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Kids growing up with PCs and learning by tinkering and making crap code reminds me of the Go (game) proverb: "Lose your first 50 games as quickly as possible." That time was so valuable.

Or, as I tell my students, "Every failure is a growth opportunity." I let them resubmit corrected projects for points, too. I'm desperate for them to get the reps in that they'd normally have had as juniors in the field.


I refuse to cater to the "em dashes are AI" crowd.

And I was just noticing that my home-built blog render pipeline produces dumb quotes and that was embarrassing to me. Needs to be fixed.

(Counterpoint, dumb quotes are 7-bit clean and paste nicely... Hmm.)


> I refuse to cater to the "em dashes are AI" crowd.

I wrote a plugin for my blog that converts all hyphens (surrounded by whitespace) into em-dashes.

https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2025/Dec/a-proclamation-regardi...


Agree. This also ties into the hypothesis that we're hitting a local maximum in terms of the state of the art in creativity as we offload that work.

I find this similar to when photography was invented and painters moved away from realism trying to find originality and creativity and they produced modern art which for many of us just looks silly.

I feel like asking it to polish or rewrite is going too far. Using it for a grammar/spell checker or thesaurus is fine, though. At least that preserves ones voice.

And I've definitely used it when I can't remember that one stinking word that I know exists and is perfect for this occasion.


> one stinking word

"hey robot give me every word even mildly related to $SOME_SENSE_ON_THE_TIP_OF_MY_TOUNGE" is a wildly satisfying and underrated experience.


When writing letters of recommendation now, I write in a more human tone to avoid sounding like a bot with a line of explanation at the start. Not an error in the sense you mean, but an error in tone for a letter of recommendation, certainly.

Makes me think of rebuilding libraries with AI to change the license.

Yeah, this is a very underwhelming promotion, I'm afraid.

So much interest in fairness in the tiny slice of human existence that is sports, and so little interest in the rest of it.

Political engineering angle: "These people will not rest until they are able to read your child's messages."

Every time someone says this is to protect children, earnestly or with memes, just reinforces the lie and makes it more believable, because child protection is the distraction, the hook that works on people that are comfortable with the State reading your child's messages if it ends up protecting them.

Chat Control is, quite simply, mass surveillance of every citizen of any age. Let's call a spade a spade.


"These people will not rest until they are able to see your teen-aged child's surrepticious sexts."

Smells like shareware from the old days. Didn't mind it then, either.

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