Phillip Compeau

Prompting AI to ruin my life

I found the most fucked imaginable use case of AI for PhD holders #ImpostorSyndrome

SVP occasionally for the nostalgia and that's about it

not telling

Died *with* hantavirus, not *of* hantavirus

More like Sam Bankman Freed amirite

Hopping into my way back machine for this gem from shared grad student housing, once upon a time

“Finally, to correct the possible impression that the inability to face radical novelty is confined to the industrial world, let me offer you an explanation of the -at least American- popularity of Artificial Intelligence. One would expect people to feel threatened by the “giant brains” or “machines that think.” Tin fact, the frightening computer becomes less frightening if it is used only to simulate a familiar non-computer. I am sure that this explanation will remain controversial for quite some time, for Artificial Intelligence as mimicking the human mind prefers to view itself as at the front lined whereas my explanation relegates it to the rear guard. (The effort of using machines to mimic the human mind has always struck me as rather silly: I’d rather use them to mimic something better.)” -EWD

Dijkstra‘s remains the correct take on AI

In the same category as the former Jerome Bettis Grill in Pittsburgh having one-way glass above the urinals with a bar view so you could keep an eye on your gf at the bar

Wow

Me too

Google just randomly showing this to me in search results. What a beautiful, necessary feature.

And congrats to Gene and Jeff! 👑

How to download your Kindle books while Amazon still allows it After Feb. 26, Amazon is doing away with its Kindle "download and transfer via USB" option.

I'm gonna remind people that I feel pretty strongly that if you bought one of my ebooks legitimately, then you own the book and however you secure that ownership is fine by me

mashable.com/article/how-...

Basically that's how I saw the creation of the University of Austin

YouTube video by boogyman10o1 The Price is Right - Bad Game of 'Clock Game'

Today was my favorite lecture of the semester because I got to show this video of the clock game on The Price is Right

www.youtube.com/watch?v=oc9H...

Nothing says "I am not working right now and this is a waste of my and your time" quite like sending a weekly summary email

Everything at Aldi is based

Universities are too expensive for students, they've lost a focus on the communities they inhabit, they employ too many executivess who don't add any value, etc. But it's easier for universities to slow PhD admissions than incorporate real systemic change.

Fewer PhDs means America loses innovation

In this teaching life you get to choose: post old memes no one gets, or steal from the greats?

What do you think the prompt was that generated this?

How the hell am I gonna feed my kids when my great great grandfather's $3.63 per month social security check (which he earned from 40 hard years of clubbing baby seals) gets stopped?

@danprimack.bsky.social gets it

We are discovering very quickly which private organizations are led by cowards. That's the thing about cowards, they panic and show you who they are very quickly

Data Hoarders Are Rushing to Save Vanishing US Health Records Computer science professor Niema Moshiri was watching TV last Thursday evening when his phone lit up with frantic messages from a virologist in Canada. The warning was urgent: back up the US Centers f...

Government agencies’ moves to comply with Donald Trump’s executive orders have sparked feverish efforts to archive US government data in online repositories like the Internet Archive.

A revelation about working in academia is that the angriest, most irritated people are also the kindest, truest of heart people you will encounter. What does that tell you?

Inspired by @charlesgaba.com's Herculean effort to post all Wayback URLs from the CDC website (including pages that have recently been deleted), I built this GitHub repo to share Wayback links to all CDC website pages, and will add more websites when I get a chance github.com/Niema-Lab/Go...

The era where significant parts of America tried to uplift people who hadn't been born into opportunity was brief, but it was hopeful.

Frankly I can't believe it happened at all

1. Reckoner
2. Paranoid android
3. Pyramid song
4. Fake plastic trees
5. True love waits

Subject to revision

I, for one, dream of a country in which people reach (underpaid) roles in (critical) governmental services by merit alone (and then take a severance offer and resign leaving that role understaffed)

We built Rosalind, the Bioinformatics Algorithms project, and the Biological Modeling online course

Say what you will about AI, but we just had an era in which our smartest quantitative minds spent their time training bots to sell ads to other bots.

That era was extremely annoying and boring. Like if smart kids all wanted to do accounting for some reason