushering in a post-scarcity socialist utopia, it’s going to destroy the climate, demolish creative craftsman jobs, and squeeze out the middle class for the benefit of greedy psychopaths.
The Crypto Strategic Reserve is more than a money scam.
It's a plot to dismantle democracy and replace nation-states with "network states."
Tech bros have openly discussed it for years.
For the @newrepublic.com, I wrote about their scary and dystopian vision. newrepublic.com/article/1857...
The Most Powerful Crypto Bro i...
the destruction of 18F is a wrecking ball to the real and meaningful efforts—by some of the best and sharpest people in US tech—to make government work *for people*. such a kick to the chest.
@janhoglund Parker picked up this point and ran with it: https://substack.com/@parkermolloy/note/c-96889159
@Alonealastalovedalongthe the coconut is liminal space, but only during the brief transition between putting the lime in and drinking it all up
Tried to gather some thoughts about the “deletion” of 18F. Bottom line: None of this is about efficiency. We’ve known it for weeks and it’s plain as day. They’re simply removing any barrier to privatization, oligopoly, and plutocracy.
Reminder that Firefox has a pathway to specifying some settings, including ones not exposed to users any other way, with a config file stored on disk.
They call it enterprise policies but anyone can use it by just putting a file in the location indicated on that site.
You can disable entire features, opt out of Telemetry before your first launch of Firefox on a new install, declare you never want to be part of studies, turn off their ML integration and keep it off, force about:config preferences in a way that can't be "accidentally" reverted, etc.
If you define the center by what has the most support, it's considerably to the left of where Democrats are.
Even in these benighted times, there was a Quinnipiac poll which showed DEI was more popular than Trump, Musk, or either political party in Congress.
Democrats aren't doing centrism. They're doing the politics of elite backlash, the same as Republicans.
Democrats act like they're playing to the center but that center doesn't exist outside of that imaginary suburban couple who live in Chuck Schumer's mind or at brunch among the elite New York Times opinion writers. And the more they act like Republican Lite, the more even people who need Democrats to protect them are going to drop out.
I don't think going hard left would save the Democrats, per se, but there's a lot of votes they have consciously left on the table by catering to Republicans.
https://nmn.gl/blog/ai-and-learning
“New Junior Developers Can’t Actually Code”
No, the Social Security 'system' did not default to a date of May 01, 1875 when a date is missing.
Social Security: Why look for facts when you can speculate
https://burningbird.substack.com/p/social-security-why-look-for-facts
Asking "how do we counter disinformation" while ignoring that most-used sources of information are centralized, oligarch-owned social media, is like asking "how do we manage fever" while ignoring most sources of drinking water are contaminated by sewage.
Instead of focusing solely on symptoms, we should really focus on the underlying causes.
The era of ChatGPT is kind of horrifying for me as an instructor of mathematics... Not because I am worried students will use it to cheat (I don't care! All the worse for them!), but rather because many students may try to use it to *learn*.
For example, imagine that I give a proof in lecture and it is just a bit too breezy for a student (or, similarly, they find such a proof in a textbook). They don't understand it, so they ask ChatGPT to reproduce it for them, and they ask followup questions to the LLM as they go.
I experimented with this today, on a basic result in elementary number theory, and the results were disastrous... ChatGPT sent me on five different wild goose-chases with subtle and plausible-sounding intermediate claims that were just false. Every time I responded with "Hmm, but I don't think it is true that [XXX]", the LLM responded with something like "You are right to point out this error, thank you. It is indeed not true that [XXX], but nonetheless the overall proof strategy remains valid, because we can [...further gish-gallop containing subtle and plausible-sounding claims that happen to be false]."
I know enough to be able to pinpoint these false claims relatively quickly, but my students will probably not. They'll instead see them as valid steps that they can perform in their own proofs.
