Jay Daigle

Starting to feel about autocomplete the way my parents' generation did about GPS.

If I don't have to type my credit card number in every time, or my girlfriend's phone number, how am I gonna memorize it? That used to just happen, but now I need to actively drill it.

Someone introduced me to the song "I Was Not a Nazi Polka", mocking widespread post-war protestations by Germans that none of them had ever been Nazis or sympathizers.

And that's easy to ridicule, but it's important part of the peace that we /did/ let most of them sing the I Was Not a Nazi polka.

2024 Puerto Rican status referendum - Wikipedia

To the best of my knowledge it gets consistent but not enormous majorities in referenda. In 2024 got 59% versus 30% for status quo and 12% for independence.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Pu...

Even now, when there is a simple cartoonish moral binary, a lot of people seem to want to identify a different simple cartoonish moral binary. E.g. "this shows all the problems with capitalism" or "we need to expel all the moderates from the coalition".

Have a lot more sympathy for all those people scheduling meetings that could have been emails, now that I regularly get complaints that my emails should have been meetings.

This is a real problem with the political project of "ostracize everyone with terrible opinions".

If 2% of people have the terrible opinions, that can and does work. If 20% have the terrible opinions, it probably doesn't. If 40% of people have them, that's basically proposing civil war.

Apparently it's a volunteer position that "in no way affects his position as governor. "

bsky.app/profile/capi...

I teach calc. Some students rarely show up and get As on all the assignments, and I don't worry about them.

Some students rarely show up and get Cs, and if they're happy I'm okay.

Some students get Fs on tests, don't turn in half the homework, and show up the last week to ask how they can pass.

So all this "what are you going to do with a degree in X?" handwringing is sort of nonsense. Unless you know you want to go down a pretty specific technical career path, your undergraduate major just does not matter that much. Which I wish we conveyed to students better.

I kind of hate the applause (it's flattering but makes me uncomfortable), so I've started watching for when they start thinking about it and shaping my cadence so they don't actually have an opening to do it.

On some level this explains the last time; best numbers I can find are something like 35 over 60 when he left office in 2021.

Enough to "be disgraced" but not enough to be abnormal; comparable to W Bush.

(Data includes pre-Jan 6 polling but not a lot www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/d...)

I studied Latin for five years in high school, and while that knowledge has definitely attenuated, I regularly find my brain wanting to revert to Latin grammar.

This comes up most often with English nouns ending in -a. For instance, yesterday I saw a display of Santae in the CVS window.

I am stealing “Elephants are big!” “No they’re not, they’re grey!”, thank you very much.

Taking It Back, The Right Way

It’s true that some scientific results can’t be replicated. And it’s also true that some people do the right thing when that happens:

I have a deep aversion to algorithmic feeds in general; reading a post that was suggested by the algorithm feels viscerally bad.

Sometimes I catch myself thinking "I wish I could read that story but it comes from an algorithmic feed so I can't." Silly—but a good antibody maybe?

Realizing I resist critiques of algorithmic short-form video because they make me feel smug and self-satisfied and I don't trust that.

I have zero interest in short-form video _or_ algorithmic feeds; judging them as also morally unvirtuous feels self-aggrandizing.

I think it's one of those phrases that has so many plausible interpretations that everyone can find _an_ interpretation they agree with.

But by that token it doesn't communicate very much.

(In context, of course, it does.)

Further evidence for my theory that math teaching is closely linked to language teaching.

They seem to be defining hallucinations as "overconfident, plausible falsehoods". They argue that the RL training will cause the model to output errors even if the underlying pretrained model has zero errors, which it obviously won't.

But they seem most interested in the overconfidence bit.

Claim: the way they do reinforcement learning prioritizes guessing when uncertain rather than expressing the uncertainty, in much the same way that guessing on most tests is a better strategy than leaving answers blank. We need to change benchmarks and RL standards to reward expressing uncertainty.

This is one of the ways I think teaching math and languages has a lot of overlap.

(Another is that you get students coming to the department with wildly different backgrounds--there's more skipping of calc 1 or French 1 than of the American History survey.)

Honestly I prefer that. Irregular schedules make it so much harder to actually lay out the schedule; it's really nice when I have a Tuesday-Thursday schedule and every week works the same.

We even see this in STEM. Math majors have good outcomes, but it's not because they go on to work "as professional mathematicians"; and students always want to know what "jobs for math majors" are.

Some engineering degrees really are job credentials, but that's very specific!

I've seen some people advise one should maintain a personal professional email and keep everything not directly related to your university job in that account. But on reflection you definitely want at least first contacts from .edu.

(But surely here you could email the chair from another account?)

I find the disciplinary variety on this issue fascinating. I like author-date, but the accepted standard in math is either [BD25] or [6]. Which is extremely compact but conveys nearly no information to the reader.

(I assume this is partly because we use references very differently.)

Also the argument generally relies on the interest in general welfare--it's rational from a utilitarian perspective because the impact of a candidate scales up as the impact of your vote scales down.

None of that affects the lives experience of the impacts on your personal life.

I had to have a months-long argument to get them to let me hook my personal Linux box up to the ethernet in my office. They generally don't let personal devices connect to the ethernet, for security reasons.

I also don't have admin access, which really limits what I can install. I'm figuring out the limits of running userspace programs today. So far not a ton of huge obstacles, although my "replace capslock with ctrl key" solution spawns a persistently open window which sucks.

It's bios locked so I probably can't. I'm gonna try but I think getting around a locked bios is actually pretty difficult!

It's very much a Work Computer where the login is through my work email and I'm automatically on the work VPN, etc.

I haven't seriously used a Windows computer in like a decade, but my personal laptop died and my employer gives me a free work laptop, but won't install Linux on it. So I'm seeing if I can make this whole Windows thing work.