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• Post #4473234

  I just learned that oat milk was discovered in the 1960s, when NASA found out by accident what zero-g environments do to goat milk. Thank you, thank you, I'll see myself out.

• Post #4402938

  RE: https://mastodon.social/@gvwilson/117043030559498832 Thanks to everyone who has responded / is responding / responds in future. Several of you have had questions or comments about the survey's content - I can't answer them now for fear of biasing responses, but I'm taking notes and will do so once the survey closes. The results and analysis will be published (open access) as soon as we have them. Thanks again.

• Post #4398874

  Looking for the source/data for the claim that approximately 1/3 of backups fail to restore - is it just folklore or does someone have a pointer to something more substantial? Thanks in advance.

• Post #4394009

  Please help if you can: I am working with some students who are studying programmers' beliefs about software engineering folklore. If you can spare a few minutes to answer the question in https://survey.bth.se/survey/2545, we would be very grateful. We would also be grateful if you could circulate the survey link to colleagues and friends - we would like to reach as diverse a demographic as possible. Thanks in advance.

• Post #4335084

  Looking for source of quote: "The real purpose of AI is to give the wealthy access to skill without giving the skilled access to wealth." thanks in advance (please note: not in search of commentary at present time)

• Post #4222488

  "Disclosure Day" is an incoherent, self-indulgent mess. There are some good performances - in particular, Emily Blunt manages to create some moments - but bleah…

• Post #4193009

  Zięba-Kozarzewski 2026: "No Edges, No Verdict: A Large-Scale Empirical Study of Declared Dependency Graphs in 78K SBOMs in the Wild" https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.22140 "52.9% of SBOMs declare no edges at all, 8.8% declare a dependency block yet leave the majority of components isolated, and 38.3% form well-connected graphs."

• Post #4164286

  In his essay on Salvador Dali, Orwell argued that because Dali was a repulsive human being, the right wouldn't admit that he was a great artist; conversely, because he was a great artist, the left wouldn't admit he was a repulsive human being. I'm seeing the same thing with AI: because it's unethical, one side won't acknowledge that it's useful, but because it's useful, the other side won't acknowledge that it's unethical. Time to make another cup of tea…

• Post #4138178

  RE: https://social.afront.org/@stylus/116991865079758024 There is an alternate timeline in which the Jupyter notebook was built in OpenOffice instead of in a browser, so that people could (for example) draw diagrams directly in the Office-y parts of the doc beside their embedded code cells. It wouldn't have played nicely with version control, but neither (in practice) does Jupyter's fastidious JSON and embedded images. I still wonder sometimes what kinds of coding environments would hav...

• Post #4112485

  "A cocaine skeptic starts an unwise habit" https://blog.djnavarro.net/posts/2026-07-26_starting-a-cocaine-habit/ is a long, thoughtful piece about AI and programming - worth reading carefully. cc @djnavarro@hachyderm.io

• Post #4094803

  Starting Aug 17, Atlassian gives itself the right to scrape your data for AI/ML training purposes: https://letsdatascience.com/news/atlassian-enables-default-data-collection-to-train-ai-f71343d8

• Post #4072927

  https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/measles-cases-u-s-9.7282606

• Post #4016722

  I had the privilege of reading a pre-release draft of @grimalkina@mastodon.social 's "The Psychology of Software Teams". Serendipitously, I followed it with Sarah Stein Lubrano's "Don't Talk About Politics", which is actually about the psychology of how people change their minds (or don't). The combination gave me a _lot_ to think about, and I highly recommend both.

• Post #4014132

  Suppose you discovered that AI transcription mistakenly ascribed points made by women to male participants in meetings 40% of the time - would you continue to use it? What if it was 4%? Or 0.4% (i.e., once every 250 meetings)? Do you and/or your employer have a threshold or SLA? Are you/they even thinking in those terms?

• Post #4012729

  TIL: second-hand child seats for cars are safe - we think otherwise because of a PR campaign by manufacturers who wanted to kill the resale market. https://isbnsearch.org/isbn/9781635570113

• Post #3986502

  RE: https://cosocial.ca/@mhoye/116954272213286323 "This is not a software business that happens to own servers. It is a real estate business that happens to compute." https://www.groundbrkr.com/p/the-second-derivative-why-no-one

• Post #3986501

  "Nothing for us, without us" is the best and also most often ignored advice in, well, everything: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/finch-west-lrt-accessibility-concerns-9.7276886

• Post #3986500

  Enjoyed Postrel's "The Fabric of Civilization" https://isbnsearch.org/isbn/9781541617612 - good popular science / history, and some thought-provoking discussion of (for example) how the needs of weaving may have inspired development of number theory in classical times. ☆☆☆

• Post #3986499

  How is this sane? https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2026/07/20/viewpoint-rfk-jr-is-setting-up-a-panel-to-compensate-people-who-claim-they-were-injured-by-a-covid-vaccine-no-proof-needed/ edit: OK, so it's a way to hand government money to their more radical supporters. That (unfortunately) makes sense.

• Post #3984906

  How is this legal? https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/07/mit-to-become-hotbed-of-ai-video-surveillance.html edit: how would you feel if the press release from the university was, "Once these cameras are installed, we will be able to track the identity and position of every woman on campus in real time."

• Post #3924095

  Canada's government recently announced billions of dollars to support development of a new pipeline to move the dirtiest crude oil in the world to market: https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/wildfire-climate-emissions-smoke-9.7274862

• Post #3798105

  "Passwords, GPS coordinates and private conversations have all been found in the metadata and source files of millions of preprint submissions." https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02057-8

• Post #3734724

  A: "Every time Claude writes an email, a butterfly dies somewhere in the Amazon." B: "Luckily, I'm using Copilot."

• Post #3732737

  "Most dependency strategies are attempts to avoid interpersonal negotiation. The tooling doesn’t remove the disagreement, it just picks who loses by default." https://nesbitt.io/2026/07/10/package-management-as-org-chart.html

• Post #3722402

  Mori & Hashimoto 2026: "On the Correctness of Software Merge" https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07987

• Post #3633976

  On December 22, 1967, Spock asked the Enterprise computer to calculate pi to the last digit in order to paralyze it (episode 2x07, "Wolf in the Fold"). Is this the first example of prompt engineering in modern fiction?

• Post #3618926

  Just learned that "slub" is actually a word.

• Post #3602870

  "I was only following prompts." - Skynet

• Post #3549619

  [this is eventually a post about AI tooling] Reading @judell@social.coop 's latest post https://blog.jonudell.net/2026/07/01/what-is-the-terminal/ made me realize that the Unix toolset is like a CISC processor with lots of overlap between instructions (think about how many ways you can do regular expression substitution from the command line) rather than like a modern RISC processor (smaller single-purpose instructions, which means you need more to accomplish any given task, but the net res...

• Post #3544251

  "People dramatically underestimate what thousands of organized humans can accomplish when they are adequately fed, aggressively supervised, and denied alternative career paths." https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/notes-from-a-tired-egyptian-guy-whose-job-is-explaining-that-humans-built-the-pyramids