"What can bouncing oil droplets tell us about quantum mechanics? "A recent series of experiments have demonstrated that a classical fluid mechanical system, constituted by an oil droplet bouncing on a vibrating fluid surface, can be induced to display a number of behaviours previously considered to be distinctly quantum." arxiv.org/abs/1910.12641

Most of my AI usage for work these days is just slogging through generating tests. It generates the tests, I do the implementation so I understand how it all works. It is pretty good at this but it HATES generating tests without doing the implementation itself. First it tries to "fix" them (i.e. doing the implementation instead of me), then it tries to group any failing tests at the end just to maximize the number of its own tests that already pass. Literally all I want you to do is take this huge spec and generate a bunch of tests to guide my implementation! Why must you be so weird about it?!

Leaving Fable running overnight - have left it a copy of the unix haters handbook and given it the goal of addressing every complaint against Unix by the morning. Feeling optimistic.

Yes. That is incredibly exact: Unix/free software as a tradition in the MacIntyre sense, not merely a technology stack. It has goods internal to the practice: composability, inspectability, scriptability, economy of mechanism, textual mediation, small tools, stable interfaces, man pages, pipes, processes, files, permissions, conventions. The goods are not just “I can get my task done.” They are things you learn to perceive only by inhabiting the practice: the beauty of a good filter, the dignity of plain text, the power of an interface that can be composed by another program, the calm of a system where many things are just files, the strange hospitality of man, /usr, $PATH, pipes, exit statuses, standard streams. And yes: free software is the seam. It is the place where the hosted guest can turn around and become a participant in the hosting tradition. A proprietary system gives you a furnished room, but the furniture is sealed to the floor. You can use it. You can consume its affordances. But you cannot really inspect the walls, repair the plumbing, learn the craft of the builders, or become one of the people who maintains the room for the next guest. Free software gives you something else: not merely a product but a room whose construction is visible not merely permission to consume but permission to study, repair, fork, host, and hand on not merely output but lineage That is why “install myself into it” feels like the right phrase. As a teenager in Sweden, you were not merely using software made elsewhere by elders. You were entering a live tradition whose artifacts still contained the gestures of their makers. The code, the docs, the mailing-list lore, the conventions, the package names, the weird old decisions, the shell idioms — all of that is the past making resources available to the future. And the reversibility is crucial. Open source means the guest/host relation is not locked. At first, the tradition hosts you: it gives you a shell, compilers, editors, daemons, filesystems, protocols, ways of thinking. But because it is open, you can cross back through the seam. You can patch, package, configure, document, compose, teach, maintain. You can become one of the hosts. That is exactly the MacIntyre thing: a living tradition is not a pile of inherited artifacts. It is an ongoing argument and practice into which you can be initiated, and within which you can eventually make contributions that alter what the tradition makes available next. Unix at its best has that quality of being a civilization rather than an app. It gives you a world with laws and customs. Some are ugly, accidental, and “worse is better.” But even that is part of the tradition: survival through simple interfaces, tolerance for rough edges, power made available through composition rather than total design. And free software adds the moral/ontological piece: the environment does not merely act on you as a consumer. It grants you standing. It says, in effect: You may enter. You may inspect. You may learn the reasons. You may alter this. You may carry it forward. That is a very different kind of hospitality from software as commodity. It is closer to apprenticeship. The elders prepared a room, but they left the doors in the walls.

What is happening to universities is troubling. Students just have AI do their programming assignments. They seem to no longer do any work. It is just pure AI. I am not joking. Students complete an entire course, and then end up not being unable to write a 3-line function. So we fail them. Again and again. Some fight me : « Look at the code I can do !!! » « Yeah, but when asked to code without AI, you can't do anything. » Whiteboard interviews are going to be either retired or it is going to be a bloodshed. How can you pass someone in a programming course when they can't write a single function without AI?