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kayo_20211030on Ferrari Luce

"Sir" Jony Ive? Sure fine, recognized by the crown and all that. It looks like a Kia. Don't get me wrong, I like Kia's. If Ive was a lollipop he'd lick himself. When you get to a point that you can no longer do seminal & groundbreaking work, and you continue to cling to what you used to be, just stop; even if only in respect to the good stuff you've done already.

kayo_20211030on Migrating from Go to Rust

If you have a green field, by all means write it in rust. If you have a brown field, and a functional profitable system, rewrite the parts that need rewriting in the original language, whatever that is, and carry on. Make your systems better in small measurable ways, with the language you know and a team you trust to implement it all. Anything else is a wasteful religious argument.

kayo_20211030on What we lost when we stopped programming

It's a very interesting question. One can't tell the difference between the "clear" and the clean human effort, or even if it matters. I'm not sure what the right answer should be. In sport, I have an answer. In development, it's less obvious to me.

kayo_20211030on What we lost when we stopped programming

There's a connection here, right? https://www.enhanced.com/games I'm haven't worked out angles or implications, but it seems to rhyme for me.

kayo_20211030on The seed oil panic is hurting my cardiac patients

Yeah. True, I feel. The signaling and recommendations have gone both overboard and data-free. The end results might be bad.

kayo_20211030on I keep bouncing off the Scheme language

I understand the challenge, but is Graham (OP?) getting too caught up in how the code ought to look, rather that what it ought to do. I don't think it matters much initially how a piece of work looks as long as it does what's intended. Afterwards it does; particularly if you need to involve other developers, and to them, the idioms looks "strange". I'm not convinced that there's an ALGOL neurotype that's distinct from a LISP(?) neurotype. I think it's a bit of a spectrum like everything else.

kayo_20211030on Inequality and Risk

A better framing is to "reduce" inequality rather that "eliminate" inequality. Intuitively it makes sense that more money means more security. Why would anyone put in the effort otherwise? But, at some point, one has to asks how much security does an individual need? If a risk-taking founder with a gazillion dollars, and doing the lord's work (not my words), takes a small tax haircut after they've earned that money, in order to grant more security to some anonymous element of the precariat, how damaging would that be in practical terms? The founder would still have heaps of money, and remain above _some_ security threshold. Yes, it's taking from the rich; but not so much that it kills the the goose that we all want to continue laying the golden eggs.

kayo_20211030on I'm writing again (Cringely)

Isn't self-censorship a curse? I'm inclined to reply with a big yawn; but you can never underestimate the tug of sentimentality of an unexperienced past for other people. Is this bloke a has-been, or a never-wuz; and trying desperately to cash in on the "I'm doing AI" boom?

kayo_20211030on We see something that works, and then we understand it

Yes. There's an adage in medicine. See one, do one, teach one. I think it applies generally.

kayo_20211030on The locals don't know

As a local, one of the funnest things to do is to host out-of-town guests and to just do the touristy things in combination with local knowledge. Bus tours, museums, food, etc. Do it all. For me, it's stuff I'd probably never do unless pressed to provide entertainment for guests I care about.

So, do the local thing with tourists and retain a focus on a combination of showing off the best elements of being a local; with the wide-eyed enthusiasm of the tourist. As a blow-in to NY, I'd like others to appreciate it too.

Do what the tourists do, but with the locals. Do what the locals do, but with the tourists.

kayo_20211030on Don't prepone it – do the needful. 10 Indianisms we should all be using

I love how words and phrases go out someplace, are adjusted, and then they come back in a more expressive form. The brilliance of language!

kayo_20211030on Warp is now open-source

Me too. Super disappointed. I was thinking, yeah that sounds fun. But, nope.

kayo_20211030on Statecharts: hierarchical state machines

For the clojure folks there's https://github.com/fulcrologic/statecharts which a pretty sophisticated implementation that removes the XML requirement (particularly for executable content), yet remaining close to SCXML. XState even gets a reference in the prior art section.

kayo_20211030on Vatican Rebukes Peter Thiel's Antichrist Lectures in Rome

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-mind-bending-convers...

probably on other podcast outlets also

kayo_20211030on Ireland shuts last coal plant, becomes 15th coal-free country in Europe (2025)

There's a declaration that a 915 MW power-plant was removed from the grid, and moved to emergency status only.

However, every other number in the piece is mentioned as some multiple of Wh's (GWh typically). That makes it very hard to tell what proportion of capacity was removed from the system as a proportion of the total generating capacity. I think the writer might have served us better with the use of some helpful percentage comparisons.

From the SEAI report (2024) (https://www.seai.ie/data-and-insights/seai-statistics/key-pu...)

- Electricity demand in Ireland was 32.9 TWh in 2024, up 4.1% on 2023-levels

- Commercial services, which includes the ICT sub-sector, accounted for 41.2% of electricity demand.

- The residential sector accounted for 25.5% of electricity demand in 2024.

- Data centres accounted for 21.2% of all electricity demand in 2024.

- Data centres account for 88.2% of the increase observed in Ireland’s electricity demand since 2015.

If I've done my math correctly, Moneypoint generates about 8TWh, if operating continuously; which it's probably not. Can we say 6-7 TWh?

That is not an insubstantial portion of the total.

kayo_20211030on Training students to prove they're not robots is pushing them to use more AI

It's a crude blade to avoid the issues of AI pollution of weekly submissions, of which few teachers have much confidence that the submission itself was actually written by the student - who's assumed to be learning something.

The OP was about students dumbing down their own work to avoid AI detectors ratting them out. That seems like a big loss.

kayo_20211030on Training students to prove they're not robots is pushing them to use more AI

Genuinely interested. What was the final like? This seems more in the experimental science (ok, journalism) category. I may have to adjust my thinking to be more expansive and also include things like "vocational".

kayo_20211030on Training students to prove they're not robots is pushing them to use more AI

In the simplest case, where we'll say the exam question was precisely the topic of the 20 page paper, the candidate would be golden. Of course, it's unlikely in a 3 hr. exam that you'll be asked to write a 20 page response; but in edited form, you could definitely produce three cogent pages about some particular aspect of the original paper - if you've done the work. If you truly wrote the 20 page paper, you can surely produce three literate, cogent, responsive and topical pages.

kayo_20211030on Training students to prove they're not robots is pushing them to use more AI

Yes. There will be no other marks available for adjusting a final grade. One test, one mark. One knows the stuff, or one doesn't.

Accommodations are real and necessary, but applied at the end.

(Experimental sciences are an exception)

kayo_20211030on Training students to prove they're not robots is pushing them to use more AI

That would be really poor course design :-)

kayo_20211030on Training students to prove they're not robots is pushing them to use more AI

It's to prove that a student is actually educated and has a firm grasp of the course material. If one gets an A every week on AI-assisted submissions, can one make such a claim? And can a teacher make the claim that they've achieved any actual education of the student?

A grade, on a single proctored test, is a crude metric, but at least it would be a brutally fair one.

kayo_20211030on Training students to prove they're not robots is pushing them to use more AI

If you nail the one exam, you get an A+. If you fail it, you get an F. In between, you get what your score says you get.

kayo_20211030on Training students to prove they're not robots is pushing them to use more AI

Would you design a system to assess knowledge, avoiding the distortions of AI on weekly submissions, according to the general case or the exceptional case?

Accommodations are part of the fabric already. It doesn't seem inconceivable that we couldn't deal with them in exceptional circumstances in a similar way to how it's done today.

kayo_20211030on Training students to prove they're not robots is pushing them to use more AI

If you have spent several days structuring a 20 page argument in October on any topic you'll have learnt a great deal about the subject matter. When you get to the exam hall in, say, May it will stand to you.

That knowledge will show up in the blue book vis-a-vis the other exam candidates.

kayo_20211030on Training students to prove they're not robots is pushing them to use more AI

Students are neither generally stupid nor constitutionally lazy. I sense that when expectations are clear they'll often surprise you with diligence. We should trust them to do the right thing. If they do, it's an A; and if not, it's less than that.

kayo_20211030on Training students to prove they're not robots is pushing them to use more AI

Yes. That's fair. Students should know, up front, what they're supposed to learn.

kayo_20211030on Training students to prove they're not robots is pushing them to use more AI

Ultimately, you ask the student, in one audited test, to demonstrate that they've absorbed the essence of the course material and have developed some level of mastery.

kayo_20211030on Training students to prove they're not robots is pushing them to use more AI

Perhaps we should not grade students on weekly, or other occasional, writing during the term or semester.

How about going back to the old system where, apart from experimental lab work, nothing is graded until the end of the term?

All weekly assignments should just be considered prep for one exam at the end of the term where the student has an opportunity to demonstrate mastery of the course's subject matter. They can prepare as they wish, use AI, and even cheat on the homework, but there will be a revelation at the end of the term.

That final test can be proctored, monitored, audited to ensure that whatever words are used are indeed the student's own words. The resulting grade depends on that, and that alone.

The approach of continuous assessment, which to me always seemed suspect and ripe for abuse, was completely broken by the AI tools that are now available.

kayo_20211030on Dulce et Decorum Est (1921)

It's interesting to compare Owen's and Brooke's poetry (and even Sassoon's). Owen had lived through it all from '15 to '18, with some detours, and probably even as a patriot saw war for what it was. Brooke never really got that dose of realism; putting out his jingoistic cant until dying in 1915, before even seeing a war. Owen was a better poet, Brooke appealed to schoolboys.

kayo_20211030on To understand our fascination with crystals, researchers gave some to chimps

Great comment. It's bananas. Chimps like bananas too, right?