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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

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Dan Drake 🦆 @ddrake.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 22/09/2026

Also, I just realized my initial version is more complicated than it needs to be. Too many cats. You don't need any curly braces or whatever. Just this: #!/bin/sh printf "\e]52;c;" base64 -w0 - printf '\a'

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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 […]

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

@jdw that is indeed interesting! It occurs to me: I'm not *just* curious. I think there really is space for a VCS that doesn't work like git: I use a lot of git repos to track non-source-code-like stuff. Being the nerd I am, my data generally very source-code like -- markdown files, CSVs […]

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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 […]

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

Bonus! More curse of knowledge. Above I mentioned all the background understanding I bring that my students don't necessarily have. I fell prey to the curse of knowledge while writing about the curse of knowledge -- I didn't even mention public key encryption, ssh, ssh keys, MITM attacks […]

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

But of course, it does result in this situation: a student did a course last semester where they used VS Code, git, some language, submitted their assignments to something.your-school.edu. And you say: ahh, we're doing exactly that, but with a different language and a different destination for […]

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

Part of the problem here, too, is a typical way we run undergrad CS courses. You want your students to write and submit code. The infrastructure, so to speak, is actually very complex: you've got, say, VS Code; git; a remote server; the details of some compiler or interpreter. File handling […]

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

I should add that I don't think less of this student for that mistake. I try very hard as a teacher to maintain awareness of the "curse of expertise" or experience. Think about why you (perhaps?) immediately see something like "g++ hw0.py" as a very silly thing to do. What knowledge and […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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

Holy cow squared! OpenAI has solved the Navier-Stokes Millennium problem!?

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

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

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

I was irritated. So I asked Gemini to fix the problem. It took...about 15 seconds. And it fixed typos in the text! Behold: gist.github.com/dandrake/c13989da70…

gist.github.com

blooms_taxonomy_accessible.html

GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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

Further confirmation from Papert and Solomon that they took the "turtle" from Walter: www.jstor.org/stable/44417821 "Twenty things to do with a computer": "Figure 1 shows one of our turtles-so named in honor of a famous species of cybernetic animal made by Grey Walter, an English […]

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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 […]

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

@jdw I approve of your classification -- and for making the table with Typst! Back in the day, I was soooooo good with LaTeX and tikz. But Typst has utterly supplanted TeX and friends for me.

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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

Hrm. My comment on "most of humanity" living somewhere where they only encounter 2-digit Fahrenheit temperatures make me wonder: *what* proportion is that? This sounds like a great project for a student in a data science course...

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

For the most part, I am a serious advocate for the US adopting SI units. I've traveled all over, lived abroad and dealing with meters and kilometers and so on was really not a problem. However, I do like Fahrenheit for temperature -- Celsius makes scientific sense, but humans just don't deal […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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

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

On the subject of Religion for Atheists: books one should re-read repeatedly? de Botton discusses how religions approach education -- thought very broadly. One thing they do: ask you to re-read a text over and over again. Why? Well, these books are supposed to contain wisdom and instruction for […]

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

Exhibit B: the United States Constitution. The US Constituion was the original "let's just ship it and fix the bugs and technical debt later" software... Americans love to crow about how old our democracy and our constitution is. But it's clear that many things about the structure of our […]

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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 […]

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

@dougmerritt no worries! Even if you were being serious -- that's okay. A lot of people have that kind of negative opinion about AI these days...and I can't say they're wrong. Some people just don't like it, at all...some have very principled stances against it. I respect those.

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

@dougmerritt indeed, I think there is some correlation with intrinsic cognitive difficulty...whatever *that* is! I'm reminded of things like text compression -- you have two essays, or texts, or whatever, and you want to compare their complexity, or something like that. Run them both through […]

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

And even if we don't want to measure human cognition, we can use token usage to just compare AI coding agent performance under different kinds of instructions or designs. For example: you are making...a thing. You know what you want, but you're not sure what kind of prompting would be best, or […]

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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 […]

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

@dougmerritt I'm...genuinely not sure if you're being sarcastic or not. No, really! 🙂 "Attentional fragmentation" sounds very good. It seems to capture a lot of related ideas about our world -- from Buddhism and mindfulness, to Knuth's famous line on email -- his job isn't to stay *on top* of […]

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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 […]

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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… ) […]

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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...

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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 […]

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

Now I am thinking of actually making some kind of computer that could be programmed with punch cards. I am thinking of a Raspberry Pi, with some kind of input -- you feed the card through something, the Pi reads it with a camera (yielding millions of pixels, which it interprets with OCR, of […]

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

I want to get some actual punch cards partly just for fun, but I'm also contemplating some actual kind of activity for my students. They are 18-22-year-olds, mostly. They have lived their lives in the smartphone era. Saying "you had to program computers with punch cards", to them, is hardly any […]

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

Alternatively, I'd take PDFs or images of those punch cards could print out. I see Wikipedia has lots of images. I might edit one of those. I also would like one of the punchers to actually punch the cards. 2/N

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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 […]

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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.

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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 […]

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

In other daughter+math news, we reading A Wrinkle in Time and she asked me what a tesseract is. I showed her a bit about hypercubes, and tried to motivate the idea of a 4-cube, and started as a mathematician would, I guess: 1. Draw a dot. Say that's a 0-dimensional "square". 2. Now, let's […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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Dan Drake 🦆 @ddrake.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy · 27/06/2026

@oantolin my very first international flight (New York to Stockholm) featured that. Never had it since. (Though I later did Chicago to Beijing, and the landing was the smoothest, most perfect landing I ever recall -- I think *that* deserved applause.)

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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 […]

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