Notices by Greg Wilson (gvwilson@mastodon.social)

Is anyone running a matchmaking service to pair recently-retired programmers with open source projects that need maintainers?

"AI adoption raises homework scores by 18% and reduces completion time by 30%, but lowers monthly exam scores by 20% within six months. High-stakes entrance-exam scores fall by 18 and 24%, with the full penalty emerging only after about two years. The losses are largest in social science subjects, followed by STEM and languages, and are especially large for junior students, high-achieving students, and boys." 2/3

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.

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.

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.

looking for a tool to export a thread from mastodon as markdown (or HTML): favorites? thx

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.

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)

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…

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

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."

Mori & Hashimoto 2026: "On the Correctness of Software Merge" https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07987

"People dramatically underestimate what thousands of organized humans can accomplish when they are adequately fed, aggressively supervised, and denied alternative career paths." https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/notes-from-a-tired-egyptian-guy-whose-job-is-explaining-that-humans-built-the-pyramids

I remember reading a science fiction story in the late 70s by Poul Anderson in which an aging capitalist and an aging communist come to blows in a bar in a small town somewhere in the not-very-distant future, arguing about where it all went wrong. Turns out that as soon as solar became really, really cheap, both of their economic models just…went away, along with the belief systems they'd sustained. The younger townspeople don't even really understand what they're arguing about…

When LLMs do scientific literature reviews they attribute women's work to hallucinated male researchers and insist that men are more heavily cited and/or more influential even when citation counts show the opposite: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02740

I have too much to read already, but I'm looking for a medium-length summary of the moral, legal, and commercial arguments around the right to repair. I am particularly interested in the history: what are the movements pre-enshittification antecedents? pointers to specific articles or books would be very welcome. thanks - G

We know how: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jun/04/world-inequality-lab-equality-academics-planetary-survival

Be the model collapse you want to see in the world.

1) I want to teach data scientists how to set up tasks to run at specific times. 2) I do _not_ want to have to teach them 'cron' because its syntax is horrible (even with LLM assistance). What do I teach them instead? Must be open source, cross-platform, and have enough community adoption that it's not going to disappear next year. Thanks in advance for links and evaluations.

https://www.thebeaverton.com/2026/03/ai-job-losses-free-up-time-for-unemployed-mobs-to-burn-down-tech-ceos-houses/