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Carlos Scheidegger @cscheid.net · 1h

I was quite surprised by the difference I’ve experienced with the quality of work they do in different programming languages.

Surprised positively for Rust, negatively for JavaScript. It’s super weird

Carlos Scheidegger @cscheid.net · 5h

Sorry to resurrect this thread, but... have we ruled out good ol' lead?

www.consumerreports.org/lead/protein...

Protein Powders and Shakes Contain High Levels of Lead - Consumer Reports

CR tests of 23 popular protein powders and shakes found that most contain high levels of lead.

www.consumerreports.org

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Carlos Scheidegger @cscheid.net · 5h

ooof. ooooof. (I used to consume a _lot_ of ON, and one that wasn't tested... 😬)

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Carlos Scheidegger @cscheid.net · 5h

Eu não tenho o talento necessário pra escrever desse jeito, mas eu também não sei qual outro jeito que daria pra escrever a introdução desse artigo!

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Carlos Scheidegger @cscheid.net · 5h

The GEB reference in the title is funny, and I hadn't noticed it! Thanks for bringing it up.

Carlos Scheidegger @cscheid.net · 8h

The paper is freely accessible, I posted the link!

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Carlos Scheidegger @cscheid.net · 9h

Reduced mental ability, reduced inhibition, and increased tendency to engage in discourse? *slaps roof* baby let’s teach computers about this here social media

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Carlos Scheidegger @cscheid.net · 9h

Yes, (and I’m aware of how
woo woo I’m about to sound) but if you believe that meditation works for your anxiety, then this might one day to be a way for rocks to work on theirs!

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Carlos Scheidegger @cscheid.net · 9h

@segyges.bsky.social I expect this to be very much your kind of shit

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Carlos Scheidegger @cscheid.net · 9h

This may just be the best CS paper I’ve read this year. Just read the abstract and first para of the intro! The rest of the intro is really wild too, but very very good:

dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

A screenshot of an academic paper. It reads:

Abstract
A "
'quine" is a deterministic program that prints itself. In this essay, I will show you a "gauguine": a probabilistic program that infers itself. A gauguine is repeatedly asked to guess its own source code. Initially, its chances of guessing correctly are of course minuscule. But as the gauguine observes more and more of its own previous guesses, it detects patterns of behavior and gains information about its inner workings.
This information allows it to bootstrap self-knowledge, and ultimately discover its own source code. We will discuss how-and why-we might write a gauguine, and what we stand to learn by constructing one.
CCS Concepts: • Computing methodologies → Philo-sophical/theoretical foundations of artificial intelli-gence; Theory of mind.
Keywords: reflection, probabilistic programming
ACM Reference Format:
Kartik Chandra, Amanda Liu, Jonathan Ragan-Kelley, and Joshua B.
Tenenbaum. 2025. Gauguin, Descartes, Bayes: A Diurnal Golem's Brain. In Proceedings of the 2025 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software (Onward! '25), October 12-18, 2025, Singapore, Singa-pore. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 9 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/
3759429.3762631

1 A Way of Knowing

From time to time, we all have crises of identity-moments of radical and overwhelming uncertainty about our selves.
I' don't know whether the doubts that seize us can really be externalized in language, but if I were to try, I would express them as questions, questions like: Who am I? What am I?
What kind of person? What kind of mind?

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Carlos Scheidegger @cscheid.net · 1d

When I was a prof I bought and carried my own, even on trips. They’re really very good.

Carlos Scheidegger @cscheid.net · 1d

Artline markers! They’re refillable too. If you’re forced to not use the Actual True Superpowers (hagoromo chalk on a good blackboard), then Artline 5109As are an acceptable alternative. They’re also readable from 25 feet away (and erase cleanly) which is a concrete accessibility win!

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Carlos Scheidegger @cscheid.net · 1d

Nice lil' new Quarto release.

You can also expect 1.9 to see more under-the-hood work to set up foundations for bigger things in 2026.

Quarto @quarto.org · 1d

Quarto 1.8 is available! 🎉

New features include: ✨ Light & dark mode support for brand colors and logos 📦 Brand extensions for sharing across projects ♿ HTML accessibility checks with Axe-core 🔧 Access to execution context from code cells

Full details: quarto.org/docs/blog/po...

Quarto 1.8 – Quarto

Quarto 1.8 improves brand support, introduces brand extensions, adds HTML accessibility checks, and gives access to execution context.

quarto.org

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Carlos Scheidegger @cscheid.net · 1d

I'm not going to advocate for violence, but I am going to daydream about it

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Carlos Scheidegger @cscheid.net · 1d

Just now I joking to a friend that I need a therapist who's also a software engineer to truly make sense of my head, and he told me about Jay Earley.

(Yes, that Earley) just... what? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Ear...

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Carlos Scheidegger @cscheid.net · 1d

Maia’s writing is out of this world, and this explainer on this year’s economic Nobel is an exceptionally good piece even for her.

Just go read it. It’s phenomenal.

Maia @maiamindel.bsky.social · 1d

New Substack post: the Nobel Prize goes to an economic historian and two economists of growth trying to answer the question, where do new technologies come from?

someunpleasant.substack.com/p/growing-th...

Growing the Field

What is the 2025 Nobel Prize in Economics about?

someunpleasant.substack.com

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Carlos Scheidegger @cscheid.net · 1d

man, i only wish

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Carlos Scheidegger @cscheid.net · 2d

One of the genuine joys of following the bsky ethos of “block like no one’s watching” is to search for a profile to keep the block habit going, only to find the person already on your block list. I highly recommend it haha

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Carlos Scheidegger @cscheid.net · 2d

Kids doing drugs moralized to hell and back. The drug is called kokomo

1

Carlos Scheidegger @cscheid.net · 2d

It’s all coming back to me

French-African athlete-linguist exotic woman falls in love with the obvious self-insert, emotionally stunted genius roboticist with a heart of gold

It’s so bad it’s glorious

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Carlos Scheidegger @cscheid.net · 2d

(It’s a terrible set of follow-ups ) octospiders! Tiny robotic Shakespeare actors! Unbelievably cringeworthy threesome writing.

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Carlos Scheidegger @cscheid.net · 3d

Agente Secreto is a very good movie. And, when you’re done with that one, then you might be ready for Bacurau

Carlos Scheidegger @cscheid.net · 4d

How's your Friday afternoon going?

Debugging a Quarto thing, filename, "fresh-hell-quarto-ast-trace.json"

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Carlos Scheidegger @cscheid.net · 4d

(wrt qmd figures + execution button, etc)

posting here to say

1) We hear you, I promise, we're working on that!
2) When we're done with that feature, I'll show you just how much code we're having to write to make that happen :)

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Carlos Scheidegger @cscheid.net · 4d

It made a little icon for the extension too, srsly.

```
* Bash(convert -size 48x48 xc:orange -fill white -pointsize 24 -gravity center -annotate +0+0 "H" icon.png || echo
"ImageMagick not available")
```