Notices by Shriram Krishnamurthi (shriramk@mastodon.social), page 4

Today's @dabeaz example in PL shows why it's essential to understand aliasing (which a lot of people don't!). Apparently Python programmers get pretty confused by the fact that `del b` didn't "do anything", which further confirms this.
#PyThOnIsEaSy

@inthehands @pelavarre Well, sure, in principle that's what we all hope we're doing. Translating that into practice is the hard part.

@inthehands All correct. And all far beyond even basic error-*catching*, much less *handling*!

Saw a public health note in a script I didn't recognize, with its end-of-sentence marker a :, which I haven't seen before. Wondered what other punctuation diffs it has and…Armenian has an AWESOME feature in place of ? and !. This 6m video is well worth it:
"How the punctuation looks like in the Armenian language"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?si=-vEu1e1O_RWOeK19&v=vu9_QB9gqTQ&feature=youtu.be

TIL that if you mistype "bigger of two args" as "bugger of two args", GPT-3.5 turbo will generate an implementation that multiplies them.

How can we find student misconceptions? Funnily, students will tell us what they are in the process of trying to understand problems—if we just listen. Our latest work uses a notion of semantic clustering on student errors to overcome expert blind spots!

https://blog.brownplt.org/2023/10/31/conceptual-mutation-testing.html

@inthehands Yeah, really good point. "It just reflects social bias" — oh, okay, great, so that means the bias is real!

University labor dispute in Australia. Not only are *students* being targeted, it produces some interesting lines from the administration.
[From the SMH: https://www.smh.com.au/national/victoria/students-cop-penalties-as-universities-turn-to-strike-busting-tactics-20231013-p5ec27.html]

A terrific article about how smiling varies across cultures (as all us immigrants recognize) and how AI erases that: "AI and the American Smile: How AI misrepresents culture through a facial expression". HT Chinmay Kulkarni
https://medium.com/@socialcreature/ai-and-the-american-smile-76d23a0fbfaf

. @dabeaz has far better cold opens than me.
#PythonIsEasy

@aral Waves in deep sympathy from #leg #fracture (also long out of cast and making great progress).

If you're waiting for email replies, do understand that my inbox includes…

My lord, this sounds horrifying. Do you want this? Am I the only luddite who doesn't? None of the questions in this article [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/20/technology/google-bard-extensions.html] strike me as things I'd want an language model to handle.

3/ The book not only gives a real insight into the daily life and society of garbage collectors, it also provides a rich historical backdrop of centuries for how NYC's garbage situation came to be as it is. ↵

2/ There are so many great things about Nagle's book. She's an anthropologist by training, and brings that scholarly view to bear. But she also writes with a light, humorous touch. And most of all, she trains and works as a "san man" herself. ↵

4/ One weakness, such as it is, is that it's specific to NYC, which is exceptional not only for its size, spread, and density but also for its garbage handling practices. But this of course makes it especially interesting to read in light of recent attempts at reform. ↵

6/ It's wonderful to read a person embedding really deep into an indispensible but ignored part of our daily lives, and surfacing it in ways that make it visceral and hard to ignore. Nagle has done a great service here. I hope she writes more. ↵

5/ Another perhaps NYC specificity, which ends up covering about a quarter of the book, is that the same department also handles snow removal, which brings its own methods, challenges, and politics. It's almost like a booklet embedded in the bigger book. ↵

1/ I am fascinated by infrastructure, especially the hidden parts: the little stick propping up the big structure.

And little is more invisible, and intentionally ignored, than the collection of garbage.

Which brings me to Robin Nagle's @rznagle "Picking Up". #BookReview ↵

Just putting it out there for every boss desperate to get people to return to the office. You're just offering sucky incentives.

[From the WaPo: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/08/31/india-moon-landing-brain-drain/]