I hereby disclose that my last paper was coauthored by my blackboard, and my Hagoromo chalk, and Agda.

I have a problem with moves to add "AI disclosure declarations" to various things. For code and pull requests, it makes sense to disclose what parts of it were written by AI etc., if AI contributions are allowed by the maintainers.

On the other hand, we have university policies requiring students to "disclose" that their essay is written by AI, and scientific bodies like ACM have policies in place requiring disclosure that papers are in part written by AI.

The thing is, in these latter cases, two things are true:

1) It is actually not acceptable, in the domain, for *any part* of the work to be written by AI. Full stop. I DO NOT WANT TO READ SLOP. I DON'T CARE IF IT IS DISCLOSED AS SLOP. WE MUST NOT PUBLISH SLOP, EVEN WITH A DISCLAIMER. So a disclosure of that kind ought to mean a desk-rejection. It's like the police saying it's required to disclose that you've broken the law: idiotic.

2) Other uses of AI, including idea generation, rubber ducking, "search", etc., should not require "disclosure" any more than using Google or talking to a friend should. I don't "disclose" that I googled something, or that I went to the library and looked at some books. I do cite the things that I use, within appropriate scientific standards, but that's different than citing the tools I used in the course of thinking about things.

So for these reasons, I find the current thrust toward AI disclosure to be deeply misaligned with reality and scientific values.

What does it take to certify a conversion checker? by @mevenlennonbertrand

https://drops.dagstuhl.de/storage/00lipics/lipics-vol337-fscd2025/LIPIcs.FSCD.2025.27/LIPIcs.FSCD.2025.27.pdf

If anyone is actually curious what kinds of properties are needed to get even remotely off the ground in making claims about independent proof checkers and other assurances.

When I want to understand some code, I print it out. I feel like that is something nobody is told to do anymore..:

It used to be “fast user switching” lmao. Now it’s “nobody uses a desktop machine anymore right? And two people sharing the machine? i might have heard of my parents doing that a long time ago”

It’s amazing that switching users on Tahoe with a new M4 Mac Mini causes a system freeze for upwards of a minute…. anyone else seen this? wtf.

my advice to students is usually something like: the trend is short, your life is long. research what you are interested in, and make sure you can explain why you are doing it to other researchers (and to beancounters when necessary).

this is especially important for phd students: if you do a "trend project" for your phd, it will be both out of date and "cringe" by the time you hit the job market.

RE: https://mas.to/@SmudgeTheInsultCat/116180303224845767

i'm still thinking about academics I know who tried to defend the idea of pivoting to *research* NFTs to me...

i was like "oh wow, ok sure"

RE: https://mastodon.social/@Daojoan/116136389048022111

Nice post, but there is no amount of taxes that can fix the roads in Cambridgeshire (for example). The problem is not amount of money, but the fact that the local authorities are forbidden to take out loans (which they would finance over the course of decades by using TAXES). So the only kind of expenditures they can make are short term ones. This means that roads can only be patched and never fixed.

Our roads are shit not because our taxes are too low (they are extremely high) but instead because the UK’s government is completely non-functional.

The problems differ in other places of course, but I wager the problem is never taxes being too low.

Cambridge University Press has discovered an exciting new way to obfuscate the PDFs in their digital library. @ACM want to get in on this?

The daily experience of using the internet is now slower than it was in 1999. Loading a typical page takes 7-8 seconds, because of the virus of cloudflare “verifications”.

I have a feeling that the “solution” is going to be facial recognition challenges for nearly every website in the next for years. And I really don’t want to live with in that future.

On my way to my last lecture of the academic year!

Teaching the 'pumping lemma' today. By the way, if anyone has an alternative fucking name for this, I will use it.

RE: https://fosstodon.org/@fullyabstract/116081339280852618

Ironically I can't access the linked article, but strongly agree with the sentiment. I'm glad the hysteria that we must “cancel” education and “meet everyone where they are at” is starting to abate…

Learning is meant to be challenging. Learning provokes anxiety. Learning reveals fragility and weakness. Learning also builds strength.

I believe we have been living for years in a fever dream in which growth is bad, discomfort is bad, fragility is good, strength is bad… It is a dream that cannot survive confrontation with reality, whether that is the reality of academic theory, economic reality, or the reality of politics, war, etc.

Here is what I believe: the ignorant shall be made wise, the weak shall be made strong, the fragile shall be made robust, the anxious shall be made confident, and the poor shall be made the rulers of society. And for that, we need people to read. It is in the written word that unanticipated possibilities reside.

The dark mode is looking pretty cool...

Making a lot of progress on AquaKit today; I've applied the MIT license to it, and begun to document the classes.

https://tangled.org/jonmsterling.com/AquaKit

I'm very interested if anyone wants to use this for their own app. Right now the only controls that exist in there are the ones I've gotten to. So there's many gaps, missing things, areas for improvement.

@jessegrosjean Wow, I just tried the Bike 2.0 beta and I am so impressed. I had let my license lapse a while back, but I instantly renewed it tonight. thanks!

RE: https://mathstodon.xyz/@albertcardona/116024102818516662

Now let’s do the University of Cambridge

And the Labour government's bizarre immigration policies are going to cause another brain drain...

It's so strange. People asked Labour to “stop the boats” (migrants breaking the law), and Labour responds by making ILR almost impossible for skilled workers immigrating legally. That is literally what nobody asked for...

(Don't take my comment as an endorsement of illegal immigration crackdowns. I am just saying that Labour's response to popular concerns about illegal immigration is really weird and is to make Britain even more impoverished relative to the developed world than it already is.)

It is so hard to retain good students… they all go to work for companies that can pay them in one year a decade of junior academic income. I won’t actually claim that industrial employment is more stable than junior academic employment (it used to be, but I think it isn’t anymore) — but when you can make 10X salary, it kind of doesn’t matter.

Each year I have a great Masters-level student who then goes to work at Jane Street, Meta, or similar. I don’t blame them, that’s almost certainly the correct life decision. I also don’t blame those companies for paying so much. I just wish we could compete in the academy. We are experiencing a serious brain drain…

@NetNewsWire Noticed a little bug in the Mac app with viewing read articles by category: https://discourse.netnewswire.com/t/macos-cant-see-read-articles-by-category/115. Not a huge issue — I can try to write a patch next month when I have time, but thought I'd mention it can easily be fixed.