I generally find the numbers printed on pasta boxes for cooking time far too high: I’ll set the timer for a minute below their low-end “al dente” time, and when I taste one it’s already getting too mushy. I decided to run a small experiment to get a better sense of how cooked I like pasta.

Here’s a snapshot of what running OTIS looks like these days.

You don’t need anyone’s permission to learn skills or build things any more.

Brought up in the context of teaching young people, but making sure people develop self-agency is an important part of building any self-sustaining team.

How to build an engaging mathematics LMS for fun and profit.

I was a coordinator for last year’s IMO 2024 and this year’s IMO 2025.1 Here’s some thoughts about that, contrasting my IMO 2019 post.

In my last semester of MIT I led a recitation (i.e. twice-a-week review) session1 for multivariable calculus (18.02) at MIT (although the first few weeks are all linear algebra). It’s different from many contexts I’ve taught in before; the emphasis of the class is on doing standard procedures, but the challenge is that there is…

Excellent notes on teaching.

because: ~azurylite

Nice post discussing the etymology and history of “speculative bubble.”

More on AI psychosis, but this time sandwiched by Japanese wordplay.

via: https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/07/real-life-is-uncertain-consensus-should.html

A collection of blocklists, for sites that generate or contain AI generated content. Formatted for use with HOSTS/PiHole/Technitium (HPT)

Protect your neck in these trying times.

A huge blocklist of manually curated sites that contain AI generated imagery for uBlock Origin

Protect your neck in these trying times.

Yay, LLM-induced psychosis! Man, the posts and articles of this genre do not stop flowing…

Today, we’re looking at two case studies in how to respond when reactionaries appear in your free software community.

The General strike -the people united shall never be stopped. If we strike together we can make true real change. Sign the strike card today.

via: https://drewdevault.com/2025/06/09/2025-06-09-Unionize-or-die.html

What happened, and an investigation of the malware

The paper (arXiv 2020, also AI review 2023) opens up with discussing recent high-profile AI debates: the Montréal AI Debate and the AAAI 2020 fireside chat with Kahneman, Hinton, LeCun, and Bengio. A consensus seems to be emerging: for AI to be robust and trustworthy, it must combine learning with reasoning. Kahneman’s “System 1 vs. System 2” dual framing of cognition maps well to deep learning and symbolic reasoning. And AI needs both.

Paper (and post) introduced to me the idea of the logic tensor network, which genuinely looks quite different interesting. I hope to see adoption of the architecture in the future.

The paper (2023) argues for integrating two historically divergent traditions in artificial intelligence (neural networks and symbolic reasoning) into a unified paradigm called Neurosymbolic AI. It argues that the path to capable, explainable, and trustworthy artificial intelligence lies in marrying perception-driven neural systems with structure-aware symbolic models.

I hate Sundays.