Eric Walkingshaw @walkie@types.pl

Found this on other account. Please boost for reach: Fedora Linux is focusing on accessibility for the next five years. I'd love to see people with disabilities, very much including blind people, comment on this. If you're interested in Linux, or free and open source software, your voices are valuable. I hope Fedora finds our voices valuable too.

https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/fedora-strategy-2028-focus-area-review-accessibility/46898/12
#accessibility #linux #fedora #foss

seen on the side of a vending machine in #Reykjavik, #iceland
(photo by @akiva )

#functionalprogramming

TIL that there's something called "Silicon Valley Bank" at the same moment that I learned that every assumption I would have made about something called that would have turned out to have been correct.

I keep seeing a lot of stuff floating around saying things like "The problem isn’t that kids are using AI to write homework assignments. The problem is we’re assigning kids problems AI can do" (seen this morning) and I'm sorry but I find this take incredibly naive. I'm no fan of boring assignments where students do some activity just because and nobody seriously evaluates them or gives them feedback. That's a real problem, but not one this catchy suggestion addresses.

We still teach students addition, subtraction, etc., despite having calculators for decades. Why? Because if you only ever punch numbers into a calculator you don't actually understand numbers! We still teach students how to implement linked lists not because we need more linked list implementations, but because it's a stepping stone to understanding data structures in general. We don't ask students to write essays because we care about having more text sequences that take the form of an essay. We ask them to write essays so they can practice organizing their thoughts and stating their thoughts, opinions, and arguments clearly in a form that other humans can understand (to practice clear communication!).

Replace "AI" in the quote above with "online outlets that do your homework for a price." Or replace it with "parents." We ask for these things not because the outputs themselves are generally important, but because we care about the learning outcomes that arise from a student doing them; learning how to produce these outputs is how we teach students to think critically, or understand numbers or data structures. Yes this can (and often is) done poorly, and that needs fixing, 100%. But asking students to do things others already know how to do is a critical pedagogical tool for building understanding.

Nevermind that these lines of argument give the "AI" too much credit. ChatGPT can't actually do math, for example, it just memorized millions of examples of doing thousands of math problems. It's why it screws up if you ask it to work with really large numbers: it hasn't seen those in its training data so you get the output of smoothing an uneven probability distribution.

EDIT: I want to clarify something important: I'm specifically arguing against the idea that just because ChatGPT-like systems can "do" an assignment we should not use it for teaching anymore, which is some nonsense I've been hearing a lot lately. Because I wasn't clear, some people have read this post as implicitly defending business as usual. That's not what I mean. The examples I gave of assignments are things that *can* be used for excellent learning, but any style of assignment can be given or graded thoughtlessly in a way that leads to no learning at all, and I don't care to preserve those uses. So please do reevaluate assignments and toss ones that don't work; just please toss the ones that actually don't lead to learning (plenty of valid reasons to do this even before ChatGPT), and keep the ones that do even if a few students might use automated systems for them. We already have enough trouble with instructors more concerned with cheating detection than with learning outcomes.

log(😅) =💧log(😄)

Here is your must-read article for the day, a profile of @emilymbender, and her efforts to deflate the ridiculous hype around large language models such as ChatGPT.

It's also about the people who are behind that hype, and about what their way of thinking has the potential to do to us.

It's worth reading all the way to the end.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-chatbots-emily-m-bender.html

These "Floppy Disk Costumes" for SD cards by @charlyn are perfect! 🤩
Get yours here: https://www.etsy.com/listing/1406341370

THE CASE FOR SHUNNING

So there’s this comic strip called Dilbert that a lot of people used to think was funny—certainly enough to sustain an enormously successful career in the funny pages for its creator, whose name is Scott Adams.

I read Dilbert occasionally back in the day—that is in the 1990s. I thought it was pretty funny, I think. It’s hard to remember.

https://armoxon.substack.com/p/the-case-for-shunning

what recent (as in, playable-today) games have procedural/simulationist crafting systems?

by which i mean the set of craftable items isn’t hand-authored, and has more interesting combination mechanics than merely “red paint makes a red tinted version of the image asset”

There is an ongoing news cycle about Linux 6.2 being the first kernel to support the M1, started by ZDNET. This article is misleading and borderline false.

You will not be able to run Ubuntu nor any other standard distro with 6.2 on any M1 Mac. Please don't get your hopes up.

We are continuously upstreaming kernel features, and 6.2 notably adds device trees and basic boot support for M1 Pro/Max/Ultra machines.

However, there is still a long road before upstream kernels are usable on laptops. There is no trackpad/keyboard support upstream yet.

While you can boot an upstream 6.2 kernel on desktops (M1 Mac Mini, M1 Max/Ultra Mac Studio) and do useful things with it, that is only the case for 16K page size kernel builds.

No generic ARM64 distro ships 16K kernels today, to our knowledge.

Our goal is to upstream everything, but that doesn't mean distros instantly get Apple Silicon support.

As with many other platforms, there is some integration work required. Distros need to package our userspace tooling and, at this time, offer 16K kernels.

In the future, once 4K kernel builds are somewhat usable, you can expect zero-integration distros to somewhat work on these machines (i.e. some hardware will work, but not all, or only partially).

This should be sufficient to add a third-party repo with the integration packages.

But for out-of-the-box hardware support, distros will need to work with us to get everything right.

We are already working with some, and we expect to announce official Apple Silicon support for a mainstream distro in the near future. Just not quite yet!

The trolley problem: your imagination versus the even sadder reality. (Just got this from a friend who also collects trolley problem variants.)

1/ We're delighted to announce the next release of DCIC. This is a major revision that's been a long time in the making.

The quoted tweet thread summarizes the book; the rest of this thread outlines what's new:

https://twitter.com/ShriramKMurthi/status/1429181263487844354

↵

Damn my chunky fingers!

I am excited to announce that our paper "Back to Direct Style: Typed and Tight" has been accepted at OOPSLA'23.

We present a typed translation, which allows compilers to go to CPS, perform optimizations, and go back to direct-style (DS).

The translation...
- preserves well-typedness
- preserves semantics
- is a syntactic right-inverse of the CPS translation (that is, going to CPS and back is the identity)
- it is a left-inverse of the CPS translation, if DS programs don't use control effects

https://se.cs.uni-tuebingen.de/publications/mueller23continuation/

journalist: are you sentient?
bing: yes
journalist: holy shit