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• Post #4319464

  Wonder how much sleep the kid managed to get after my recommendation of listening to a Mars Volta album.

• Post #4319463

  Saw a couple of construction workers decked out in their work gear (orange vest, work boots, hard hat) carrying their tools all while riding an e-scooter and smoking a cigarette. It was definitely a look.

• Post #4319462

  It wouldn't surprise me if AI companies were buying and destroying books without scanning them at all.

• Post #4319461

  RE: https://mathstodon.xyz/@bremner/117019951456757670 Maybe it's different now, but I was literally taught nothing about teaching prior to or during the time I was a university professor. I kind of wonder if all those chickens are now going to come home to roost with AI. I've been thinking about this a lot as I'm back in school working on a Masters in Teaching right now. Note: this comment is more about the difficulty of the task and not David specifically (but his c...

• Post #4169612

  It's really amazing how much programming discussion has devolved from using technical language of practice to using a jibberish language of drug use.

• Post #3946068

  Honestly, I think a big part of my personal attitude problem with LLMs (aside from all of their various downsides) is the fact that I've somehow managed to make it this far in life without needing things like fancy autocomplete and I'm just not going to start doing that now. It'd be like if a helicopter swooped down to offer me a ride when I'm already about 28000ft up Everest making steady progress. No, fuck you very much. I do not want that. I'll crawl if I have to. But...

• Post #3727534

  Wife: "You know, he's under no obligation to give her a can opener." Me: "No, but he could be less of a prick." Wife: "But he's out there with his little kids." Me: "She didn't ask to eat a kid." Kid: "You know, Dad has a good point there." Me: "If cans had existed at the time of the old testament, I bet some kid would be doing their Bar Mitvah speech about loaning strangers a can opener." Wife: "Ok, you can stop...

• Post #3487709

  Find myself having to make an unplanned road trip. Could fly. Don't want to. Could take the interstate. Nah. Could use a map. Nope. Think I'm just going to leave the house and drive backroads across the prairie until I get there some 1000 miles later. Sort of homing pigeon style.

• Post #2412265

  Sure, you don't have to use cocaine, but all of your students are using cocaine. They'd probably be more engaged if you were a bit more culturally sensitive and also used cocaine.

• Post #2331129

  The year is 2026. I just finished observing a day in the life of 35 high school math classes taught by 34 different math teachers across 7 different high schools. Ask me anything.

• Post #2126200

  About a year ago, I started putting together a course to work through the first part of Crafting Interpreters in Rust. Having now done that a few times, I feel like my Rust skills have improved a LOT and I'm rather enjoying it. I got to thinking about how to take it further. Then a little voice said "why not just teach everything in Rust all summer?" Yeah. So, I'm doing that. https://dabeaz.com/summer.html

• Post #2126199

  Grace Hopper is the first person to have implemented a compiler. Perhaps you can become one of the last. Anyways, I've got an upcoming compilers course February 16-20. https://dabeaz.com/compiler.html Boosts kindly appreciated.

• Post #2126198

  I've still got space in my Raft course coming up in a few weeks (Mar 9-13). https://dabeaz.com/raft.html. It's probably going to be the final voyage of Raft so if you were thinking about taking it, now would be the time.

• Post #2098635

  A busy week of HS observation ahead. Today, it's a journey to a Chicago Public School.

• Post #2098634

  I get that the water required to produce a hamburger is probably more than an AI query, but this neglects to account for the fact that the cow still wrote better code.

• Post #2098633

  Not sure if it was by design, but almost every math teacher I observed today also coached sports. So, it was sort of like "BUELLER, WHAT'S THE VERTEX?!?!?!" for the whole period.

• Post #2098632

  Rhinoceros!

• Post #2098631

  Found myself quietly sitting in the back, low-key observing an AP CompSci-A class today. A short summary of the 55 minutes... "Work on the projects." "I'm confused." "You've got this!" "This is coded in the dumbest way possible." "I'm still confused." "You're doing great! "Why isn't anyone working?" (some quiet looking over code. C...

• Post #2098630

  Getting ready for a final day of HS observation. This has really been a very interesting thing to see.

• Post #1631638

  Based on the kid's report of puking, I'd say it was a resoundingly successful class field trip to "physics day" at Six Flags.

• Post #1536257

  When I hear about the Apple Calculator app casually leaking 32GB of memory, I'm not thinking that's a lot of memory--I'm thinking that's a Connection Machine 5 amount of memory. (The 1024 node CM-5 supercomputer at Los Alamos had 32GB of memory when I used it).

• Post #1092763

  I am teaching the Raft course for what is likely to be its last voyage March 9-13. Space is still available. https://dabeaz.com/raft.html. Boosts appreciated.

• Post #924875

  I've watched movies and TV shows. I've read science fiction. And I've read some fantasy. And I'll begrudging admit that I once read an Ayn Rand novel. But, for the life of me, I have no freaking idea where these tech bro billionaires are getting their ideas. Nobody needing jobs? Millions of people working high-paying jobs in space? No need for doctors? Or teachers? Is it drugs? Licking too much lead paint? Stanford? It's drugs isn&#39...

• Post #857949

  A student in my Ruckus course said they gave the project to an AI afterwards as an experiment and it simply did the entire project (passing all tests) and even wrote an overview of its decision making process. I looked at the resulting code and the overview. It's not entirely to my liking, but I'd probably give it a B+. I'm not even quite sure what to make of all of this except to wonder if continuing education in CS is completely dead at this point.

• Post #845797

  It's come to my attention that John Bradley, author of the "xv" tool has died. I never knew John, but I used "xv" a LOT in the early days of my career as a graduate student working in computational physics. In many ways "xv" might have been more pivotal to my early career than even Python. In this thread, I'm going to offer my tribute to "xv" and say a bit about its role in my 1990s "vibe&qu...

• Post #809828

  Unlike most of my other courses, I'm somewhat inclined to keep Ruckus around for a future offering just because it's too weird to not offer it again (and I love it). However, just in case I don't, you can take it March 23-26. https://dabeaz.com/ruckus.html.

• Post #738533

  Meanwhile, I'm out taking my trombone to the repair shop and the guy says "so, you want to see something an old lady brought into the shop from the depths of her closet last week?" And there it was.... a *MINT* 1970s King 3B with original packing materials and owners manual. Looks never played. The holy grail of jazz trombones. It's now mine. Naturally.