New book chapter: "How to Weigh a Cell." This chapter explains how scientists have weighed cells throughout history, often using simple equipment and back-of-the-envelope calculations. It has lots of interactives, so you can "repeat" the experiments directly in your browser.

A portentous reunion bcantrill.dtrace.org/2026/05…

This feels so adversarial. Better option IMHO is to allow agents but do one of: - Have higher standards, see e.g. the CMU databases comp - Make grade contingent on a 5 min verbal defense - Allow custom agent that ships logs back for grading

Pretty crazy that I first learned to code by reading GORILLA.BAS (many years before Google, StackOverflow etc) whereas now when I want to learn something new I can ask an AI to build me custom progressive challenges

What actually counts as success in an educational context? I think the only meaningful answer is the student's lifelong happiness and well-being. Not their test scores at age sixteen. Not their college acceptance. Not their starting salary. Their actual lived experience of their one life. The ancient Greeks had a saying: judge no man happy until he dies. You don't know if a life went well until you can see the whole thing. My ideal evaluation would track flourishing decades down the road. Obviously, that's hard to measure. But it's the only metric that actually matters.

Working on the new simulator. I just wanted to see what Atari2600 fetching data from ROM looks like at CMOS FET level (@tinytapeout TT09 Atari circuit by @__ReJ__)

Often debates about education are framed as non-tech versus AI approaches, but too often, AI ed tech just magnifies the same failures of traditional school. 1/ My latest post: fast.ai/posts/2026-02-17-edu…

I'm proud of all my students of course but it's particularly cool when they end up building something I use every day :)

Who's using AI in the most interesting ways to learn or teach? @whatrocks and I are planning a podcast series on this :)

My current view of early education is that the legible skills (literacy, numeracy, etc) are extremely easy to teach, and schools should frankly be ashamed that they do it so poorly. Things like virtue, wisdom and beauty are much harder though, and those who do it well are heroes

Vibe coding is the creation of large quantities of complex AI-generated code. Executives push lay-offs claiming AI can handle the work. Managers pressure employees to meet quotas of how much of their code must be AI-generated... yet results are far from what was promised 1/

I wanted a better intuition for protein "bendiness" so made myself some animations. I'll start from the beginning but here's an alpha helix to give you a sense of where this is going...