Her (years ago): "The basic unit of time in any organization is the bladder."
Me: "I've never thought of it that way."
Her: "You've never been pregnant."

This post https://ryancheley.com/2026/08/17/what-if-maintainer-burnout-isn-t-burnout/ from @ryancheley introduced me to the idea of "administrative sediment".

What I cannot build, I do not understand: https://third-bit.com/2026/10/05/frml-intro/ and https://third-bit.com/2026/10/08/frml-scalar/ (with more to come)

Are you reelin' in the years?

Rodionov and Assylbekov 2026: "TRACES: A Benchmark for Epistemic Reliability in Scientific Reasoning by LLMs" https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11415 The interesting thing for me isn't the benchmark - it's that all of the leading LLMs treat junk science (e.g., Wakefield's "vaccines cause autism" paper) as if it was real.

Manzoor et al 2026: "Psychological Safety in Software Engineering Teams: A Systematic Mapping Study of Team Processes and Performance" https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.08896

RE: https://mastodon.art/@ThompsonArt/117405781274210047

I would throw $20 into a Kickstarter to get @ThompsonArt to do images like these for classic D&D monsters.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@gvwilson/117367019936463192

My answer: we don't have any. https://third-bit.com/2026/10/02/heroes-and-villains/

At what point did / will the volume of internet traffic attributable to AI exceed the volume attribute to pornography? (serious question: I have no idea where to get reliable estimates for either)

Updated list of student projects I'd be interested in supervising next semester: https://third-bit.com/2026/09/25/student-projects/

Who are the Jane Goodalls and David Attenboroughs of software?

Teaching https://third-bit.com/mrsp/ in Montréal tomorrow - looking forward to learning from participants.

RE: https://cosocial.ca/@mhoye/117365875528810915

One of my favorite short books - I've re-read it half a dozen times.

Ma et al 2026: "Do Coding Agents Reuse Existing Code or Reinvent the Wheel?" https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.35357 "An audit over 3,000 turns shows that agents progressively stop exploring relevant repository code, reuse their own history less even when it is fully in the workspace, and leave duplicated logic in 50.8% of task chains by turn 5 - all while pass rates barely move."

Woirhaye 2026: "Joule-Profiler: Profiling the Energy Consumption of Build Automation Tools Made Easy" https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.31228 "Joule-Profiler is an open-source command-line tool for Linux that measures hardware energy consumption via Intel RAPL (CPU), NVML (NVIDIA GPU), and attributes it to user-defined program phases by monitoring standard output."

Will we have to wait decades for similar revelations and lawsuits about the effects of social media and AI on our mental, rather than physical, health? https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2026/sep/25/syngenta-paraquat-parkinsons-lawsuits-epa

We need a way to measure LD50 for social media.

What starts with 'w' and ends with 't'?
[pause]
No, really, it does.

Thank you, thank you, I'll see myself out.