Notices by Ben Cohen (airspeedswift@mastodon.social)

Logged on to twitter for the first time in a while. I follow the Department of the Interior because they used to post nice pictures of mountains. Their latest post is an ad recruiting for the National Park Police showing them conducting midnight raids bashing in apartment doors and perpwalking people out.

California residents: for the first time in a long time, your vote this November matters nationally.

Prop 50 counters the illegitimate Republican gerrymander of Texas, restoring the impact of your vote on congress. It's temporary, expiring in 2030.

There are good people against it, but they're misguided. Taking the high road here just helps those who oppose democracy keep control of our government.

Please vote yes on 50, and encourage your friends to do the same.

https://stopelectionrigging.com

I’m gonna need more details on what this tutoring involves.

Financial analysis is going to be ground zero for AI-driven job losses, because there is already a culture of being able to make up nonsense confidently with no consequences.

https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2025/08/the-human-toll-of-artificial-intelligence/

Normally, the Supreme Court order would start with the throat-clearing “The application presented to Justice Alito and by him referred to the Court” but the wording on the deportation injunction is unusual, starting “There is before the court an application” which implies Alito was deliberately stalling to aid the illegal deportation attempt, and the other justices intervened.

https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/04/did-alito-refuse-to-refer-a-a-r-p-v-trump-to-the-full-court-to-facililtate-trumps-illegal-detainments

Folks are right to say the stock market doesn't represent the economy, but that doesn't mean plunging markets aren't bad, because the stock market AFFECTS the economy.

Consumers feel less wealthy, spend less and save more when their investments fall. Companies pull back – especially the tech sector which relies on its share price to pay employees (who then spend less if the share price goes down). And in all sectors, execs get paid via their stock appreciating, so cut spending when it falls.

the kids are constantly having to sign forms promising they haven't used chat gpt for their homework, but I don't think they need to worry about it going undetected quite yet

@gregtitus I feel like the schools are taking the wrong approach with the "academic integrity" pledges that imply LLMs are some genius way to cheat they're not allowed to touch.

What they need to do is show students how wrong the LLMs can be, and make it clear they are smarter than this supposed miracle tech.

(of course, I would also couple this with not banning calculators that can do fractions because we have had that particular tech since the 80s and it actually works and is good)

lotta blame to go around

@inthehands I mean, you may as well just mail the check to Citadel instead.

@inthehands Beware. These funds are not designed for buy and hold. They are short-term instruments only. When the underlier goes up, they go down by _more_ due to the way they are implemented, due to the cost of downside protection.

This means unless a stock plunges suddenly after you buy, you generally lose money over time. Mostly stocks descend via ups and downs each day, and when the ups cost you, that compounds to a net loss over time.

Namespaces are about 2% as useful as people think they are.

@numist visibility is also less important than people think it is :-p

And now I'm going down the rabbit hole of trying to do the same “from scratch" exercise for integration. desmos has some fun but not super documented list comprehension features that are a bit like using parameter packs in swift

(We spent hours drawing rectangles under graphs when I was 16, which I hated because I was terrible at drawing, and it didn't seem to help with the understanding, unlike interacting with a slider like this might?)

https://www.desmos.com/calculator/urpgokkraj

Desmos is so incredibly powerful while still being simple and playful. I wish I'd had it when I was in school.

The eldest is learning about exponents and logarithms and his course covers e, but they introduced it by just dumping the formula for continuously compounded interest on them without explaining what or why.

So we built some numerical differentiation in desmos to explore with. It's quite fun to play with moving the tangent, then guess the derivative from that.

https://www.desmos.com/calculator/1u5pogdrkt

https://journa.host/@w7voa/114043381601663065

“They've added a fixed-size inline-stored array type to Swift as well as the dynamic heap-allocated one? Why must they make it so complicated, unlike Objective-C" is a form of irony I have been enjoying lately.

There's lots of #Swift content at #FOSDEM this year, starting with @dgregor79 on the main track at 12:00 CET talking about Swift's incremental adoption approach to memory safety.

If you didn't make it to Brussels, you can stream it here:

https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/streaming/

Talking about how #swift avoids the rewrite the world problem.

The #Swift room at #FOSDEM kicks off at 15:00 CET, which is late enough for enthusiastic West Coast residents to join the stream at 6am PST :)

We have a great line up of talks, you can find the schedule here:

https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/track/swift/