wingolog: international lisp conference -- day two has this very interesting
snippet:
The "debate" had an interlude, in which Costanza asked Sussman why MIT had
switched away from Scheme for their introductory programming course, 6.001. This was a
gem. He said that the reason that happened was because engineering in 1980 was not what it
was in the mid-90s or in 2000. In 1980, good programmers spent a lot of time thinking, and
then produced spare code that they thought should work. Code ran close to the metal, even
Scheme -- it was understandable all the way down. Like a resistor, where you could read
the bands and know the power rating and the tolerance and the resistance and V=IR and
that's all there was to know. 6.001 had been conceived to teach engineers how to take
small parts that they understood entirely and use simple techniques to compose them into
larger things that do what you want.
But programming now isn't so much like that, said Sussman. Nowadays you muck
around with incomprehensible or nonexistent man pages for software you don't know who
wrote. You have to do basic science on your libraries to see how they work,
trying out different inputs and seeing how the code reacts. This is a fundamentally
different job, and it needed a different course.
Via
Andy Wingo
@wingo@mastodon.social
Cam Pedersen: Noids, an update on Craig Reynold's "Boids" idea based on what's
been learned about starling behavior in the intervening 4 decades, and by doing it with a
neural net.
Via MeFi.
Some Words on WigglyPaint.
On how the author of WigglyPaint
is processing an older version of that code base being republished on a gazillion linkbait
sites.
Via.
Yeah, I'm pulling this one back.
Charlene had run across some African singing she really liked, so last night we tried to find a bit of it before we went to sleep. Looks like everything "Ubuntu Choir" on YouTube is AI generated. Along with all of the videos on Facebook. The slop really is taking over.
Eventually we figured out that "gwijo" was a useful search term, but I'm sure it's only a matter of time for that to get slipped.
Gerry Doyle
@mgerrydoyle.bsky.social
are the "adults in the room" in the room with us right now?
Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ
@olivia@scholar.social linked to Zenodo: Against the Uncritical Adoption of
'AI' Technologies in Academia
Related to the rejection of expertise is the rejection of imagining a better
future and the rejection of self-determination free from industry forces …. Not only AI
enthusiasts, but even some scholars whose expertise concentrates on identifying
and critically interrogating ideologies and sociotechnical relationships — such as
historians and gender scholars — unfortunately fall prey to the teleological belief that AI
is an unstoppable force. They embrace it because alternative responses seem too difficult,
incompatible with industry developments, or non-existent. Instead of falling for this, we
should “refuse [AI] adoption in schools and colleges, and reject the narrative of its
inevitability.” …. Such rejection is possible and has historical precedent, to name just a
few successful examples: Amsterdammers kicked out cars, rejecting that cycling through the
Dutch capital should be deadly. Organised workers died for the eight-hour workday, the
weekend and other workers’ rights, and governments banned chlorofluorocarbons from
fridges to mitigate ozone depletion in the atmosphere. And we know that even the tide itself
famously turns back. People can undo things; and we will …. Besides, there will be no future
to embrace if we deskill our students and selves, and allow the technology industry’s
immense contributions to climate crisis and environmental destruction to continue unimpeded
….
Citations ellipsized out for readability.
Went down to Marv's Big Sing https://www.singwithmarv.com with Riomas (formerly Shireen Amini, https://shireenamini.com ), and Rio's transformation has been accompanied by a shift from "good song leader" to "that was powerful and I feel compelled to learn those songs in order to share them".