iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Dan Drake 🦆

@ddrake.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy

18 followers 1 following 344 posts

Former #softwareengineer, current #mathematician, college #math, #computerscience and #datascience lecturer in #stpaulmn #Minnesota at #Macalester College. (And […] 🌉 bridged from ⁂ mathstodon.xyz/@ddrake, follow @ap.brid.gy to interact

Posts Replies Media

Dan Drake 🦆 @ddrake.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 21/09/2026

A fun and useful shell trick: you can, effectively, pipe things from a remote computer into your local clipboard. Context: you're ssh'ed into a remote computer. Locally, you could pipe stuff to xclip or wl-copy or pbcopy to put it in your OS clipboard -- but that won't work in ssh. If your […]

Original post on mathstodon.xyz

000

Dan Drake 🦆 @ddrake.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 18/09/2026

Are there any other VCS's worth looking at, other than git? I am old enough to recall the shift from a world where CVS and SVN were the dominant VCS's, to the days of Mercurial, Bazaar, darcs, and eventually git. Nowadays, it's just git. It's the only game in town. And it's fine, I use it […]

Original post on mathstodon.xyz

Dan Drake 🦆 @ddrake.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 16/09/2026

I may have overestimated my upper-division CS students... I'm teaching a junior/senior-level course on the foundations of AI. We're using Python, and there's a very simple starter homework assignment to get students to work through the logistics of submitting their code. Yesterday I was […]

Original post on mathstodon.xyz

100

Dan Drake 🦆 @ddrake.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 11/09/2026

I usually lean towards more geeky things, but a quarter century after 9/11, I've been remembering that day. I went to a candlelight vigil that evening, held in the middle of the University of Minnesota campus (where I was, at the time, a graduate student). The next time I attended a […]

Original post on mathstodon.xyz

000

Dan Drake 🦆 @ddrake.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 04/09/2026

www.anthropic.com/research/formaliz… Holy cow.

100

Dan Drake 🦆 @ddrake.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 31/08/2026

I find myself thinking about accessibility a lot, and it was hard to not be very annoyed by the truly awful yellow-on-white text here: www.simplypsychology.org/blooms-tax… I genuinely can't read that. And it's on a psychology web site -- psych people study human perception […]

Original post on mathstodon.xyz

Dan Drake 🦆 @ddrake.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 25/08/2026

O frabjous day, a new emacs version! lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-de… I have a staggering amount of preparation for the upcoming semester that I really need to do. I am wondering whether I should actually try to do that today, or just give in and admit that […]

Original post on mathstodon.xyz

Dan Drake 🦆 @ddrake.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 11/08/2026

I'm working on getting a Braille version of a document printed. It's just regular text and very straightforward to do in Braille. But naturally I'm wondering about math and CS. How does math notation work in Braille? I'd like to see how, say, derivatives and integrals work in Braille. And […]

Original post on mathstodon.xyz

Dan Drake 🦆 @ddrake.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 07/08/2026

A while back (mathstodon.xyz/@ddrake/116697712256…) I asked about the origin of the "turtle" in "turtle graphics". I found a good reference confirming that it came from William Grey Walter's "tortoise" robots. Here's another paper that directly confirms that again […]

Original post on mathstodon.xyz

Reposted by Dan Drake 🦆

Jakob @jdw.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 07/08/2026

I made a meme for the first time in my life. Source code: ```typst #table( columns: 2, [$0 in NN$\ Lawful Good], [$0 in.not NN$\ Chaotic Good], [$0 : NN$\ Lawful Evil], [$0 div NN$\ Chaotic Evil], ) ``` Context: mathstodon.xyz/@jdw/117049262864821…

See source code

Dan Drake 🦆 @ddrake.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 27/07/2026

The low temperature this morning: 80 degrees (Fahrenheit -- about 27 Celsius). That's the *low* temperature. Dew point was 81F! Earlier this year, on January 23, the *high* temperature was -9F (about -23C). A difference of 89 degrees (or 50)! On that January day, I did go out for a couple […]

Original post on mathstodon.xyz

Dan Drake 🦆 @ddrake.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 26/07/2026

@b0rk OMG -- your comic yesterday on #shellcheck! wizardzines.com/comics/shellcheck I hadn't heard of it, and just started using it. It's so helpful -- instead of puzzling out some weird behavior at runtime, it points me to things that are probably not what I mean. Thanks so much for […]

Original post on mathstodon.xyz

000

Dan Drake 🦆 @ddrake.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 24/07/2026

I figured out a simple way to do callout boxes in pandoc's markdown, and having fiddled with it all morning, I am posting about it in case anyone is interested: codeberg.org/ddrake/simple_pandoc_c… #pandoc #markdown #css #callout

000

Dan Drake 🦆 @ddrake.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 22/07/2026

I seem to need to understand everything by way of a metaphor with something related to math or CS. Exhibit A: I am currently reading "Religion for Atheists" by Alain de Botton -- and I find his argument very compelling, although perhaps there's some confirmation bias on my part since I've kinda […]

Original post on mathstodon.xyz

Dan Drake 🦆 @ddrake.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 21/07/2026

Watching a talk by Titus Winters at the ACM2Y meeting, and he floats an interesting idea: youtu.be/lzFxmYn9onM?si=FF-XxHt_asD… If tokens are a meaningful measure of human cognition and effort, then you can use them to empirically verify claims about thinking and mental […]

Original post on mathstodon.xyz

Dan Drake 🦆 @ddrake.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 21/07/2026

Man, the ACM website -- the Association for Computing Machinery's site -- is so confusing with all the usernames and accounts. I am trying to subscribe to one of their mailing lists and it's asking me for an email address and a password. As an ACM member, I have an @acm.org email; my account […]

Original post on mathstodon.xyz

000

Dan Drake 🦆 @ddrake.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 20/07/2026

Reading "Know thine enemy: A critical engagement with AI-assisted software development" by Amy Ko ( medium.com/bits-and-behavior/know-t… ) […]

Original post on mathstodon.xyz

Dan Drake 🦆 @ddrake.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 14/07/2026

Oh...my. Yikes. www.lyrebirddreaming.com/post/the-g… Here in the US Midwest, we get much warmer winters in El Nino conditions. Looks like we are in for a very, very warm winter...

000

Dan Drake 🦆 @ddrake.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 14/07/2026

My office right now. A reasonable person could be forgiven for thinking I'm a kindergarten teacher, and not preparing materials for a college introduction to programming course. (Let me know if you're interested in what those activities are...) (And also a […] [Original post on mathstodon.xyz]

An office desk, with piles of Legos sorted into piles by color; some paper, cardboard tube, glue stick, and tape; the textbook "Artificial Intelligence: a Modern Approach"

Dan Drake 🦆 @ddrake.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 13/07/2026

Grades are a 1-pixel approximation to a large, complex picture. dandrake.github.io/writing/grades_1… I think a lot about grades and assessment, and in general I can't tolerate the "traditional" points-based grading […]

Original post on mathstodon.xyz

Dan Drake 🦆 @ddrake.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 10/07/2026

Teaching an intro programming class, and I am always hearing about the old days when your program was a stack of punch cards. I want to get some of those punch cards to show my students (and see for myself!). You can find real punch cards for sale online, but many seem to be just for data […]

Original post on mathstodon.xyz

100

Dan Drake 🦆 @ddrake.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 09/07/2026

A great day -- reconnecting with my PhD advisor Dennis Stanton, and my colleague Jang Soo Kim from my days at KAIST in South Korea! (We did not find a $q$-version of...anything, sadly. 🤔 We'll have to have lunch again sometime...)

Dennis Stanton, Jang Soo Kim, and Dan Drake at a table at the EaTo restaurant in downtown Minneapolis.

000

Dan Drake 🦆 @ddrake.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 06/07/2026

One thing I love about Saint Paul: they put poetry on sidewalks. Here's some in my neighborhood. Art + infrastructure! #saintpaul #minnesota #poetry #sidewalks

A sidewalk with a poem imprinted in it:

I don't know enough
about balance to tell you
how to do it

I think, though,
it's in the trying
and the letting go

that the scales measuring
right and wrong -- quiver
and stand still

A sidewalk with a poem imprinted in it:

there's no place I'd rather be
then here
in this quiet common place
where late morning sun
meets the scent of concrete and cut grass
stirring

A sidewalk with a poem imprinted in it:

Midnight in the Burger King parking lot
We could drop a dime, see it sparkle
fifty feet away. We would always
have the moon we said

Dan Drake 🦆 @ddrake.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 03/07/2026

Git worktrees question. (Which, as usual, I think I answered while trying to ask a clear question...) I just learned about worktrees and they seem great. So I have my repo, all the files are checked out, and I do `git worktree add` to add a "foo" worktree. Now, in my base repo, I have a […]

Original post on mathstodon.xyz

100

Dan Drake 🦆 @ddrake.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 03/07/2026

My 10-year-old daughter is making an ice cream truck out of cardboard, sized for one of her little stuffed animals. She is being very detailed, and has chosen the particular flavors of ice cream and sherbet the truck will have, and is making a menu sign. Naturally she's putting prices on it […]

Original post on mathstodon.xyz

Dan Drake 🦆 @ddrake.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 29/06/2026

Mike Caulfield has developed a "deep background" AI prompt that students and others can use to make AI chatbots act like a useful research assistant, suitable for academic work: checkplease.neocities.org/sift-tool… (The page says you need a paid version of Claude or ChatGPT; I think […]

Original post on mathstodon.xyz

Dan Drake 🦆 @ddrake.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 25/06/2026

Trying the macOS app Shortcut to replace mouse usage -- you can keep your hands on your keyboard and navigate all the clicking and such: shortcat.app I am really liking this. I have an Ultimate Hacking Keyboard, so I can bind a convenient key to launch it and it works really well […]

Original post on mathstodon.xyz

100

Dan Drake 🦆 @ddrake.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 24/06/2026

I should start writing my name as "0xDAN".

000

Dan Drake 🦆 @ddrake.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 23/06/2026

Just learned a cool word: illfare. There's "welfare", right? So it makes sense to have "illfare". I learned about this from the preface to J. A. Hobson's book "Work and Welfare": archive.org/details/workwealthhuman…

Work and wealth: a human valuation : Hobson, J. A. (John Atkinson), 1858-1940 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

xvi p., 1 l., 367 p. 22 1/2cm. O $2.25

Dan Drake 🦆 @ddrake.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 21/06/2026

I've been thinking a lot about design lately -- next spring I'm teaching a course in the ethics of software design -- and I realized that even something like an iPad cover / stand can be right-handed, in a way. When the iPad is propped up using the cover in […] [Original post on mathstodon.xyz]

an iPad on a desk, using its cover as a stand.

Dan Drake 🦆 @ddrake.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 16/06/2026

What are people doing with OpenClaw? I still don't really get it -- it sounds like it can do some really cool things, but is also super, super risky? I'm trying it. I have a burner laptop, and have it set up and connected to a Telegram bot. I have it using my Claude Pro subscription (and I […]

Original post on mathstodon.xyz

100

Dan Drake 🦆 @ddrake.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 16/06/2026

Click, tap, and so on: For, well, decades now, the universal verb for "interact with a hyperlink" has been "click", for the obvious reason that the device you most often use to do that is a mouse and you click the button. So it's interesting to see a major website -- like, oh, say, this one […]

Original post on mathstodon.xyz

000

Dan Drake 🦆 @ddrake.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 15/06/2026

Holy cow, Tailscale is cool. It's a VPN system. It's absolutely, totally plug-and-play. You make an account, install it on a machine, add it. Add a new machine and now you can magically ssh between them no matter where they are. It also does file sharing, and you can expose web services to […]

Original post on mathstodon.xyz

000

Dan Drake 🦆 @ddrake.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 14/06/2026

A very, very obscure nerdy cool thing: When installing Ubuntu, you can choose to set up ssh -- and there's now a feature where it downloads your ssh keys from GitHub! Just give it a username. This may just be with Ubuntu Server, but it's really nice, since you can install ssh without password […]

Original post on mathstodon.xyz

000

Dan Drake 🦆 @ddrake.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 13/06/2026

Gah, just when I was going to try using Fable...the government makes Anthropic turn it off for everyone: www.nytimes.com/2026/06/12/technolo… This reminds me of the bad old days when […]

Original post on mathstodon.xyz

100

Dan Drake 🦆 @ddrake.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 12/06/2026

Usually the best way to communicate with your IT helpdesk staff is to send an email. In this case...

A note attached to an office door. It says "if I'm on a piece of paper, Dan fixed his computer issue! If I'm in a screenshot or some computer file...maybe not."

000

Dan Drake 🦆 @ddrake.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 11/06/2026

CS education folks! I just read a very interesting paper: Margaret-Anne Storey. 2026. From Technical Debt to Cognitive and Intent Debt: Rethinking Software Health in the Age of AI. doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.22106 It gives us a couple good ways to describe to students what is lost […]

Original post on mathstodon.xyz

Dan Drake 🦆 @ddrake.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 11/06/2026

Years ago I loved the game Trainyard -- it was a mobile game and was a lovely masterpiece geometric logic puzzle. www.trainyard.ca (It's so good, folks went and proved theorems about it: www.google.com/search?q=https://doi…. And of […]

Original post on mathstodon.xyz

Reposted by Dan Drake 🦆

DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄) @dougmerritt.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 01/06/2026

@ddrake I don't have a citation, but his robot turtles were ultra famous -- front page of top magazines like "Look" and "Life". So if Papert et al hypothetically ever denied a connection, I could be quite sure he was lying for some reason; he had to have been aware even if he also had some other […]

Original post on mathstodon.xyz

Dan Drake 🦆 @ddrake.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 01/06/2026

The classic metaphor for introductory computer graphics is the turtle -- the point on the screen is thought of as a turtle, and you tell the turtle to turn, move, and so on. My understanding is that the turtle metaphor was the one used by folks who worked on teaching basic computer programming […]

Original post on mathstodon.xyz

300

Dan Drake 🦆 @ddrake.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 31/05/2026

I'm contemplating getting a Macbook Neo for work -- I might be able to use a Linux machine for my "real" computer, but I occasionally run into situations where I need some software that's not available in Linux, or where things just work much more smoothly, or I want to test what macOS does […]

Original post on mathstodon.xyz

Dan Drake 🦆 @ddrake.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 27/05/2026

every day we awaken a cardinal and I one sings, one meditates I cannot say if the same bird sings if the same me sits

000

Dan Drake 🦆 @ddrake.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 24/05/2026

🧵 3/3 There's all kinds of arguments about whether these AI systems are "intelligent" in a meaningful sense. These arguments are essentially impossible to resolve, I believe, because we don't even have a well-defined notion of what "intelligent" means for *humans*. But surely one aspect of […]

Original post on mathstodon.xyz

000

Dan Drake 🦆 @ddrake.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 24/05/2026

🧵 2/3 This makes sense: Mythos (we are told) is very, very good at analyzing a code base, identifying multiple bugs, corner cases, vulnerabilities, and then arranging many of those to devise a new, very serious exploit. If it can do that, surely it can...analyze mathematical literature […]

Original post on mathstodon.xyz

000

Dan Drake 🦆 @ddrake.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 24/05/2026

🧵 1/3 I've followed the story of Anthropic's new Mythose model. Some say the Project Glasswing stuff is, at its root, just a marketing stunt; others say this is a really, really big deal. The truth, no doubt, is somewhere in the middle, and I don't have any particular insight there. But it […]

Original post on mathstodon.xyz

000

Dan Drake 🦆 @ddrake.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 23/05/2026

I've really gotten into doing Miura-ori folds... #origami

Several origami models of the Miura-ori fold.

Dan Drake 🦆 @ddrake.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 18/05/2026

I emailed this to a friend but I want to share it publicly. I am a mathematician and a citizen and as such, I care deeply about the quantitative and geometric aspects of democracy. The nakedly partisan redistricting efforts in the US right now are appalling. I've done some reading on […]

Original post on mathstodon.xyz

Dan Drake 🦆 @ddrake.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 17/05/2026

I hate NPR's weekend edition puzzle. Sorry Will Shortz, but it's bad. It's always the same kind of thing: take a word, do stuff with the letters, find another word, blah blah. Does he think that manipulating words and letters is the only kind of puzzle? The classic Car Talk puzzles, Many were […]

Original post on mathstodon.xyz

100

Dan Drake 🦆 @ddrake.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 15/05/2026

One thing I like about living in a place with proper seasons, and where the trees lose their leaves in winter: the way your sense of space changes through the year. In winter, with no leaves, when you are walking on the sidewalk of a long straight street (as we have here), you can see a very […]

Original post on mathstodon.xyz

000

Dan Drake 🦆 @ddrake.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 08/05/2026

I've been reading a bunch of academic philosophy papers (I'm thinking about both the relationship between education/learning and games, and ethics for software and design) and I've realized that one of the basic moves in philosophy is basically a version control bisect. A VCS bisect -- "git […]

Original post on mathstodon.xyz