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Earlier this month I wrote about why it seems AI likes archivists.

I sometimes feel bad about how old some books on my to-read stack are, particularly relative to their recency when I first bought them. But, of course, more books keep coming out so what can you do! I just got around to reading Zadie Smith’s On Beauty and I’m actually glad that I waited to read this until I, and many of my friends, are also academics in our 50s.

As this article acknowledges, from a data science side the processes used for watermarking AI generated text are interesting and it’s sort of cool that it works. But the sentiment of the title, Anthropic’s Text Watermarking Proves AI Companies Do Not Care at All About Writing, gets at an important point that you need to know what a system was designed to do to understand if and how to use it. If word choice is treated as something arbitrary that can be manipulated without changing the quality of the text, that tells you something about the types of texts you can reasonably generate.

That article is nicely complemented by the following: In Praise of “Wordy, Old Prose.” (Or, F*ck Your AI Reading Buddy)

The complete collection of Slings & Arrows is available on YouTube.

Before there was AI, or even spell checking built into every application and app we use, you could spend $50 (in 1983 dollars, the equivalent of a bit over $150 today) to buy the Random House spell checking software – number of words available depending on your hard drive and memory capacity:

Not a lot of links this month as I’ve been spending more time outside and more time reading books than being online. A highlight of the month was What We Can Know by Ian McEwan. Some reviews described it as speculative fiction, but I found those elements fairly minor. The general story revolves around a lost poem, shifting between a plot about literary scholars in the future searching for it and the story in our current time of the single time the poem was read to an audience at a party. The future scholars have access to the full digital lives of the author and party attendees, though we come to realize what is missing from that “complete” digital record. The book is roughly broken into two parts – I enjoyed the first part more than the second, but it was certainly worth finishing the whole thing. I’m also glad I went into the book spoiler free, because there are some excellent revelations along the way.

Uncovered is a writing-focused site for finding new books – scroll through the first pages of books, without context, until something strikes your fancy. I’d like some context on where the excerpts come from and the range of books they cover.

I’m saving this video of a game developer talking about how helpful it was to their game development process when they discovered how to use inheritance. I’m sure they were already aware of inheritance, but their enthusiasm for explaining exactly why it solved a hard problem for them is great. Definitely going to share with my students.

Toys and Games:

• Click the faces on the Rolling Stone to set the color/tone and then set it rolling to hear the effect
• Can you Gerrymandle?

Returning to images from the August 1983 edition of Byte, here’s a reminiscence of a time when magazines included code for you to type out or, in this case, examples of basic Unix commands and their effects. The explanatory comments for each command are nice. And yes, in the second image below, this is from back in the day when you could just look at the contents of the system password file.

A very cool stop-motion short of a knitted human body built up from the inside out.

Hank Green’s Artemis II Photo Timeline with synced NASA audio is also very cool. (And his video about creating it.)

YESSSSSSSS – Windows 11 Insider Experimental Preview Build 26300.8493: “You can now change the position of taskbar on your screen. In Settings > Personalization > Taskbar > Taskbar Behaviors, you can select the side of the screen you want your taskbar on: bottom, top, left, or right.” The inability to put my taskbar on the left side of my display was by far the worst part of upgrading to Windows 11.

Trademark drama recently around Notepad++. It’s the text editor of choice for one of my classes, so I was interested in the flurry of news stories I saw about there finally being a macOS version. But the official Notepad++ site was posting that this was not an official or endorsed version. Things now seem to be resolved with the macOS version now being made available as Nextpad++ and greater clarity on the site about their independence from Notepad++.

Browser fingerprinting at Taken might be illustrative in a variety of our courses…

Game fun:

• Cursor Camp over at neal.fun: just a little pointer arrow having fun at the beach with their pointer arrow friends
• RNGdle: generate a random number, collect achievements
• I do not know enough Javascript to fully solve the JS Crossword

I finished off a shawl that I started on a long trip back in March: the Sunday Morning Shawl. I made mine in a sock weight yarn, so I did many more repeats than the pattern called for, but it also worked great as a travel project because the sock yarn means carrying only a few materials (I think the total shawl comes in at about 300g) and after the first couple repeats I had the pattern entirely memorized. The biggest downside was the insane number of bobble stitches I ended up having to do at the end, but it was worth it for how nice the edging looks. The end result is nice and light. I’ll keep it in my office as part of my collection of layers to ward off the excessive AC/lack of heat in some of the classrooms, but it’s also light enough as a summer wrap. It turned out a bit wider than I hoped, but I can wrap the ends around my waist for more of a “shrug” look, which is nice. Overall, I’m really happy with it!

Another merged report of March and April, because I spent much of March and a chunk of April traveling….

Fun and games:

• How many animals can you list in a minute (with time added for successful animal additions. I got to 109….️‍
• Outsmart the computer in this simple five-round betting game
• Wikipedia Gacha

Spring is the time to watch the Utrecht Fish Doorbell again!

Images used to illustrate words on Wikipedia in every language. Reload to get a different random word (or enter one of your own).

Extrapolated Futures Archive: Mapping real-world scenarios to the science fiction stories that explored them first

Nobody Gets Promoted for Simplicity: “In design reviews, instead of “have we thought about scale?”, try “what’s the simplest version we could ship, and what specific signals would tell us we need something more complex?” That one question changes the game: it makes simplicity the default and puts the burden of proof on complexity, not the other way around!”

Game Devs Reveal All Their Ugly Placeholder Assets Made Without AI, recommended for the examples and the clarity the devs have that about the merits of placeholders that are clearly draft content. We see students often spend way too much time on visual assets in the early prototyping stages.

It’s always nice seeing what my alums are up to, so I particularly enjoyed reading through a former student’s breakdown of a recent DMV text scam, including a bit of AI usage to help with de-obfuscation.

Some games journalists I’ve encountered in various places over the years have a new website Jank that already has some cool stuff on it, including a seven-part series where they interview game developers who have designed climbing games from within the game Peak.

I shared this Penny Arcade reacting to writing-assisted AI with several colleagues in English.

I suspect a lot of people encountered Hunter’s Atlantic article Stop Meeting Students Where They Are when it came out in early February, but I happened to encounter it right after reading Guzdial’s post on Defining Learner-Centered Design of Computing Education which made for a good pairing. The supporter at the bottom vs. supporter at the top description and idea that supporter at the bottom is more student centered (as compared to standards centered) is interesting. But, the problem of “motivating in the middle” (which Guzdial does touch on) is a challenge I’m thinking about a lot. Sometimes, that gets mixed up with students gaining clarity about what they really want as learners, as compared to what their family, high school, media, etc. have been telling them they should want. When is it okay to help a student recognize they want to be scaling a different wall than the one I’m prepared to help them up….

“PrintingFilms.com is a collection of vintage films that showcase the technologies and processes of printing, journalism, and typography.” Some are old silent films with narration cards, such as the “Hand Composition at R.R. Donnelley & Sons Co.” training film. I enjoyed the intro cards justifying why they would use film as a medium to provide training.

I anticipate Introducing Our Lord and Savior, The College’s New Strategic Initiative becoming a perennial classic for academics on par with It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers.

I often ask myself to think about designing systems to allow effective coexistence with AI. The HBR article AI Doesn’t Reduce Work – It Intensifies It closes with reflections on how to design organizational systems overall (not just technical systems) – what they call an “AI Practice” – to encourage long-term productivity while using AI.

Other writing on AI this past month that caught my attention:

• How Generative and Agentic AI Shift Concern from Technical Debt to Cognitive Debt – I don’t see why this issue of cognitive debt wouldn’t apply to non-code projects managed by AI as well
• The AI hater’s guide to code with LLMs (The Overview) and An AI haters guide to code with LLMs (The How-to) are a snapshot of the current state
• Simon Willison’s Writing about Agentic Engineering Patterns introducing his collection of “chapters” about agentic programming design patterns
• Why AI writing is so generic, boring, and dangerous: Semantic ablation

In August 1983, you could take out a punny half-page advertisement for your C compiler that will prevent you from “retreating to assembler”….

I’m trying to invent a reason that I ought to print out and use the Neatnik Calendar, a single page calendar for the whole year. If I were teaching our JavaScript course I’d consider sharing the NeatoCal tool that creates one-page calendars (inspired by Neatnik Calendar) with a variety of configuration flags available.

I’ve been hearing from some alums recently about the things they’re finding they’re spending most of their time on – and the fact that it isn’t programming. A lot of what they say is echoed by this engineer’s reflections on their time at Google.

I’m not a manga reader, but this bookshelf adapter is a very nice piece of design.

Game Poems Issue #1

In AI news, Gas Town got a lot of attention in January (Yegge’s welcome post here  – at the very least it’s an interesting exploration of pushing agentic AI forward with a variety of roles, hierarchies, agent memory, orchestration, etc.). This article is a nice effort at identifying some lessons/themes learned from Gas Town over the past month. It closes with some interesting conversation about how much developers should ever look at, or touch, code. For the time being, this sounds right: “Framing this debate as an either/or – either you look at code or don’t, either you edit code by hand or you exclusively direct agents, either you’re the anti-AI-purist or the agentic-maxxer – is unhelpful. Because nothing is a strict binary. The right distance isn’t about what kind of person you are or what you believe about AI capabilities in the current moment. How far away you step from the syntax shifts based on what you’re building, who you’re building with, and what happens when things go wrong.”

Then at the end of the month Moltbook blew up, because now that we’ve killed Stack Overflow, the bots need to make their own. Unsurprisingly, Simon Willison has thoughts. The security community is rightly losing their minds and the bots agree.

Two good books that I read in January:

• The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz: When this came up in my Libby queue I remembered nothing about it beyond assuming it was a novel about literature. I think it increased my enjoyment that I didn’t remember the specific genre or reviews I had read of it. It opens appearing to be a novel about academia, but that quickly passes, and it’s much more about the process of writing. Very plot twisty.
• Culpability by Bruce Holsinger: Family drama plus AI ethics, heavy on the trolley problem. Though ultimately the book is much more about keeping secrets, of different kinds, for different reasons.

It took me a while to realize that this month’s featured add from Byte (still on August 1983) features what’s practically a kiddy-pool sized glass of champagne:

Upload a photo of your own laptop or browse through what others have uploaded at stickertop.art. The major designs appear to be minimalist, tesselated, and chaotic overlap. You can also play the game of seeing who else has the same stickers as you. I’m impressed not to have seen any asset tags on display.

I’m going to be playing 45×45 into the new year – basically an insanely scaled up Connections.

Our interfaces have lost their senses argues that our technology interfaces are flattening our experience of the world, illustrated with yarn-craft dioramas. Much of the argument goes back to the tension between removing effort and friction and creating deep cognitive engagement. I’m not sure the author’s proposal achieves the full vision they allude to, seeming to mostly stick to talking and typing at your computer. I expected a haptic component, based on the early focus on embodied interactions. And it still doesn’t seem to offer the flexibility/customizability of form of a desk drawer full of office supplies that make less of an assumption about how I will eventually use them or what task they’re even intended for. Of course, it’s just one experiment as part of a call for more experimentation. The driving assist interfaces in cars seem like the place we are most working on how to include things like tangible artifacts and ambient signals in our interfaces, and I’m reminded of the pushback against moving everything onto a touchscreen and the return, in some cars, to knobs and dials for some functions as well.

We had this exact Mastermind box growing up and yes, yes, yes: The Mastermind Box Cover: What the Hell Were They Thinking?

My big crafty project of the month was putting together a traditional Western Pennsylvania cookie table for a friend’s wedding reception. I decided to raid the family supply of tea sets and linens and put together a tea party themed display – while I know some people lean into the Christmas theme this time of year, I wanted this to clearly say “wedding cookies” not “Christmas cookies”. Lots of friends pitched in and I was really happy with how the vision came together, including the delicate teacups filled with biscotti. I also got to try out a few new cookie recipes including Lemon Thumbprints (which included my first time making lemon curd), Lemon Lavender Shortbread, and Raspberry Coconut Macaroons.

Messenger: Beautiful little browser game where you travel a tiny world delivering messages and packages. Fully playable in a short sitting.

Bringing this pair of stories to my security class this week as a fun palette cleanser before final exams: Cryptographers Held an Election. They Can’t Decrypt the Results. and Magician forgets password to his own hand after RFID chip implant. Life lessons that key management is hard.

Adversarial Poetry as a Universal Single-Turn Jailbreak Mechanism in Large Language Models is also fun (and summarized by Schneier)

“The sight of a person dressed as Batman led to a nearly doubled rate of people giving up their seat to a pregnant woman. Over the course of 138 subway rides, researchers found that people who saw “Batman” standing near the pregnant woman were far more altruistic than those who did not.” (Psychology Today)

This video quizzing Harrison Ford on which of his lines from movies he could remember, out of context, was charming and reminds you how many movies he’s been in.

Didn’t run across this pumpkin basque cheesecake recipe until after Thanksgiving; feel free to invite me to an event where this would be a suitable contribution to the meal….

I don’t remember the frob, from fromco, from back when it was in production but I love this collection of disks, cabling, and chips for developing Atari cartridges using your Apple II.