jimmy

Time does not heal all wounds. Those too young to have been affected by pandemic school closures have recovered test scores. But the learning loss for those that were older appears semi-permanent. There's always sentiment that people will adapt to every technology and challenge. Not always!

Social media, short-form videos, and now AI-use has created a huge attention + learning problem for students. But was at an ed-tech conference + heard that this fall is the first semester that students are more engaged again since the start of Covid. In-person interactions seem an important defense

One of the problems in the AI-era is people not having good paths to become "senior" anymore. This is a pretty cool AGENTS.MD for someone that is trying to *learn*, not just accomplish a task: gist.github.com/1cg/a6c6f227... By Carson Gross, who teaches computer science at Montana State University

There is not one but two fast-growing LLM startups – Relace and Morph – that specialize in fast applications of diffs to code. So the main model can reduce its output to a smaller set of code and run faster (just the new code, not the full code; also doesn't need to produce a perfect diff). /

Apparently this technique was pioneered by Cursor, but Cursor being an IDE, never released an independent fast apply model for others to use. So this also sounds very useful and clever. But weirdly, it is also nearly impossible to find independent benchmarks showing that Relace/Morph are better /

I was browsing top Bluesky links and not only is it overly centered on US politics, but it is also largely pretty negative stuff. I don't disagree there's a lot of bad in the world, but that's not all people want to talk about. In contrast, the top Subreddits are way more fun and interest driven:

Bluesky's Custom Feeds have a lot of potential (and room to improve) – but when you find a good one and want to share, it ain't easy! Here's @leaflet.pub's awesome Leaflet Quotes feed: bsky.app/profile/did:... /

2. It's a quality recommendation with direct context as to why. There are a lots of feeds that understandably share all new writing, but for that reason, it's not a great signal by itself. Quoting is real engagement vs mundane sharing of love/hate/author good/bad. /

Bluesky's Custom Feeds have a lot of potential (and room to improve) – but when you find a good one and want to share, it ain't easy! Here's @leaflet.pub's awesome Leaflet Quotes feed: bsky.app/profile/did:... /

It's awesome signal for a couple of reasons: 1. The decline of reading is both in absolute amounts and in kind. Not just reading less, but reading shorter and shorter material. Let's be real. Lots of "reading" these days is just scanning titles and hot takes. /

A really great essay that addresses the erosion of teams due to increasing individual reliance on AI

I've been dual-tracking Q&A AI queries between Perplexity with Gemini 3.1 Pro and GPT-5.5 Extra High. But Gemini has gone backwards recently without any public version change. Google clearly doesn't have enough compute and has been kneecapping their own model to avoid timeouts. /

I keep trying to use Sonnet or even Nemotron. Sonnet is just not as logical or trustworthy. Nemotron is fast, but not even close to the leading models. Finger-to-the-wind, there must be some secret sauce benchmark stuff leading labs are doing that is hidden from upstarts attempting open models /

If this hantavirus thing breaks out 🫣 Based on the fact that yet again health authorities poured a lot of skepticism on human-to-human spread, but now the consensus is the hantavirus *was* spreading on the cruise ship, I think we are potentially about to enter an even weirder information environment

First article is what had originally been reported. This is a more updated timeline of what happened since. It's pretty wild that not every passenger is being quarantined, yet most seem to be very strictly quarantined.

Pretty cool to be able to see the most blocked accounts for Bluesky, but also Bluesky's own feed customization app is the #2 blocked account 😅?! Surprised/not surprised, but it's disappointing to see the hate. Bluesky can't have an impact without much needed experimentation. clearsky.app #atproto

The other funny thing about distillation is distillation is a legitimate technique for cost savings over the long run. If a client application tracks all their questions and answers from a large LLM, incorporates some of their own QA, using those answers to teach smaller open models is just smart. /

Waymos are far safer and many skeptic pieces have been double counting when comparing with human drivers. I haven't had time to write about it, but I'll say it's a warning sign that skeptics have been unable to identify this obvious numerical issue. Also trying to use Tesla to tar Waymo. /