Simon @spoltier@qoto.org

So weird how teaching is such a punching bag for tech bros including the ones who sit around trying to cash in the cultural cachet of "caring about education" just as much as the ones who like to cash in on "shitting on education"

I think it's revelatory to ask what makes people's skin crawl and clearly teachers make these guys crawl out of their skins. Like I think this is true on a visceral level for them

I am learning some upsetting-to-me things from reading the bash man page, for example that in bash `source blah.sh` will by default search all directories in your PATH for a file called `blah.sh`

The demoscene has become a national UNESCO heritage in Sweden! I was part of making the application, so ofc I think it's great, but I wrote a little bit about how difficult it is to generalize the demoscene. https://www.goto80.com/the-demoscene-as-a-unesco-heritage-in-sweden

After a 1.5 year period where I tried to use an iPad as my laptop, I have just grabbed my 5 6+ year old Thinkpad X1 Carbon for this trip, and while the battery life sucks, it is nice to have my proper OS back.

Models have preferences like giving inanimate 📦 stuff to animate 👳
Is it that they just saw a lot of such examples in pretraining or is it generalization and deeper understanding?
https://alphaxiv.org/pdf/2503.20850
#linguistics #language #LLM #AI

Hell is other networks. Today @ahl.bsky.social and I will be joined by Oxide engineers to discuss an incident where our combination with particular networking equipment resulted in a pathological system -- and how it was debugged and resolved. Join us, 5p Pacific!

https://discord.gg/QrcKGTTPrF?event=1356306084972986399

I just heard that a cryptography professor at Indiana University had his house raided and was fired. Don’t know much more. https://www.heraldtimesonline.com/story/news/local/2025/03/28/fbi-department-of-homeland-security-agents-search-house-in-bloomington-indiana/82710451007/

This week, Elecia( @logicalelegance ) and Chris( @stoneymonster ) host Kwabena Agyeman, CEO of OpenMV LLC for a chat about more powerful and tiny programmable cameras.

Join them here ( https://embedded.fm/episodes/497 ) on the latest episode of Embedded.

Here's Kwabena on an upcoming MicroPython feature:

#software #hardware #engineering #embedded #camera #iot #openmv #ml #ai

New Change, Technically episode is out: WHO'S AFRAID OF MATH?

We tackle *math anxiety,* @analog_ashley teaches me about vulnerable circuits in the brain and being vulnerable about teaching, and I read a HECK of a lot of science to bring you this episode.

I hope you enjoy our deep dive into math anxiety, what we know about it, what we can do about it, and why we think you shouldn't feel bad if math makes you feel bad ❤️

https://www.changetechnically.fyi/2396236/episodes/16876929-who-s-afraid-of-math

Two fascinating new papers on LLM interpretability from Anthropic
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/27/tracing-the-thoughts-of-a-large-language-model/

Both papers are great, but the best thing about them is they aren't published as PDFs! They are glorious, mobile friendly web pages which even include several interactive diagrams. Love this so much. https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/biology.html#dives-multilingual

In the first millennium CE, mathematicians performed the then-complex calculations needed to compute the date of Easter. Of course, with our modern digital calendars, this task is now performed automatically by computers; and the older calendrical algorithms are now mostly of historical interest only.

In the Age of Sail, mathematicians were tasked to perform the intricate spherical trigonometry calculations needed to create accurate navigational tables. Again, with modern technology such as GPS, such tasks have been fully automated, although spherical trigonometry classes are still offered at naval academies, and ships still carry printed navigational tables in case of emergency instrument failures.

During the Second World War, mathematicians, human computers, and early mechanical computers were enlisted to solve a variety of problems for military applications such as ballistics, cryptanalysis, and operations research. With the advent of scientific computing, the computational aspect of these tasks has been almost completely delegated to modern electronic computers, although human mathematicians and programmers are still required to direct these machines. (1/3)

Going to put this out there in light of news of other researchers moving, because I think information sharing in our communities is a form of power, but Ashley and I are looking at opportunities outside of the US right now and considering it. I want to signal our openness to it.

Especially for her, as a tenured teaching professor in neurobiology whose entire lab & teaching practice is deeply grounded in equity & increasing success in STEM. Her extraordinary work makes local communities flourish