Technology

Miscellanea, September 2024

By AMH

Cool photos and breakdown of a Navajo weaving of an Intel Pentium chip from a display in the National Gallery of Art (sadly the exhibit now seems to be closed). The breakdown is able to map out the chip to determine specifically which chip it is based on. The blog post also closes with an interesting story of the Fairchild work on the Shiprock chip and the relationship to the Navajo. Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power Since 1500: Scrollable visualization of computing, communication, and control from the 1500s to the present categorized by things like communication devices, … Continue reading Miscellanea, September 2024

Rear Adm. Grace Hopper and Future Possibilities

By AMH

I’ve been slowly listening my way through the recently released “lost” lecture from then-Capt. Grace Hopper entitled “Future Possibilities: Data, Hardware, Software, and People” from 1982. I didn’t read much in advance about the content of the lecture, just decided to watch it as an interesting piece of history. It’s a very engaging and funny talk – about 8 minutes in I had to pause and go back and start listening again more closely. Her main opening premise: “I’m afraid we will continue to buy pieces of hardware and then put programs on them, when what we should be doing … Continue reading Rear Adm. Grace Hopper and Future Possibilities

What is coding help?

By AMH

With semesters starting, there’s another flurry of conversation about how to teach programming when students have access to generative AI tools. Much of it is about assessment, where the size and context of your class makes a big difference (I have options available to me in a 20 student in-person class taught in a room with dedicated computers I have instructor control of that many other people do not). However, there’s also discussion of how to help students use generative AI as an assistant as they learn. I’ve been thinking a lot about one tool I recently saw promoted that’s … Continue reading What is coding help?

AI toys

By AMH

In addition to the more technical updates I’m making to my AI course, I’m collecting some fun AI toys that could make for nice first-day activities to get discussion going or otherwise bring some levity to the course. What Beats Rock? is easy fun. The game seems tuned to give you at least some benefit of the doubt that your chosen item will win that round of the battle. The generated explanations vary in how compelling they are. After a couple of rounds, much of the fun is not the AI but seeing if you can come up with a … Continue reading AI toys

A bit of nostalgia

By AMH

And now for a bit of nostalgia, as well as an opportunity to see if I’ve got WordPress access properly set up on my new tablet (if so, I’m hoping it will facilitate increased weblogging). A couple of weeks old now, but I appreciated this recognition of the 40th birthday of X Window System. My first programming job, a summer internship type position 32 years ago, had me learning UNIX by crash course, and most particularly figuring out how to write X Window configuration scripts. As the article notes, X Window offered the potential for customized and consistent windowing environments … Continue reading A bit of nostalgia

Still haven’t crafted a cat yet

By AMH

A couple of gaming related distractions: I have not played Baldur’s Gate 3 but I cannot recommend enough the video Can You Beat Baldur’s Gate 3 As a Cat? if you have played any games at all in the genre or want to be entertained by cat (and eventually herd of cats) attempting to go on an epic quest. For more context: druids in BG3 have a cat form, and the video shows an attempt to beat the game from this form, which has a variety of limitations. Unsurprisingly, the game was not intended to be played this way. It’s … Continue reading Still haven’t crafted a cat yet

How we think about coding and computing literacy

By AMH

I’ve been meaning to write about Annette Vee’s Coding Literacy: How Computer Programming is Changing Writing for a while now. The book looks at the current interest in “coding literacy” from the perspective of literacy studies. I picked up the book because I was interested in this outside perspective, and two quotes in the introduction immediately told me I was going to enjoy this book: Programming as defined by computer science of software engineering is bound to echo the values of those contexts. But the concept of coding literacy suggests programming is a literacy practice with many applications beyond a profession … Continue reading How we think about coding and computing literacy

Missing the phone part of my phone

By AMH

This week I got to spend a bit over three days without a phone due to unrecoverable failure of my old phone and a delay in getting a replacement. When I discovered I wouldn’t have a phone for that stretch a time, my immediate reaction was semi-panic – what would I do without my phone! I was sort of surprised that, in reality, it was way less of a hassle than I expected. I attribute this to a few things: I have so many devices that there were only a small number of apps on my phone whose functionality wasn’t … Continue reading Missing the phone part of my phone

Readability of rainbow schemes

By AMH

The core argument in this discussion of color schemes in maps of Hurricane Harvey rainfall makes sense to me – darkness and light have intuitive intensity meanings to us and it is a problem when a visualization violates those meanings and expects a key to do the work of remapping our understanding. But the suggestion to rework the map with an entirely different visualization technique based on a gradient of color (perhaps with a slight hue shift as well) rather than a rainbow scheme seems to miss what I, at least, find to be functional about the rainbow scheme. I’m accustomed enough to how the rainbow … Continue reading Readability of rainbow schemes

Next, they rise up and kill us all….

By AMH

My most recent weblog post was on teaching ethics to self-driving cars, flippantly titled At least they’re not using GTA as a data source. Except…. Self-Driving Cars Can Learn a Lot by Playing Grand Theft Auto Let’s console ourselves that “there’s little chance of a computer learning bad behavior by playing violent computer games” and instead admire the clever efficiency of allowing them to get practice navigating the complexities of realistic roads. And, in this case, it does seem that they are just extracting photo-realistic screenshots rather than having to produce authentic training data, which is a cool trick. But the fact that the … Continue reading Next, they rise up and kill us all….