Notices by Ben Cohen (airspeedswift@mastodon.social)

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/

And later @ktoso will be talking about #Swift / #Java interoperability in the Java room, including how Swift is using the new Project Panama technology for native interop.

Kicking off our #FOSDEM #Swift devroom, @paris has some exciting news. Apple is open sourcing the Xcode build system, with cross-platform support, as swift-build.

Meanwhile in the security track. If only there was another way…

https://social.akrabat.com/@rob/113928145881333300

The #Swift team at Apple is hiring Windows engineers!

We have a number of roles focused on improving the experience of using the Swift language and tools on Microsoft (and other) platforms. These roles would be based in our City of London office, with two days remote.

Openings for Compiler and Runtime:
https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/details/200584014/swift-windows-engineer

Debugging:
https://jobs.apple.com/en-gb/details/200579182/swift-debugger-compiler-engineer-windows

Standard/Core Libraries:
https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/details/200575776/swift-standard-library-engineer

Now I'm fully aware that there are plenty of people who still believe this code is better than Swift. But at this point I think they're a tiny minority.

This screenshot demonstrates to me the fundamental core of why Swift strives to be a low-ceremony language. Not because all the ceremony shown here is a hassle remember or type, though it is.

It's that the ceremony drowns out the core of what the code is trying to express: the business logic that is the actually important part.

Over on Blue Sky, @dimillian posted a screenshot of code that stopped me in my tracks. It was just normal Objective-C code that he was considering rewriting in Swift. As he says, "it's not complicated, it's just verbose”.

https://bsky.app/profile/dimillian.app/post/3lfeuxp2nk22w