Eric Walkingshaw @walkie@types.pl

The big announcement!!! The dsl.design book is officially out from Springer. You can now order it at the source or download it if you have a subscription: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-23669-3

The book aims at university teaching of language design and technology, with lots of small examples and exercises. Supported by a code repository.

BTW. We are not getting any money when you download, but please go ahead and download!!! :D

#pleaseBoost #WeAreDone! CC: @tberger @seresearchers

One of my professors during PhD used to say “You can drive a truck through the holes in any given paper. So you look for what you *can* learn instead.” And being the smartass grad students we used to think driving that truck was fun. After so many years, I now appreciate her wisdom more than ever. All scholarly work has limitations but it’s refreshing when people critically evaluate what’s the actual value of the research. It's about humility, honesty, rigorous intellectual work.

Have we really not yet standardized a “lttp:” protocol for linking to resources from The Wayback Machine? You know, a link to the past.

Release Engineering Is Exhausting So Here's cargo-dist!

Helping your Rust projects ship prebuilt binaries that others can actually use without you having to become a Github CI Expert (or Rust Toolchain Expert) ((or OS integration expert)) (((or...)))

https://blog.axo.dev/2023/02/cargo-dist

I don't want to talk about Black history yet. I want to talk about why if you grew up in the North or West, your high school history book likely talked about the "Articles of Secession,"

but if you grew up in the South, those parts are removed and lied about.🙂🙃

Disinformation.

You can literally go and read the "Declaration of Causes of Seceding States," primary documents written by confederates themselves, on why they are Seceding.

https://web.archive.org/web/19980128034930/http://sunsite.utk.edu/civil-war/reasons.html

Some schools refuse to teach this.

OpenAI released a tool which purports to detect AI-generated text. At the highest end of detection, it labels text "possibly" or "likely" AI-generated. 21% of human-written text falls under "possibly" and 9% of "likely" does. That's 3 in 10 students being defamed and/or harmed.

Just like other providers of academic surveillance software, OpenAI states that their detector "should not be used as a primary decision-making tool".

It will be, though. And harm will follow.

https://openai.com/blog/new-ai-classifier-for-indicating-ai-written-text/

"I worry that, as a culture, we’re getting the AI we deserve. As the journalist Sarah Kendzior has noted, on the internet, journalism is paywalled but disinformation is free. A paper-writing machine that spews out disinformation at a record clip almost seems too on-the-nose to be real."

https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/confessions-community-college-dean/getting-ai-we-deserve

"If Americans continue to depend on cars at the current rate, by 2050 the US alone would need triple the amount of lithium currently produced for the entire global market, which would have dire consequences for water and food supplies, biodiversity, and Indigenous rights."

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/24/us-electric-vehicles-lithium-consequences-research

#climate #climatechange #evs #electriccars #transportation

Love this Axios Visuals look at the evolution of pickup trucks and their popularity in the US (and how they are used for shopping / daily driving much more than hauling boulders) . This view of the inversion of the ratio between cab and cargo bed tells the story. https://www.axios.com/ford-pickup-trucks-history

Americans will really do anything to avoid using the metric system.

The Twitter API lockout of third-party apps is only the latest reminder of centralization's most important rule: The platform owner has the right to capriciously wreck the businesses of people who accepted the platform's invitation to run a business on the platform.

https://www.theverge.com/23551060/elon-musk-twitter-takeover-layoffs-workplace-salute-emoji
🤡 🍆

Because it has to be repeated again and again: We need to drastically reduce the number of cars to solve our problems.

Petition to bring back 🌈 rainbow computer logos
#retrocomputing

every paragraph in this paper is blowing my mind https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613(22)00236-4 even as someone who already believed in the infinite variety of language, there are just so many deeply researched counterexamples to basically anything you think is universal (especially if you're using english as your basis for "universal")