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  Ma et al 2026: "Do Coding Agents Reuse Existing Code or Reinvent the Wheel?" https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.35357 "An audit over 3,000 turns shows that agents progressively stop exploring relevant repository code, reuse their own history less even when it is fully in the workspace, and leave duplicated logic in 50.8% of task chains by turn 5 - all while pass rates barely move."

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  RE: https://mastodon.social/@Carl_Zimmer/117345065655681591 I think you have to be very naïve to believe that AI providers aren't (at least occasionally) skimming information from users' prompts.

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  from the Toronto Public Library website

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  When exactly did setting up a dev environment on a new machine become functionally indistinguishable from solving crossword puzzles in Ancient Sumerian?

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  No, this isn't a joke - it really happened today.

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  Happy Skynet self-awareness day, for those who celebrate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxW0yGvWRTk

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  parton (n.): unit of measure for the extent to which a wealthy person uses that wealth to make the world a better place. Sadly, the milliparton and microparton are more commonly used. Note that negative values are frequently observed.

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  I was moderately useful to other people today.

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  I just learned that oat milk was discovered in the 1960s, when NASA found out by accident what zero-g environments do to goat milk. Thank you, thank you, I'll see myself out.

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  RE: https://mastodon.social/@gvwilson/117043030559498832 Thanks to everyone who has responded / is responding / responds in future. Several of you have had questions or comments about the survey's content - I can't answer them now for fear of biasing responses, but I'm taking notes and will do so once the survey closes. The results and analysis will be published (open access) as soon as we have them. Thanks again.

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  Looking for the source/data for the claim that approximately 1/3 of backups fail to restore - is it just folklore or does someone have a pointer to something more substantial? Thanks in advance.

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  Please help if you can: I am working with some students who are studying programmers' beliefs about software engineering folklore. If you can spare a few minutes to answer the question in https://survey.bth.se/survey/2545, we would be very grateful. We would also be grateful if you could circulate the survey link to colleagues and friends - we would like to reach as diverse a demographic as possible. Thanks in advance.

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  Looking for source of quote: "The real purpose of AI is to give the wealthy access to skill without giving the skilled access to wealth." thanks in advance (please note: not in search of commentary at present time)

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  "Disclosure Day" is an incoherent, self-indulgent mess. There are some good performances - in particular, Emily Blunt manages to create some moments - but bleah…

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  Zięba-Kozarzewski 2026: "No Edges, No Verdict: A Large-Scale Empirical Study of Declared Dependency Graphs in 78K SBOMs in the Wild" https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.22140 "52.9% of SBOMs declare no edges at all, 8.8% declare a dependency block yet leave the majority of components isolated, and 38.3% form well-connected graphs."

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  In his essay on Salvador Dali, Orwell argued that because Dali was a repulsive human being, the right wouldn't admit that he was a great artist; conversely, because he was a great artist, the left wouldn't admit he was a repulsive human being. I'm seeing the same thing with AI: because it's unethical, one side won't acknowledge that it's useful, but because it's useful, the other side won't acknowledge that it's unethical. Time to make another cup of tea…

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  RE: https://social.afront.org/@stylus/116991865079758024 There is an alternate timeline in which the Jupyter notebook was built in OpenOffice instead of in a browser, so that people could (for example) draw diagrams directly in the Office-y parts of the doc beside their embedded code cells. It wouldn't have played nicely with version control, but neither (in practice) does Jupyter's fastidious JSON and embedded images. I still wonder sometimes what kinds of coding environments would hav...

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  "A cocaine skeptic starts an unwise habit" https://blog.djnavarro.net/posts/2026-07-26_starting-a-cocaine-habit/ is a long, thoughtful piece about AI and programming - worth reading carefully. cc @djnavarro@hachyderm.io

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  Starting Aug 17, Atlassian gives itself the right to scrape your data for AI/ML training purposes: https://letsdatascience.com/news/atlassian-enables-default-data-collection-to-train-ai-f71343d8

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  https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/measles-cases-u-s-9.7282606

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  I had the privilege of reading a pre-release draft of @grimalkina@mastodon.social 's "The Psychology of Software Teams". Serendipitously, I followed it with Sarah Stein Lubrano's "Don't Talk About Politics", which is actually about the psychology of how people change their minds (or don't). The combination gave me a _lot_ to think about, and I highly recommend both.

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  Suppose you discovered that AI transcription mistakenly ascribed points made by women to male participants in meetings 40% of the time - would you continue to use it? What if it was 4%? Or 0.4% (i.e., once every 250 meetings)? Do you and/or your employer have a threshold or SLA? Are you/they even thinking in those terms?

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  TIL: second-hand child seats for cars are safe - we think otherwise because of a PR campaign by manufacturers who wanted to kill the resale market. https://isbnsearch.org/isbn/9781635570113

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  RE: https://cosocial.ca/@mhoye/116954272213286323 "This is not a software business that happens to own servers. It is a real estate business that happens to compute." https://www.groundbrkr.com/p/the-second-derivative-why-no-one

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  "Nothing for us, without us" is the best and also most often ignored advice in, well, everything: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/finch-west-lrt-accessibility-concerns-9.7276886

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  Enjoyed Postrel's "The Fabric of Civilization" https://isbnsearch.org/isbn/9781541617612 - good popular science / history, and some thought-provoking discussion of (for example) how the needs of weaving may have inspired development of number theory in classical times. ☆☆☆

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  How is this sane? https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2026/07/20/viewpoint-rfk-jr-is-setting-up-a-panel-to-compensate-people-who-claim-they-were-injured-by-a-covid-vaccine-no-proof-needed/ edit: OK, so it's a way to hand government money to their more radical supporters. That (unfortunately) makes sense.

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  How is this legal? https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/07/mit-to-become-hotbed-of-ai-video-surveillance.html edit: how would you feel if the press release from the university was, "Once these cameras are installed, we will be able to track the identity and position of every woman on campus in real time."

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  Canada's government recently announced billions of dollars to support development of a new pipeline to move the dirtiest crude oil in the world to market: https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/wildfire-climate-emissions-smoke-9.7274862