Mark Gritter

Git along now Look around you. Do you feel like maybe it would be nice to be able to have relational databases in your nice safe DCVS? What about streaming releases? What about coders who might be scared about screwing up? Do you actually roll all your code libraries up into the version control, or do you reference them? Does that feel like a safe way to operate?

Git along now

Look around you. Do you feel like maybe it would be nice to be able to have relational databases in your nice safe DCVS? What about streaming releases? What about coders who might be scared about screwing up? Do you actually roll all your code libraries up into the version control,…

Name That Gummy! With a packet of gummies

Eden Prairie, a posh suburb of Minneapolis, now has an official government-made THC gummy, and held a contest to name it

Updated the name and title to be more *inspired*

Please play and rate it here! #gmtkjam

itch.io/jam/gmtk-202...

Flash Gordon 08/03/2025

I see what you did there, @danschkade.bsky.social‬!
Thumbs up! 👍

Flash Gordon Comic Strip 2025-08-03 | Comics Kingdom Read the Flash Gordon comic strip from August 3, 2025, and check out other Flash Gordon comics by Dan Schkade.

Your Sunday summary of this wintry week in FLASH GORDON!

A Shaky Bridge by Marissa Lingen Clarkesworld Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine and Podcast.

New story out today in @clarkesworldmagazine.com ! clarkesworldmagazine.com/lingen_08_25/ Desperate times, desperate measures, desperate families....

Evaluation is important and we have good ways of evaluating instructors (observations, audits, mentoring). But the evidence is clear that asking students to Yelp review their instructors the week before exams yields no valuable information on teaching or learning--just customer satisfaction.

Reminder: code review is not "to catch mistakes", it is a tool for understanding to limit bus/lottery factor first and foremost. When code is written (if you're lucky) by one human, having the second human abdicate their judgment to the machine is actively harmful to your team's code understanding.

If You Find Yourself Speaking to God, Address God with the Informal You - Uncanny Magazine Content Note: Racial Slurs and Racist Violence   That first video of the flying man goes viral on social media and gets featured on the news. No jet pack. No hang glider. Just him, unaided, soaring ov...

Love seeing people discuss the immigrant themes in the new Superman. It's got me thinking about this novelette again.

A great take on that part of Superman's identity (with a huge queer heart), written by @johnchu.bsky.social, an actual immigrant and GREAT writer. @uncannymagazine.bsky.social

I would like to hug Tali vas Normandy.

Biden’s Team Lied About Gaza. It’s Time to Hold Them Accountable. Impunity for abetting war crimes weakens U.S. democracy.

Say what you will about secret manuevers in the dark, in the plain light of day Biden's Israel policy was disastrous and Trump's blank check to Netanyahu follows Biden's refusals to halt arms deliveries, halts required by US law. foreignpolicy.com/2025/07/18/b...

Amazon Q: Now with Helpful AI-Powered Self-Destruct Capabilities - Last Week in AWS Blog Today 404Media released a truly stunning report that almost beggars belief. To break it down into its simplest form: A hacker submitted a PR. It got merged. It told Amazon Q to nuke your computer and ...

Amazon Q shipped a feature where a rando hacker told it to run aws iam delete-user, and AWS said “Sure thing, pal!”

They caught it only because a journalist asked.

This isn’t “move fast and break things," it's “move fast and let strangers write your roadmap.”

www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/amazon-...

Platonic and Archimedean solids are related by truncation (excluding snubs). Photo by Stacey Speyer at Bridges, 2024.

I accidentally went to the Art Fair at Minnehaha Falls, today. Did you know that Art Fairs give you an almost infinite number of opportunities to tell artists you think they're great? And that when you do so, they open like flowers and beam like the sun? Also, there were dogs.

We’ve thrown away decades of knowledge about tainting, query parameters and binding, for what.

Including screenshots of the entire exploit to try and make it really obvious how rubbish this is

Today on mcnostril.com: Potato potato.

Will anyone review this paper? Screening, sorting, and the feedback cycles that imperil peer review Scholarly publishing relies on peer review to identify the best science. Yet finding willing and qualified reviewers to evaluate manuscripts has become an increasingly challenging task, possibly even ...

1. Kevin Gross and I just posted a new science-of-science preprint.

This one explores the looming peer review crisis. As many of you know, it's becoming significantly more difficult for journal editors to find scholars willing to serve as peer reviewers for submitted manuscripts.

Double rainbow over downtown Minneapolis

🤩

A 3x3 grid. Inside each grid is a smaller 50x51 grid illustrating possible room shapes, each with a count of how many seeds produce that shape. The distribution is conditioned on particular shapes for the first two rooms -- only 209 seeds out of 2^32 generate those shapes.

The previous diagram's negative space, all the room shapes that are impossible given the first two rooms are fixed.

Over on Mathstodon, I'm experimenting with huge visualizations of #Rogue level generation.

If we go through all 2^32 seeds, and fix the first two room shapes, what possibilities remain? Left: remaining possible shapes. Right: excluded

mathstodon.xyz/@markgritter...
mathstodon.xyz/@markgritter...

Every U.S. state must necessarily have a largest ball of twine.

Which states don't know where theirs is located?

(Some of the largest balls might be otherwise unremarkable and just lying around in a basement or garage.)

The important thing to understand about the current state of affairs is that Andreessen hired a partner at the most influential VC firm in the tech industry solely on the basis that the man strangled a Black man to death in my neighborhood.

i think slop is about the carelessness of endless industrially manufactured content, and not Tarn Adams saying “i am going to make you the biggest most perfect soup in the world”

soup vs slop

Wow the Cyberiad predicted ChatGPT

One of the robots invents a poetry machine, feeds every scrap of poetry in the known universe into it and creates a machine that produces the most insipid garbage anyone's ever read

Our tickets are $30, or pay what you can. We’re volunteer-run. We don’t have corporate-sponsored talks. And yet, unlike GDC, if you speak at Roguelike Celebration, you’ll get paid! No travel costs! We pay for streaming hardware if you need it! Human transcribed captions, uploaded with no paywall!

Congratulations!

More on these crazy letters, in @lawfaremedia.org. lawfaremedia.org/article/the-...

HackNY: Well, Hell Your career is long, and it has a lot of fluctuations, but you'll never regret being curious about your industry, your role, and how people interact with computers.

HackNY: Well, Hell

Your career is long, and it has a lot of fluctuations, but you'll never regret being curious about your industry, your role, and how people interact with computers.

Just to state the stupidly obvious: This is treatment the United States has subjected HUNDREDS of men to without trial or process, the vast majority of whom have no criminal record of any kind. (Not, of course, that it would be acceptable if they did.)

Part 1 of a 15-panel SMBC comic update showing the plans of the Evil Bachelor of the Arts Society.

Part 2 of a 15-panel SMBC comic update showing the plans of the Evil Bachelor of the Arts Society.

Part 3 of a 15-panel SMBC comic update showing the plans of the Evil Bachelor of the Arts Society.

Inspired by the recent Quanta Magazine article, Mathematical Beauty, Truth and Proof in the Age of AI, which Dave Luebke sent me.

COMIC ◆ www.smbc-comics.com/comic/humanity
PATREON ◆ www.patreon.com/ZachWeinersm...
STORE ◆ smbc-store.myshopify.com

Teaser figure (Figure 1) from the linked paper. Caption: "Fuzzy linkography allows for the rapid translation of user activity logs from digital creativity support tools (and other traces of creative activity) into rough graphical summaries, suitable for visual and quantitative inspection by researchers." On the left, a little sketchy person labeled "CST user" sits at a laptop and types in an idea to be rendered as an image. From their interactions, we derive a "creative activity trace" listing off all the ideas they've suggested as bullet points: "cat", "pink cat", "angry cat", and so on, all the way down to "pink cat with glasses". This trace passes through a process labeled "fuzzy linkography" (depicted here as a fuzzy purple cloud with a cat face and tail), and produces a graph labeled as a "fuzzy linkograph" that shows semantic and temporal relationships between user-suggested ideas. Another little sketchy person, labeled "researcher", peers at the fuzzy linkograph through a magnifying glass and thinks about the patterns they see. Sketches by @cheesetalk.bsky.social!

🧶 Fuzzy Linkography: Automatic Graphical Summarization of Creative Activity Traces

we introduce a new way to analyze user activity logs from creativity support tools…

…& illuminate patterns of creative divergence, convergence, idea development, & homogenization at scale

arxiv.org/abs/2502.04599