Notices by Greg Wilson (gvwilson@mastodon.social)

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/

OH: "There are two hard problems in computer science. Please don't be a third."

Honestly, I cannot think of anything Donald Trump would do differently right now if he _wasn't_ working for Vladimir Putin.

More than a million people in Ontario needed to use food banks last year: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchener-waterloo/2025-hunger-report-feed-ontario-food-bank-use-1-million-users-rise-9.6997356 This is the ninth straight year of increases.

True story: I once spent an afternoon scrolling through someone's Facebook account to find out when he had acquired each of his cats because he had named successive releases of a software package he maintained after the damn things in the order in which they joined his family and I needed to know whether Pickles came before Chocolate or vice versa.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/richard-falk-detained-cbsa-palestine-conference-9.6980514

"it is extremely difficult to completely stop users from recreating any kind of content that’s in the training data, and OpenAI can’t remove the copyrighted content from Sora 2’s training data because it couldn’t exist without it. " https://www.404media.co/openai-cant-fix-soras-copyright-infringement-problem-because-it-was-built-with-stolen-content/

GoFundMe has created 1.4 million "donation pages" for nonprofits *without their consent and without any prior warning or contact*. You can go to https://www.gofundme.com/s?nonprofits= to check if they've done this to your 501(c)3. See https://abc7news.com/post/gofundme-created-14-million-donation-pages-nonprofits-bay-area-organizations-had-no-clue/18013410/ for more details and some utter disingenuous self-serving bullshit from GoFundMe.

Holy shit, Montréal is about to become a surveillance city: https://old.reddit.com/r/montreal/comments/1o0q9wa/the_spvm_will_start_using_an_american_ai/ American software collecting the movement history of all people in Montreal. Millions of hours of video will be sent to the US, including the movement history of all citizens, and police will be able to access it all _without a warrant or judicial oversight_.

Karakatsanis et al 2025: "PyTrim: A Practical Tool for Reducing Python Dependency Bloat" https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00674
Their tool achieves 98.3% accuracy in replicating human-made changes; when run on 971 open-source packages, it identified and trimmed bloated dependencies in 39 of them.
#nwit

Canada issues warning for citizens with gender-neutral passports travelling to U.S.: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-united-states-travel-warning-1.7648381

Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here" is 50 years old this month.