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• Post #3223844

  I got really pissed off at news coverage about the British heatwave. This is record-breaking summer temperatures *in May*, and I see reporting like how everyone was happy to be going to the pool or the beach and enjoying the "sunny weather". Stop. This is endangering people and not adequately educating the public on how to deal with this. British people are not properly educated about hot weather and sun dangers, and this kind of reporting will claim lives.

• Post #3223843

  RE: https://mastodon.social/@marioguzman/116716125990845344 I'm glad. I can probably just skip 26 and go straight to 27

• Post #2380714

  I quite enjoy reading the weeknotes from @byorgey and @jonmsterling. Even though my research doesn't really overlap with theirs, it's nice to read people's thoughts and reflections in a format which is more considered and interesting than microblogging or social media. Has anyone else started weeknoting?

• Post #2380713

  A few weeks ago, I postulated several conjectures, and my PhD student thought about them and came up with proofs or counterexamples for each of them. I was overjoyed and excited for our future work together. I imagine a scenario where instead I had asked a chatbot to prove the theorems for me. Even if it did prove the theorems (extreme doubt), I think getting such a proof wouldn't have made me feel anything. No one's achieved anything.

• Post #2304948

  I don't know who needs to read this, but: there's value in doing things slowly, in your own way. Trying to maximise efficiency in your life is a fools errand, and will just hurt you. Take the longer route with the nicer scenery. Write that email by hand instead of asking a bot to do it. Spend some time to read and not just skim. Take your time and cook a nice meal for yourself. Pursue little hobbies, even if you're not good at them. Don't compare yourself to other...

• Post #2304947

  My ult. rant is prompted by academics saying that the reason they train students rather than just do research themselves with claude doing all the legwork is that there's value in the apprenticeship, in training a person. To me that's a bad argument because it presupposes both that we should be prioritising efficiency above all else (definite disagree) and that working with AI is more efficient in the long run than working with a student (also disagree but falsifiable)

• Post #2211074

  I want to like the Vivaldi browser, because their project has worthy goals and they promote lots of good things like RSS and mastodon, but their UI is just a mess.

• Post #2211073

  Feeling pretty devastated. The vast majority of my first year students failed their second midsem test, with over half of the submissions having compile errors. This is for a _second_ programming course, where they're given and recommended to use IntelliJ. I'm racking my brain to see if I could have done anything differently. I don't think the test had too little time, it took tutors 25 minutes to complete (100%) and I gave the students 90 minutes. I gave them a practice...

• Post #1754532

  RE: https://masto.ai/@phoronix/116476120066302561 Another one bites the dust.

• Post #1724090

  it makes me so happy when I see my research students become friends with each other.

• Post #1724089

  I'm very blessed that my students are smarter than I am.

• Post #1724088

  Does anyone who follow me have strong expertise in descriptive set theory and topology? My student and I are stumped by a fairly particular problem.

• Post #1724087

  RE: https://types.pl/@liamoc/116465039020846254 I can gladly retract this call for assistance, my student is absolutely brilliant and has solved the problem and proved her theorem in Isabelle/HOL!

• Post #1724086

  Come and hear me sing with a great Canberra chamber choir. https://www.corocanberra.com/concerts

• Post #1415174

  I find the proposed agda contributors policy to be quite disappointing. I'm not sure what I will do about this yet, and I'm not actively using Agda at the moment so i don't need to come to a decision now, but I'm leaning towards avoiding Agda as I currently avoid Lean (despite the fact that I like Lean quite a lot as a language, the dreaded bots have infected too much of its ecosystem and culture for me to have a good time engaging with it)

• Post #1402929

  Part of my job as an educator is to create situations where my students will be stressed, they will struggle, they might get frustrated, they might even hate me (although that's rare). My mentor Kai Engelhardt said that part of his job was to "torture students". It's a joke of course but there is a kernel of truth there: particularly for learning skills like debugging, there's no better way to learn than by trying to reason your way out of a buggy mess o...