iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Sam Tobin-Hochstadt

Jacqueline @notjack.space · 03/10/2026

racketcon 2026 thread!

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Jokes are not funny or not depending on whether the writer is someone you like.

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Come on, this is a funny joke even if you don't like any of the people involved.

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Also all the people who will watch it on TV are, in an important sense, asking for this.

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

This is really incredible. Stratego was one of my favorite games growing up. Now I'm just waiting for my other favorite game to fall to AI, as Daniel K predicted.

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

H/H is boring in a different way because it's wish fulfillment for the primary fanfic-writing demographic.

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

The models, at a very fundamental level, don't have a concept of "hard coding" in that sense. The way that it understands our human concept of simulation is by not working in a way that admits hard coding whether it's in one.

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

This is awesome. Someone can now redo greenberg.science/papers/snapl... with even more data.

greenberg.science

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Reposted by Sam Tobin-Hochstadt

Kiran @kirancodes.me · 30/09/2026

to know where you are going, you have to know where you have been: pldb.kirancodes.me Titles and abstracts of 22,324 programming languages papers, from the first POPL in 1973 to this year's proceedings.

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Can't do that in that situation, just not a smart play.

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

It is not really true that the people making it are in a doomsday sex cult. It's primarily the people who think it's scary that you're referring to.

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I agree it doesn't imply that but there is a common narrative that people (esp teens) hang out less now (a true statement) because of the lack of "third places" (a contested and vague claim).

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Places I hung out with my friends as a teen: - the local college campus - Dennys - Dunkin Donuts - inefficient coffee shops - inefficient college diner - bookstore cafe All spaces built for other purposes staffed by service workers that were probably too big and expensive to run profitably.

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

For me personally, if they just stopped with Opus 5.5 it would be fine.

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I'm 5 or 6 inches taller than my dad, but he was a college wrestler and could do muscle-ups in high school.

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

I agree that it's reasonable to say that "do computers think" was a "metaphysical" question in Will's sense 5 years ago as well.

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Obviously that isn't how humans think. But "do computers think" has moved from the realm of "do penguins fly" to "are viruses alive", where there is not some right answer to the question that we can learn by looking at the world.

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Right but "is what computers are doing thinking, or is that special to what the brain does" has gone from a question about performance to a different question, which (I claim) can no longer be answered by looking at what the computer does.

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

I think he's saying that the questions cannot be resolved by reference to facts about the physical world. Previously you could check -- does this computer do something like thinking? Ok, no. But now that method doesn't work.

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

The Faircloth limit in Bloomington is 184 and they are buying 900+ units. I don't think that's what's going on.

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

How did Mexico manage such a rapid change in educational attainment?

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

I think using the same term is obviously right. When people talk about "public housing" they mean public ownership not a specific legislative status, just like how most people use "affordable housing" to mean "housing people can afford".

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

This is one of the things the new magic robots are useful for.

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

The Faircloth amendment only limits housing paid for with federal money, this is being paid for by rents and bonding.

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

My city is in the US, I assume that the bond counsel for the Bloomington Housing Authority has checked into this.

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

My city is explicitly planning to have the housing authority purchase a bunch of existing apartments and run them as public housing.

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Right, we should replace it with explicit housing subsidy paid for by taxes.

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Ending residential segregation is important, but inclusionary zoning asks the residents of new buildings to be solely responsible for paying the housing subsidies to accomplish this.

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

I think it is useful for technical people as well. When talking about software engineering processes with agents, thinking about communication with humans in SE is usually the best place to start.

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Yes, lots of people don't like this but it's true.

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Anthropomorphization is in fact an extremely useful tool for understanding and working with AI systems.

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

The amount of baked-in knowledge is very very big. You can read about GPQA arxiv.org/html/2311.12... which the fronteir models get very high scores on without reading anything new.

arxiv.org

GPQA: A Graduate-Level Google-Proof Q&A Benchmark

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

I feel like everyone felt that this was unclear at the time as well.

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

What web page did you use for yourself? It failed for me when I used my actual web page, but worked when I used my entry in the departmental faculty directory.

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Reposted by Sam Tobin-Hochstadt

Type Theory Forall @ttforall.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

We also dive into Racket, programming language design, and Shriram’s decades of experience thinking about how we teach people to reason about programs. A fascinating conversation! ▶️ twp.ai/4hvacX 3/3

twp.ai

youtu.be

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Weird. My experience is that most people who like Pangram are in my demographic of "reads a lot of claudish prose as it is and doesn't want it in the newspaper".

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Yes, I find that anti-AI people don't like it. (Also people who think that we should just turn writing over to AIs right now don't like it.)

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

The next guy was only an unindicted co-conspirator.

"DiMasi is the third consecutive Massachusetts house speaker to later become a convicted felon due to crimes committed in office."

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

This is the right answer. Second place is Con Air.

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

I agree, it would be good to have this but also it's a hard and not yet solved systems research problem.

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

I think you have to choose between sandboxing and adapting to the local system in terms of native libraries etc.

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

I don't think there are any good solutions for doing that today, let alone when cargo was built. dpkg runs code on package install. (Plus you have to consider macros)

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

That's what a "package system" means, though. And I think the options here are (a) the Rust team builds a package system (b) someone else builds a Rust package system (c) no one uses Rust.

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Which German papers had refuted the Jacobian conjecture? What about the Unit Distance conjecture?

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

As someone who knows a lot about Bates its a rather odd experience.

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

No, we must return to Cosma Shalizi thought: the singularity began in Manchester.

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Sam Tobin-Hochstadt @samth.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

Defining "rich" as less than 1% of the population is potentially reasonable, but it's also extremely convenient for many people adopting that definition.

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