The article refers to “dual-use ambiguity”… what is the civil use of a deep-sea cable cutter? Serious question…

“You’re old fashioned!”

But yes, this sucks. Still, seems like a logical development of prior trends for a new generation: we’ve gone from “cite whatever paper has a title that seems to support my claim” to “cite a whatever the LLM thinks supports the claim”.

"Dear Professor, I am very impressed by your paper, (name of a paper that I didn't write, nor did anyone anyone with a similar name to me, nor anyone I've ever published with) ..." is not a great start to a "can I be your student" email.

And that is the end of the saga. No success, no concrete indications of failure, just a researcher alone in an empty field wondering why a software company won't put software on his computer.

The end.

12/12

OneNote telling me that I can "Open in Desktop"

OneNote claiming to be opening a file in "OneNote for desktop"

I shall tell OneNote what I want to do: "download onenote". It doesn't give me a "Download" option, but there is an "Open in Desktop"... this sounds promising!

11/12

An online OneNote notebook. Still no download buttons...

Still no Download buttons! But hmmm, there's a "Tell me what you want to do"...

10/12

Another Microsoft OneNote page that doesn't have a download button

This is what I see after signing in. Note the continued absence of a Download button... how about I click on the collaborator's notebook that's been helpfully shared with me?

9/12

The MIcrosoft OneNote page, bereft of any Download buttons.

Do you see a Download button? I don't see a Download button. Maybe I have to sign in first?

8/12

Microsoft Copilot telling me how to download OneNote

OK, Copilot, let's see what you've got. Tell me how to download OneNote!

Hmmm, go to microsoft.com/onenote and click "Download"? That sounds pretty easy...

7/12

A Microsoft Copilot prompt.

And that portal gives me... not OneNote, not a link to OneNote, but an opportunity for conversation. A conversation with Copilot. This isn't going to be easy, is it?

6/12

A bunch of big, beautiful links to M365 apps with a tiny link to portal.office.com above them.

Looks like that institutional page (which is clearly a @microsoft.com template) has an HCI problem: above all those big, beautiful links to M365 apps, there's also a tiny little link to portal.office.com. OK, let's try that!

5/12

A Microsoft OneNote page that doesn't have a download button

Clicking on OneNote brings me to a page called "OneNote help & learning", whose only prominent link says "Buy Microsoft 365". I don't want to buy Microsoft 365, I want to use the Microsoft 365 that my institution already bought!

4/12

A screenshot of a bunch of links to M365 apps

OK, let's see if I have more luck with the M365-provided version that's different from the one in the App Store for some reason (not very "one" note, but I digress). My institution has an M365 page with a bunch of links to @microsoft.com apps:

3/12

a bald child with the words there is no spoon written below him Alt: Matrix "There is no spoon" kid

First off, I install Microsoft OneNote in the App Store. This should be the end of the story... it is not.

ON: "Sorry, your notebook doesn't work: you should sync it"
Me: "OK, let's sync then... maybe coulda done that automatically?
ON: "Psych! Your notebook is gone, there is no notebook."

2/12

An academic collaborator wanted to use @microsoft.com OneNote for joint note-taking and take management. OK, sure, why not? And so begins...

"Let's Install OneNote: A Comedy of Errors"

1/12

It’s not very snowy in St. John’s, NL, but there is freshly-fallen snow by the side of the road and we are all very tired of it

The other end of the country 😭

But yelling at people for their choices is… what the internet’s for?

"OUTSTANDING."

There’s a Flag for That: Trombone Players Day
Q: What do you call people who like to hang out with musicians? A: Trombone players. In addition to having a good sense of humor, trombonists also have their own day of celebration on April 1 and a stylish flag dedicated to their art of the slide.

For a few days there my son was 6+7 and I was 6×7. One of us grew out of it, but it was real while it lasted.

Read this. "Coding" is not what you think it is.

Also, sick burn: "I'm pretty sure what happened is the human asked the AI to convert an initial draft of the project to a prose specification and the AI decided that labeling the code snippets as text made them more like prose rather than code."

# A sufficiently detailed spec is code This post is essentially [this comic strip](https://www.commitstrip.com/en/2016/08/25/a-very-comprehensive-and-precise-spec/?) expanded into a full-length post:  … and for a long time I didn't need a post like the one I'm about to write. If someone brought up the idea of generating code from specifications I'd share the above image with them and that would usually do the trick. However, agentic coding advocates claim to have found a way to defy gravity and generate code purely from specification documents. Moreover, they've also muddied the waters enough that I believe the above comic strip warrants additional commentary for why their claims are misleading. In my experience their advocacy is rooted in two common misconceptions: - ***Misconception 1:** specification documents are simpler than the corresponding code* They lean on this misconception when marketing agentic coding to believers who think of agentic coding as the next generation of outsourcing. They dream of engineers being turned into managers who author specification documents which they farm out to a team of agents to do the work, which only works if it's cheaper to specify the work than to do the work. - ***Misconception 2:** specification work is more thoughtful tham coding work* They lean on this misconception when marketing agentic coding to skeptics concerned that agentic coding will produce unmaintainable slop. The argument is that filtering the work through a specification document will improve quality and promote better engineering practices. I'll break down why I believe those are misconceptions using a concrete example.

preview of an upcoming post

now we're in this weird moment where the biggest app in the worls is a remix app, to have any success you need people to remix what you make, & everything becomes an advertisement for itself w/ an industry built on massive illegal remix everyone wants you to do but it's not legal to do

“Experiment 1, referred to as ‘The Monolith,’ was designed to investigate the behavior of the enculturated chimpanzees in response to the appearance of two relatively big objects in its living enclosure: a transparent quartz crystal (Figure 1E) and a rock of similar size (Figure 1D).”

That game in all the Duolingo ads where a hole in the ground eats things, gets bigger, eats bigger things, etc.

my most pessimistic take on ai codegen is that it automates the production of tech debt

Funding boost for Ontario postsecondary schools should provide stability, minister says Associations representing universities, colleges estimate they’ve lost more than $3-billion in revenue since international study permits were cut

Ontario’s investing in its future… a good example for other provinces (ahem)!

What a thing of beauty
github.com/dspinellis/u...

😳

Is This Crypto’s Fimbulwinter? Political power may not be enough to save the crypto cult

From @pkrugman.bsky.social:

“Analyzing crypto prices isn’t like, say, analyzing housing prices in the Naughties, where you could compare prices with fundamentals — because with crypto there are no fundamentals, it’s vibes all the way down.”

open.substack.com/pub/paulkrug...