Well, this ought'a make a few tablespoons of caramelized onions
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David Andersen
@dave_andersen@hachyderm.io
mastodon 4.7.3Computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Co-founder & CTO, Enriched Ag. he/him.
signal: dga.48
1276 Followers
569 Following
31 Posts
Joined November 24, 2022
Location:
Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Amateur Radio:
AC3ME
github:
Oh dear I have talked to a reporter, please pray for me
tempted to nickname my oven the Slor and see how long it takes my family to have me committed.
Many zucchinis and za'atars knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of the Slor that day, i can tell you!
Wednesday we had a big systems faculty meeting to discuss - of course - how to make sure our courses continued to work in the face of AI being able to one-shot nearly any programming assignment we would create for undergrads.
One clear take-home from it was that we need to move of the "did you learn what we want from the projects?" into the assessments instead of where we used to have it -- working code handed in.
Last semester I added weekly very short (<= 5 minute) weekly quizzes to my class of 250 students. I was worried about the logistics, but it turns out to have worked pretty well: I designed the quizzes to be easy to grade, and gradescope's clustering let my TAs collect, scan, and grade them often before class was over, which is pretty awesome.
I'm upping the game a little for the coming semester, making the quizzes just a hair harder, filling in the weeks I missed this semester, and attaching a few more points to them. And ironically - I ended up using AI to wrangle a lot of it. In case it's useful for others...
(All work done using google's antigravity 'agy' CLI tool)
1) Cleaned up the typst code for all of the quizzes, extracting what was a bunch of one-off copy-paste quiz descriptions into a coherent template and refactoring all of the quizzes to use the template. Then had it add a makefile and some targets to build a single PDF of all of them, etc. Took about 15 minutes.
2) Had it rename and align all of the quizzes with the weeks of the class instead of being numbered sequentially, which made it annoying for me to see where I'd left gaps. Then had it match up the topics list on the schedule with the topics extracted from the quiz question to identify topic coverage.
3) I sent a draft of the quizzes to one of my TAs, who commented that I'd made some of the questions awfully similar to the previous semester, but the students could access the quizzes because we scanned them in to gradescope. Whoops, forgot about that. So had gemini match each new question about its nearest counterpart in the previous semester and create an "excess similarity" report (shown below). It probably wasn't perfect but the top 4 it identified were really too close, and that's what I needed to fix.
1/2
Party time in PJM land, we just dropped below the 220v short term deviation voltage limit. (Measured inside my house, but at the end of a 200A line directly from the meter, so... pretty accurate). Probably not _technically_ a brownout yet but very close.
Nom nom nom. I love enchilada day. Why is it not every day? Oh, right, because my family would revolt and start ordering takeout. But it's good when it happens! 16 enchiladas ready for eating and freezing.
I feel out of touch. Was talking with a colleague who runs supercomputers at a national lab who mentioned casually that they have individual racks at 1/2 MW each. (!)
mind-boggling power density. The water cooling pipes alone are huge.
Ok, fine, you may have the light for now. But after you're done I'd really like to replace the bulb so it works again.
Thank you, little espresso machine, for the #accidentalart. I hadn't known you liked to draw people's heads.
I have many and complex feelings about the mega-AI effort, but there's nothing complex about a company reasonably saying "our tech shouldn't be used in fully autonomous weapons or for mass surveillance of US persons". The government trying to compel a private company in this way should rightfully horrify everyone, and kudos to the folks at Anthropic for defining their boundaries and sticking with them.
2013: Gosh memory is kind of expensive in cloud rentals.
2026: hold my beer
(screenshot from a 2013 paper...)
Sigh. A firm "fuck you" to whomever just did an identity theft on my spouse. I doubt it's worth trying to track it down since I caught it before they got any money from the accounts they opened, but still an annoying waste of hours.
Guess we should have proactively frozen her credit agency records years ago. I was paranoid with my own after the OPM breach but not with hers.
RE: https://mstdn.social/@Nickiquote/116467231325654624
This kinda sums up 2026 so far
RE: https://social.treehouse.systems/@whitequark/116145581473013061
Endorsed and encouraged.
Replying to
@hyc@mastodon.social @soviut@hachyderm.io @Edent@mastodon.social Howard, you've accidentally entered this discussion without understanding that this is a subtoot of a particularly venomous exchange going on in the linux community right now that has nothing to do with makefiles or build scripts.
You .. might have a better reception in this thread if you take a moment to look at the resignations of Hector Marcan and Karol Herbst so that you understand the context well enough to formulate an informed comment.
The kids school moved spring break back this year, so we are traveling and have only a kitchenette. There is some improvisation involved and I hope to not make charoset in an ice bucket in future years (but it's still tasty). 🤓🤣
Replying to
Also, it turns out there's a real danger of becoming the co-director of the lab: There are fewer grown ups in a position to tell me that my jokes aren't funny. One of my slides from the intro keynote:
@0x00string@infosec.exchange @filippo@abyssdomain.expert especially since it's probably some asshat throwing openclaw at it to produce a bunch of garbage "fixes".
"Claude claims to have incorporated those fixes from community contributions and added those new features"
uh-huh.
asshat. block _and_ report.
Replying to
@regehr 1) thanks! 2) daaaang. you guys are fucked this summer. but my 13 year old is going to be excited for the climbing. :)
Replying to
@regehr hah..glad to hear. Gate buttress is about 1.x miles up LCC just above the LDS storage thing.
In BCC the two spots I'd wonder about are the area around the s-curve (only about 50' higher) and then lower down about a half mile from the opening of the canyon at dogwood...
Replying to
@jbqueru It's going to be such an interesting thing to watch. :-) LLMs could make many of those things much worse or much better and ...
it is a seemingly common belief that the adage "throw away your first prototype" is a reasonable one that is often overridden by management who sees a hacked-together demo and insists on shipping it. That version of the story does not point towards the better outcomes. Hopefully there will be countervailing factors so we're not all swimming in a soup of bad code.
Replying to
@Popehat "Obscenities? In Boston? Horrors!"
This was beautiful. Thank you. :)
Boston was the first place I saw Scabby the Rat (sorry, Chicago, I visited you later). Pretty sure that's a city that [expletive]n' gets labor protests.
Replying to
(The PDL does not primarily focus on formal verification, but the trend lines make it clear that verification is going to play an increasing role in mission-critical systems development over time, so we're roping in Bryan to add a dash of "big things you should keep a finger on" to our mix.)
@regehr@mastodon.social Do you know how low the snow level is w.r.t. climbing spots in BCC and LCC right now? Is, e.g., the gate buttress snow-free? It kinda looks that way from the udot webcams but I can't find a view too far off the road
I love this. :)
I am procrastinating the hell out of writing this NSF proposal for some reason.
But by the power of productive procrastination and a little bit of fear (my usual co-teacher will be out), I have prepped most of my quizzes for next spring's class. 🤣