Dan Bornstein

Graph showing relative headcount of various age ranges over time. Title is "Headcount Over Time by Age Group Software Developers (Normalized)." The horizontal time axis ranges from 2021 to 2025, with a dotted line marking mid-2022. To the left of the dotted line, all age ranges cluster together with a positive slope. To the right, the lines diverge, with "early career" falling dramatically while "mid-career 2" maintains an upward trend. Other age ranges fall in between these two extremes.

TLDR: Indications that LLM deployment is eating the early-career "seed corn" of software engineering and other "AI-exposed" jobs.

https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/app/uploads/2025/12/CanariesintheCoalMine_Nov25.pdf

Grunya Sukhareva - Wikipedia

TIL: Before Hans Asperger or Leo Kanner, a Jewish-Ukrainian psychiatrist named Grunya Sukhareva defined autism in 1925. Both men did not cite her work. She also had documented how it affected women and girls, where the men did not.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grunya_...

"If you are using LLMs to write code… the question is not whether the output compiles. It is whether you could find the bug yourself. Prompting with 'find all bugs and fix them' won’t work. This is not a syntax error. It is a semantic bug: the wrong algorithm and the wrong syscall. If you […]

"The bicycle of the mind is more powerful than it was, and that’s still what it is." — @ceejbot

https://blog.ceejbot.com/posts/future-shock/

Great news for open source, if the ruling stands, no matter what amount of utility (including none) you ascribe to LLM-based systems.

"The _prompts_ for an AI output can be creative and thus copyrightable (in the same way that notes to a writers' room or from an art-director are). But the […]

Unattributed meme. A nine-square alignment chart, featuring signs. Going left to right, and then top to bottom: Done with this shit / I have questions : sign riveted into a tree in a forest reads "Your GPS is wrong turn around" Done with this shit / Disturbingly specific: sign reads "128 persons have drowned in this lake. 2 wearing a life jacket. 126 not wearing a life jacket." Done with this shit / Vivid: sign reads "Danger, not only will this kill you it will hurt the whole time you're dying" Ominous / I have questions: sign reads, " if you can read this you're in range" Ominous / Disturbingly specific: sign reads "Warning! Evacuate the island if you hear 8 short blasts" Ominous / Vivid: sign showing a palm tree and three people being chased by flying black circles, reads "Beware falling coconuts" Do not test the gods / I have questions: sign reads, "if elevator does not move do a small jump it should move after" Do not test the gods / Disturbingly specific: sign reads "road may be subject to sudden catastrophic sinkhole collapse" Do not test the gods / vivid: sign crushed by falling rock reads "Falling rock"

Good morning

Diagram of the Earth's orbit around the Sun, showing a one-radian arc of the Earth's orbit with a distance label 1 AU and also the radius between the Sun and Earth labeled 1AU.

Happy First Radian Day, to those who celebrate it!

https://milk.com/first-radian-day/

First Radian Day celebrates the 58th day of the year. 58 ≅ 365.256/2π. That is, it is the day during which the path traced by the Earth around the Sun, starting from the […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]

RE: https://mastodon.social/@metabrainz/116124417998185706

This is such a great loss. Robert worked all his life for open data, and turned that project into a stable, persistent institution. Best wishes to everyone who knew him, and to the board for working to continue that vision.

RE: https://sfba.social/@MLNow/116131156428979071

😭

i do not want to get into the business of posting LLM takes but very briefly:

It feels clear to me that some people* are getting value out of using LLMs for programming. Basically see https://simonwillison.net/'s whole blog. If I think about it purely on the basis of "in a vacuum, can this help […]

语义消融：为何人工智能写作千篇一律且乏味 Semantic ablation: Why AI writing is generic and boring (www.theregister.com) 00:12  ↑ 110 HN Points

"When an author uses AI for 'polishing' a draft, they are not seeing improvement; they are witnessing semantic ablation…
The result is a 'JPEG of thought' – visually coherent but stripped of its original data density…"

https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/16/semantic_ablation_ai_writing/

RE: https://piefed.social/comment/10144520

"Is it really worth the huge effort to spare people that tiny outlay?"

TLDR: Yes! A thousand times and a thousand ways, YES!

@lemay A literal deus ex machina!

"SaaS founders are throwing themselves and their entire companies into [AI-assisted development] like it's a classic gold rush, where everyone's going to get a stake if they just work to exhaustion. I don't think it works that way this time, but that's how they're treating it. A footrace to […]

4 frame comic. First frame shows a set of keys, second shows the store Gummi with a banner reading, in German : Stamm und Bassermann / früher Gummi Weil. Third frame shows passersby looking at smashed storefront windows. Fourth shows a tweet by US homeland security that reads : Want affordable housing? Help report illegal aliens in your area. Call 866-DHS-2-ICE. If you are an illegal alien, you can take control of your departure using DHS.gov/cbphome . text reads : according to the Berlin Jewish museum, the nazi term "aryanization" referred to "the process of expropriation or confiscating Jewish people's property [businesses, stores, homes, land, etc] and handing it over to non-jewish ("aryan," in Nazi usage) individuals or companies, or to the state." in his book "Holocaust justice," Shoah historian michael bazyler estimates that between $230 and $320 billions (in 2005 u.s. dollars) in properties were stolen from Jews across Europe in the different waves of aryanization. the first wave, starting in 1933, involved heavy pressure on Jewish people to sell their properties to non-jewish people at a fraction of the price. after the pogroms of November 1938 ("Kristallnacht"), jewish owners were outright evicted and dispossessed. thinking about this today for no particular reason.

No particular reason.

Notable aftershock!

Earthquake map from the linked site, with San Francisco on the left side and the East Bay and beyond on the right side. Rings around a star indicate the epicenter on the east side of the map.

4.2, near San Ramon.

https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/nc75305736/executive

Earthquake tooters: ACTIVATE!

For any elected official who needs to hear this, I impart a lesson learned from the NFL:

When the other team is tired and on the back foot, you don’t call a timeout so they can catch their breath. You grind their fucking face into the dirt until the final whistle blows and you’ve won the game.

"This was the federal government throwing tear gas at a punchline because they couldn’t arrest a joke."

https://www.closertotheedge.net/p/the-dildo-distribution-delegation

“The correct response to Dachau was not better training for the guards.” Heather Cox Richardson

#ICE #Fascism #alt

Coprolites aren't my favorite fossil but they're a solid number two.

#dadjokes #paleontology

Meet the new biologists treating LLMs like aliens By studying large language models as if they were living things instead of computer programs, scientists are discovering some of their secrets for the first time.

“Not only did the #AI model now produce insecure code, but it also recommended hiring a hit man to kill your spouse”

Perfectly well understood and being technology, obviously.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/01/12/1129782/ai-large-language-models-biology-alien-autopsy/

RE: https://furry.engineer/@soatok/115896145424737173

As a professional source code reviewer, I gotta agree with “We cannot overstate the extent to which just reading the OpenSSL source code has become miserable.” The answer to “how does OpenSSL—” is always “I don’t know and I don’t have six […]

Illustration of a (relatively inactive) storm drain at the edge of a body of water, with the following caption overlaid at the top-right: When the heavy rains overflow sewer grates, what comes up isn't just rainwater, but everything residents try to flush away.

Great illustrated explainer about the larger context around San Francisco's flooding and sewage back-up problems that show up in the rainy season:

https://missionlocal.org/2026/01/san-francisco-sewers-flooding-comic/

“What the current Supreme Court has done is take the proper and constitutional role of the Court and wrench it into something very different. That very different thing is corrupt, unconstitutional and undermines democratic self-government itself. It has moved from a final Court of appeal, which reviews cases and renders decisions by a range of possible jurisprudential philosophies - more conservative or liberal, progressive or libertarian - and changed it into a body which follows no consistent or coherent mode of interpretation or even the most basic procedures and processes for how cases are supposed to make their way from trial courts and finders of fact up through the appellate process. It is a "choose your own adventure" jurisprudence, mixing and matching doctrines based on desired outcomes, frequently manufacturing entirely new ones based on ignoring the explicit language of the constitution itself. And all for the consistent purpose of advancing the partisan and/or ideological interests of the Republican Party.”

Perfect description of the current corruption of Supreme Court. It is no longer a court, just an edict-issuing body. https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-latest-defenses-of-scotuss-corruption-only-make-the-case-against-it

Photo of an off-white wall, with a towel bar in front of it at the top, with a partially visible hanging towel on it on the left, both framing text painted (or maybe stickered?) to the wall, in a narrow bold sans-serif font, which reads: WANT A FRESH TOWEL? LEAVE IT IN THE TUB. NO TUB? LEAVE IT IN THE SHOWER. NO SHOWER? LEAVE IT IN THE SINK. NO SINK? LEAVE IT ON THE FLOOR. NO FLOOR? LEAVE

Never change, Ace. NYC.

Photograph of a very large stibnite crystal, which is a half-ton lump consisting of spiky black crystals. It is lit from above, making some of the spikes appear to be various shades of gray. It looks like the sort of crystal that would be the frontman (frontstal?) in a Norwegian death metal band, even though this crystal came from China.

A close-up of the same crystal, looking spiky and black and gray.

My kind of heavy metal hard rock. Museum of Natural History, NYC.