Joe Gibbs Politz

We are hiring an Assistant Teaching Professor at UCSD CSE! This is a teaching-focused position with equal status to assistant professor, including tenure, faculty governance, and so on. More in thread... apol-recruit.ucsd.edu/JPF04041

@alexhillman “Luxury goods are worth more because they cost more.” is a very good reminder.

I dream of writing as few words as Seth can

@moarbugs I'm struggling with this. Right now my answer is “teach the disease, then show the cure”. We have a systems programming course that I think has useful learning outcomes around the consequences of unmanaged heap use in C. Then multiple upper-div electives that use/teach Rust.

PL educators: when should we introduce Rust to students? Asking for a colleague with a teenage kid who knows a bit of Python (and maybe Racket?). Is it important to learn something like C/C++/Java to understand static typing, memory layouts, etc. first or just dive in to Rust?

@ShriramKMurthi Also CC @mcoblenz who in my model of the world is responsible for any and all features of Numbers.

@ShriramKMurthi it's called numbers not names shriram

Using Apple's Numbers for the first time, and simply CANNOT convince it that "Jan" is a name, not "January". I tried to trick it in several different ways. At one point it even came back to me as "1/1/2026". Clearly Apple didn't want Excel to have all the fun destroying data.

what the Fuck arxiv.org/html/2603.2185…

@krismicinski Another analogy: it's like programming in a very rich ecosystem (npm packages, pip, etc). Except now you can ~never fail to find the package as long as you can describe it well and it's implementable. (Ofc, you can also “find” bad packages, incur maintenance burden, etc)

Hypothesis: effectively working with AI code generation tools is not entirely dissimilar to working on a massive software artifact where you could never hope to read / understand all of the code

@ShriramKMurthi “The failures are the curriculum. The error messages are the syllabus.” is quite nice

The best piece I've read lately on AI in science is Minas Karamanis's "The machines are fine. I'm worried about us." I disagree w/ his take on evaluation, but the rest is thoughtful, trenchant, and has several fine turns of phrase and useful litmus tests. ergosphere.blog/posts/the-mach…

@samth @moyix I hope I remember to retweet this in 15 years when backwards compatibility is measured in ms.

@moyix "I'll add a command line option to preserve backwards compatibility" in a project we started 20 minutes ago.

"That can't be the bug, that code has been working and stable for years" my brother in Language Modeling YOU wrote that code three days ago

The Obsidian team is growing from three engineers to four engineers. Competitive SF salary. Fully remote, live anywhere. Apply below.

@kareem_carr I type in much less code; my cursor spends more time in the Claude prompt than source files. I don't know what % of time I was typing code before. It likely wasn't most of my time, but it's definitely not much of my time now. There's still lots to do (incl. more coffee sips)

I keep hearing that software engineers don’t write much code anymore and it’s mostly AI now. Can any software engineers confirm how true this is? Do you just drink coffee and watch Claude code all day now?

@ShriramKMurthi @BrownUniversity anthropic.com/news/exploring…

We'll know AGI is here when our IRBs ask us for informed consent from our models. [Was thinking of a cheap April 1 gag modifying the Brown IRB page to include something about models, but decided @BrownUniversity would get too many randos flaming at it from every direction.]

@ShriramKMurthi We should call this category of failure “making a token effort”.

My work gmail has some ridiculous AI assist now, which includes such gems as suggesting I correct the grammar of "It looked" to … "It looked". Out of curiosity I accepted its suggestion, so it turned the prose into … "It It looked". Everything is just peachy now.

@ShriramKMurthi IDK there's a lot of software I know how to write that I don't want.

My evolving relationship with coding.

@MegaCrit TBH I was not Prepared for this one, but I will have lots of time to Prepare for the next one.

Hey everyone, we appreciate all the feedback on the recent beta patch! Since we have a lot of new players that weren’t around for StS1’s Early Access phase and players who are new to Early Access games in general, we wanted to explain our patching methodology a bit. (1/4)

Hitting new levels of nirvana.

@FreyaHolmer @abeyang What fun! My proposal: On completion a square of size 10, clear lines that include the placed piece as if it's a normal Tetris clear all pieces and fragments above fall straight down in the current orientation. Recenter the pivot downward, do not rotate on clears.

@abeyang right now you can't! clearing is difficult from a design perspective, since "falling" towards the center has a lot of ambiguities that aren't predictable

been feeling kinda stressed lately so I made a little prototype is this anything

@samth @xenocryptsite I'm enjoying reading this literally as “DiCaprio” and not “DiCaprio's characters.”

@xenocryptsite I think both Shutter Island and Inception (controversially) suggest that DiCaprio is wrong and delusional.

Speaking of "Bugonia" etc, is there a single piece of fictional pop culture about paranoia and delusions that doesn't end up validating them in the narrative. Does anyone wonder what the effects of that are on like, the public, and everything else.

@patio11 I think Starcraft 2 vs Starcraft is a useful analogy. It's basically a better, smoother, cleaner replacement that serves (will eventually serve) basically all players better from amateur to pro.

Slay the Spire 2: more slay, more spire. Feels more of a content pack than a separate game, but if your complaint about StS was that the magic eventually wore off, you’ll enjoy it. Some minor observations:

@nikhilaprabhu @alexgaoth I mean I know I assigned you the PA but I think I was clear on how it can be irresponsible to code in C so 🤷‍♂️

@alexgaoth should tag joe on this one to get his opinion

just had an old lady sitting next to me on my flight call me satanic for coding. the thing is that im just doing my PA in c by hand. wait until she hears abt coding agents.