Very aesthetic presentation.

via: https://laurelsletter.substack.com/p/winter-spring-2026

We received 553 answers to the question “If you could change one thing about Haskell, what would it be?”. This is the breakdown.

Building a language is fucking hard, man.

Lucy Foulkes argues that campaigns may not be helping, and in some ways may actively make people worse.

the next generation of campaigns should promote the unfortunate reality that the topic of mental health is an unwieldy, untameable beast. In particular, I’d like to see a campaign that conveys the idea that mental health problems lie on a spectrum. This is an inconvenient truth, because it reveals that our experiences cannot be neatly packaged and labelled as ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’. But far better to be aware of this complexity than to pretend any of this is easy.

via: https://lucyfoulkes3.medium.com/the-adolescent-mental-health-mess-c93f23f8ed56

Agents can write code faster than we can absorb it. Here’s why it still matters for humans to understand what they build — and some techniques for doing that efficiently: explainer docs, quizzes, micro-worlds, and shared spaces.

What I term the “monad tutorial fallacy,” then, consists in failing to recognize the critical role that struggling through fundamental details plays in the building of intuition. This, I suspect, is also one of the things that separates good teachers from poor ones. If you ever find yourself frustrated and astounded that someone else does not grasp a concept as easily and intuitively as you do, even after you clearly explain your intuition to them (“look, it’s really quite simple,” you say…) then you are suffering from the monad tutorial fallacy.

On factual vs. conceptual knowledge.

Spaced repetition has a natural domain of applicability: information that is systematically organized as an unambiguous key-value mapping with short keys and values. The “Hello, world!” of flashcards is the NATO phonetic alphabet: A → alpha, B → bravo, etc. Similarly, the periodic table can be thought of as defining a collection of mappings: element name ↔ symbol, element name ↔ atomic number, etc. You can just drill these cards and memorize the facts without a prior step of understanding, or building a conceptual model.

I started learning how to read and write Chinese recently. In that time, I have often wanted to strangle the language by its metaphorical throat. In this blog post, I will explore the reasons behind my metaphysical hatred, and how I learned to redirect that hatred to thinking about linguistics.

Fascinating structure!

via: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2026/04/30/links-for-april-2026/

“Hey, I have a good idea for a game,” I said. “It’s called the function machine game. I will think of a function machine. You tell me things to put into the function machine, and I will tell you what comes out. Then you have to guess what the function machine does.” He immediately liked this game and it has been a huge hit; he wants to play it all the time.

This post made me smile. :)

In 2013, education reformers tried to help poor students the using the best tool at their disposal: The 16th most popular Ted Talk.

Man, I hate social psychology now that I actually have a good understanding of stats and critical theory under my belt. I swear to God: if I see one more personality scale, I’m gonna flip a table.

This is how experienced people understand systems: they continuously form hypotheses about how the system works, and then they deliberately place themselves in situations which have a chance of invalidating their hypotheses.

I describe tutoring as “giving students an opportunity to reevaluate their assumptions, by asking the right questions to expose the critical mechanisms from their invidial perspectives.”

That’s how tutoring works, but it’s also how to debug broken code, how to learn how a network is put together, and how to learn to drive a race car. That is how to learn.

Words to live by.

Academic and writer Amia Srinivasan’s revolutionary debut text, The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century, questions the ways in which we discuss or avoid the problems and politics of sex. Examining the complexities and interconnections between sex, consent, gender, class, race and power, the stunning narrative unravels the nuances of discrimination and preference, pornography and freedom, rape and racial injustice, to name a few. In conversation with Bee Rowlatt, Srinivasan discusses these urgent political debates and what it means to be free.

This woman is cracked.

Diátaxis is a way of thinking about and doing documentation. Also interesting in the sphere of education/teaching.

Interesting discussion of math education.

Diátaxis is a way of thinking about and doing documentation. Also interesting in the sphere of education/teaching.

Ever feel like the mathematics you’re learning doesn’t make any sense to you? Good. In a way, it would’ve been worse if you thought it did make sense.