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  @beep@follow.ethanmarcotte.com The office work equivalent of the Cowan paradox: When “labor saving” devices like vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, etc. were introduced, the amount of time spent on domestic work did not significantly decrease over the years. Sociologist Ruth Schwartz Cowan highlighted this phenomenon, suggesting that increased expectations and social pressures kept domestic workloads high. “Spring cleaning” was a once a year activity that involved the entire household. Vacuums m...

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  Inductive Deductive Synthesis: Enabling AI to Generate Formally Verified Systems https://arxiv.org/pdf/2605.23109 This paper is pretty cool. They more-or-less use a proof checker (Rocq, a successor to Coq) as a tool in their agent loop during implementation, instead of turning to verification only at the end. The proof-checker generates structured output clarifying bugs in each stage of the implemenation (rather like a compiler in an ordinary coding assistant), which gets fed back into the...

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  @aral@mastodon.ar.al One of the things you learn in many art classes as an adult is that the product is much less important than the process. Take pleasure in the process, and the outcome will take care of itself. The artists I know draw and paint and sculpt (and since I know techie artists) “make” for the sheer pleasure of it. Having said that, having programmed for fifty years, there’s a lot of boilerplate involved in programming. AI tools help one turn a human-language description of a...

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  @vie@hachyderm.io The hand-tool artisans look down on the users of power tools, with some justice. But it could be that the two sets of people have different goals. For the artisans, it is the process itself. The constructed artifact exists primarily to embody the care and skill that went into its construction. For the power-tools user, perhaps their goal is a shelf to store the books they were able to read because of the time they did not spend in the workshop.

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  @EricFielding@mastodon.social Be sure to read to the end: “Tapping into the HBS computer has had its challenges. To address reliability, the team developed a “sanity check”: The algorithm runs on the HBS multiple times before one of the rover’s main computers checks to ensure the results match. During testing, the team repeatedly found the rover’s position was off by 1 millimeter. They discovered damage to about 25 bits — a minuscule fraction of the processor’s 1 gigabyte of memory — and deve...

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  Tsundoku is the Japanese term for the pile of unread books (today I learned it dates back to the Meiji era!). Tsun-, from tsumu, to pile up. Doku from read (also means “idle”). I propose: “tabigatory” (tab purgatory) for all those open browser tabs.

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  @charliejane reminded me this morning of this wonderful quote from Stephen Jay Gould: I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops. Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History today, I think I’d add refugee camps and immigration detention to the list of places

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  Germany is advertising the stability of German science research jobs with signs at Boston bus shelters

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  @bob Possible Alt-text: A Reddit post to r/analytics with heading “We just found out our Al has been making up analytics data for 3 months and I'm gonna throw up.” The post goes on to say: “So we've been using an Al agent since November to answer leadership questions about metrics. It seemed amazing at first fast answers, detailed explanations, everyone loved it. I just found out it's been hallucinating numbers this entire time. Our VP of sales made territory decisions based on...

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  @xeno Coding with LLMs is just the 80s dream of software reuse achieved.