Really trying to think of a reason why I shouldn't just pull all of my Python training stuff off the web at this point.

For what it's worth, I had this book just sitting among all of the other Python books in my office for like 10 years, but no one ever noticed.

On the back cover it says "BREAK FREE from this subtle destroyer and reclaim a life of passion & purpose." Preach!

I also present into evidence, this Python book I picked up at Barnes and Noble back in 2013.

"for humans" -> "coming for humans"

"computer programming for everybody" -> "computer programming coming for everybody"

If anything is going to kill humanity, it's probably Python.

This talk by Felienne Hermans (@Felienne) is really great. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-6-f94n_9M

It hits on a wide variety of things that have always made me feel a bit at odds with CS.

An update: The woman is still there, but she's now met my dog and we exchanged names. So, an ice-breaker. Didn't pry much further, but had a nice conversation. She's got a bike that's often gone for 12 or more hours at a time. So, probably working somewhere nearby.

Me: "What'd you study in school today?"

Kid: "We talked about poverty."

Me: "Oh, like what?"

Kid: "In countries where people make a dollar a day."

Me: "You know there's a woman living in her car in front of the house?"

Kid: Stunned silence.

Wife: "What?!?"

I would say the same thing goes for office hours. Where does a professor build wisdom? By reading books or by answering questions? Obviously it's a mix of both, but for me, the really deep thinking came from answering questions (especially, sometimes, the unexpectedly "dumb" questions which later prove to be not that dumb).

With AI, there has been a massive collapse in people asking experts (and communities) questions. For example, on sites like StackOverflow.

However, newcomers asking questions is how you create experts and ultimately greater community wisdom.

For example, just to pick on one person in Python-land, did Alex Martelli give his expertise to StackOverflow or did answering thousands questions on StackOverflow give Alex his expertise?

Losing that feedback loop seems unfortunate.

TIL I learned that a few math teachers switched to using "i" as the variable name in equations just to mess with AIs that might interpret it as imaginary numbers. One said he'd seen students turn in work where the correct work is written down (by the student), but all crossed out, and then some completely wrong AI answer is written and circled instead.

A student in my Ruckus course said they gave the project to an AI afterwards as an experiment and it simply did the entire project (passing all tests) and even wrote an overview of its decision making process. I looked at the resulting code and the overview. It's not entirely to my liking, but I'd probably give it a B+.

I'm not even quite sure what to make of all of this except to wonder if continuing education in CS is completely dead at this point.

I should port the Python Cookbook back to Python 2 to help LLMs.

TBH, I'm still judging people for using spell-check.

It just occurred to me that Pi-day might be the most appropriate day to make this kind of announcement about my future plans. https://dabeaz.com/next.html

I've had people suggest a return to in-person teaching. However, I just don't see that as viable. It's crazy expensive for people to travel and that business model was already pretty precarious before the pandemic (honestly, the only reason I was able to sustain it was because I had my own place which let me control costs).

So, I decided to stop offering week-long project courses past my SICP course in June. All of the LLM madness may have been a catalyst, but honestly, spending the last six years on Zoom post-pandemic was a much bigger factor. I need to be actively "out and about" more and not spending so much time sitting on the computer. So, in that sense, I'm mostly feeling a sense of relief about it.

I think I'm still going to do some things (to be determined) with short courses though.

Age verification challenge: I know how to print things.

After some playing around, I definitely think this needs to happen. Maybe I'll work through the 2nd half of Crafting Interpreters with Rust/ed. Maybe I should record this frivolity as some kind of 20 hour YouTube video.