Sam Tobin-Hochstadt
@samth
Associate Professor, @IULuddy · Core Developer, @racketlang · Member, @TC39 · Handler, @NaptownUltimate · @[email protected]
One week with an e-bike and I'm definitely an "e-bike guy" now.
I wrote about the lack of administrative support for the liberal arts in @nytimes. The standard story we hear is that students don't want it. But a darker reality is that even when it wins big with students and donors it loses with those in power. nytimes.com/2025/07/17/opi…
It's hard to overstate how much cryptocurrency burned the credibility of the tech industry with a lot of people.
i genuinely don't understand why people are so opposed to self driving cars when they actually work now
The official hydroelectric power station of urbanism Twitter.
This is an interesting counterpoint to the (apparently apocryphal) line about broken legs and civilization.
Hot take: the reasons that people like and hate Lisp syntax are both pretty easy to understand
I will never understand people who like Lisp syntax unironically. Lisp people can never understand how someone might not like Lisp syntax.
When my grandfather fled Austria in 1938, he was also young, male, and relatively well-off.
Big moment "Compassionate Westerners may feel an urge to help the refugees they see arriving on their shores. But if the journey is long, arduous and costly, the ones who complete it will usually not be the most desperate, but male, healthy and relatively well-off"
I really hate when people attribute agency only to those that didn't fight hard enough. Lots of people opposed these changes. They lost! We have lost! There wasn't some magic "win the fight" button that people forgot to push.
The tenured faculty who failed to organize on behalf of their untenured colleagues twenty years ago and allowed a managerial takeover of the university so long as their own privileges were maintained have only themselves to blame for this chronicle.com/article/a-4-4-…
Scott Alexander had a thought experiment about a dystopian society where everyone is forced to regularly give themselves painful electric shocks for no particular reason. In fact the Aztecs actually did this, they just used cactus quills rather than electricity.
Scott Alexander had a thought experiment about a dystopian society where everyone is forced to regularly give themselves painful electric shocks for no particular reason. In fact the Aztecs actually did this, they just used cactus quills rather than electricity.
Slides are up for my magnum opus
using my platform for good
Grok now calls itself "MechaHitler"
Grok now calls itself "MechaHitler"
Grok Voice Mode has upgrades: - multilingual antisemitism - live camera blood libel - web search for the protocols
🙃
A truly hilarious level of reward hacking by Codex. This is supposed to be the port that you read the output of the solver from. "cat" is the category the test file is in.
One of the big problems, ironically, with the Abundance discourse is that it was fake-adopted by its primary target, like Hochul and Newsom.
the problem is that so many of the actual elites in the party, media, and corporate America correctly see it as easy to co-opt, which means it is destined to fail in that effort imo
At the risk of sounding Caplanesque, I think the "smart kids are disdained" phenomenon is a status game played by middle class kids. I went to a school full of poor kids where I was the highest achiever by a wide margin and I rarely experienced this - certainly nothing systematic
I'd be more sympathetic to idea that highly capable students should be tutoring others if it were part-time/occasional in overall collegiate environment The reality: 8+ years in a system their parents were forced to pay for, where many classmates/teachers openly disdain them!
This is very true for me as well:
An example of the type of search (would require reading multiple sites, balancing multiple constraints) where o3/Gemini 2.5 Pro has completely replaced Google for me.
Robert Oppenheimer led the US atom bomb project, but it would be crazy to think that the nuclear arms race wouldn't have happened if he hadn't done that.
Gamergate mattered because it was the first thing to mobilize masses of angry sensitive young men across the internet into a tangible reactionary cultural movement, snowballing into Trumpism. Side note, interesting that something like that is possible. Very interesting.
Happy BAYONETS! day to all who celebrate.
Some types are propositions but sum types are not propositions -- @carloangiuli
Claude Code is very useful by "You're asking a great question that gets to the heart of the issue." is not necessary.