When you woke up feeling wizard today

This is really cool. If I weren't moving, I would have considered this.

A college instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work and teach life lessons - Sentinel Colorado "What's the point of me reading it if it's already correct anyway, and you didn't write it yourself? Could you produce it without your computer?" said Phelps.

Luddite pedagogy ♥️ sentinelcolorado.com/uncategorize...

I don't know who needs to hear this, but if you design a system and 50% of its users are using it wrong, that is not user error.

You cannot blame users for that, you built a terrible system.

A screenshot of a white-on-black terminal depicting a 19x19 go board in ascii graphics, with empty grid intersections as periods, and black and white as Os and #s

It’s absolutely incredible that one of the largest Japanese-run Go servers, which has been running since 1992, is still accessed entirely via Telnet. And while most players use GUI clients that use Telnet under the hood, you can still connect manually and get ASCII graphics streamed to you

The Necessary Pain Involved in Blogging (if you want your work to be preserved beyond your lifespan) I am thinking a lot these days about my own mortality. That’s not because I am obsessed with death or anything of the sort. It’s more that my health problems are accumulating and I do not know how long my body is going to hold out against them. It might be that I can clear all my current...

Blogging is painful but essential for preserving my work beyond my lifetime. I discuss the steps I take, from metadata to digital preservation, and why it's worth it.

eve.gd/2026/04/19/the-necessary...

A flatscreen display on a "smart" water fountain, demanding to be reconnected to the internet.

In 1999, I was playing a decker in Shadowrun, and tried to distract a guard by hacking a water fountain to overflow, and my GM said "why would a water fountain be on the network? That's fucking stupid. No you can't try."

Well it's 2026 and I just want you to know, Phil, that I FUCKING CALLED IT!

Self-Portrait by Federico García Lorca for *Poeta en Nueva York* A large dreaming face dominates the centre, eyes closed, crescent moons on the cheeks. Surrounding skyscrapers are covered in alphabets and numbers. Black demon-like creatures prowl the margins. A winged figure floats above. A piano keyboard appears on the right. https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federico_Garc%C3%ADa_Lorca#/media/Archivo:Autorretrato_Poeta_NY.jpg

Lost Federico García Lorca verse discovered 93 years after it was written

Eight-line poem found on the back of a manuscript sheds light on Spanish poet’s preoccupation with time

by Sam Jones

www.theguardian.com/culture/2026...

Lorca at PG:
www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/autho...

#books #literature

The Harvard Computers standing in front of Building C at the Harvard College Observatory, 13 May 1913. Photograph of the Harvard Computers, a group of women who worked under Edward Charles Pickering at the Harvard College Observatory. The photograph was taken on 13 May 1913 in front of Building C, which was then the newest building at the Observatory. The image was discovered in an album which had once belonged to Annie Jump Cannon. Image courtesy of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Back row (L to R): Margaret Harwood (far left), Mollie O'Reilly, Edward C. Pickering, Edith Gill, Annie Jump Cannon, Evelyn Leland (behind Cannon), Florence Cushman, Marion Whyte (behind Cushman), Grace Brooks. Front row: Arville Walker, unknown (possibly Johanna Mackie), Alta Carpenter, Mabel Gill, Ida Woods. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Computers#/media/File:Edward_Charles_Pickering's_Harem_13_May_1913.jpg

Before Computers Were Machines, They Were Women. Here Are Six Places Where Human Computers Built Modern Science

by Diana Turnbow

www.smithsonianmag.com/blogs/smiths...

#womeninstem #computerscience

Fisher-Price Is Pivoting to AI-Powered Autonomous Weapons Manufacturing “We at Fisher-Price have always believed in the power of imagination. In discovery. In the joy of a child pressing a button and hearing a satisfying sound. T...

"Effective immediately, Fisher-Price will exit the 'child development toy' vertical and re-emerge as Mattel·igence AI Defense Systems, a fully integrated autonomous weapons manufacturer focused on AI-enabled lethality solutions for the modern battlefield. Our stock is up 4000%."

OPEN TO CURRENT GC STUDENTS ONLY

This workshop series introduces Graduate Center students to feminist oral history, transnational archival practices, and public-facing scholarship methods.

centerforthehumanities.org/event/transn...
@thegraduatecenter.bsky.social

Screenshot of Eurosky fundraising page showing amount raised: €5,226 out of a €100,000 target and number of supporters (282).

We’re fundraising to build everything we need to operate without Bluesky. Our €100,000 target will accelerate our goal of building a European app backend (Appview) and a microblogging app.

Since last night over 282 of you contributed more than €5,000.

Let's do this!

fund.eurosky.tech

The Women's Print History Project collects bibliographic data on printed objects associated with women's production. I've been itching to query the data not limited by the UI, and ✨ I finally get to ✨ Here are some things I've been able to surface...

womensprinthistoryproject.com

To a much smaller and more limited extent, limited to digital content, DRM was this. Companies and governments both jumped on it, to the detriment of everyone except the companies that sold DRM "solutions" (which solved nothing, least of all piracy)

Oh yeah, this is a real concern if you expect any models trained on publicly accessible code to be trustworthy. It's why you can't and shouldn't just deploy the direct output from your vibe coding session. The *best* case is that it just contains bugs.

And *that* topic is usually bound up in (surprise) gendered notions of making vs maintaining. You already know which one gets the most money.

Gwenifer Raymond: Tiny Desk Concert The Welsh guitarist's fingerstyle playing drones with a haunted quality, but her flurry of bends, slides and chord clusters rip open the firmament.

The Welsh guitarist's fingerstyle playing drones with a haunted quality, but her flurry of bends, slides and chord clusters rip open the firmament. n.pr/3QJ7OJo

Which is why the main thrust of my opposition to the *products* is all the problems they outsource or obscure. Making working code from prose and then having that code contain stuff you have to fix is normal technical debt. The rest of it is harder to mitigate.

@doriantaylor.com case in point re: reining in the overhead

I can accept a tool that's wrong often if it's not also creating a bunch of other negative externalities. Where a LLM data center gets its power is one of many.

Maybe Don't Bet the Farm on AI Coding tl;dr: I used some AI coding tools over the last year and got decidedly mixed results This is an expansion of a thread I posted on Blues...

And I quoted and linked to you in my post ;)

www.aaronhelton.com/maybe-dont-b...

The guy who showed us how to use Claude Code for IDNs confidently asserted that all his learned programming skills were now obsolete. I just couldn't help thinking I'm glad I'm not forced to support whatever vibe coded load-bearing pillars he's responsible for.

Additionally, the compute required to pull this off is higher than, say, sitting down with it and learning how to do it yourself. I'd be more sanguine about this if we could rein in the overhead, because the question remains: is this worth what it costs?

Right, and like I said, that's seductive. To the extent that it works, it could, in fact, put more people in contact with the thing they want to create, people who otherwise might not have tried learning to program in the first place. There are many caveats in this assertion, though.

One of my IDN class readings for last week surveyed the history of no/low code tooling. More direct connection with the thing you're creating has been a holy grail for a long time (and was an impetus behind more expressive programming languages too). But yes, the limitation is how computers work.

Give instruction -> Watch it spit a bunch of gerunds at you -> Occasionally accept a command -> Hope the output is in the ballpark.

Too much black box for me.

I recognized in his demo some of the web inspection tools we take for granted now. Those work basically the same way, the unnecessary complexity of CSS (as people implement it) notwithstanding. I'm also reminded of how frameworks like Nuxt auto-reload the app and refresh browser on code change.

For my IDN class this week, I had to pick up Claude Code. Let me just say I'm not fond of the interaction model. I could probably tweak it or configure it, but I'll cancel the subscription in a month anyway.

Yes, they seem to be covering at least some of that ground between prose and code reasonably well, and certainly better the smaller and better articulated the task.

What do you mean by "chunkier primitives"? (I am still under-caffeinated...)

It is seductive, I have to admit, to have something that's even in the ballpark after a few iterations. I'm still not sure it saves time in the long run though, because there's a difference between "this code works" and "this code can be deployed".

i simply find it a little hard to believe that shortly after every website implemented ai code and fired a bunch of engineers they all started breaking constantly every single day but its not related to the ai code or the skeleton crew