Earlier today, I became aware of the story of Scott Shambaugh, a volunteer maintainer for the incredibly popular matplotlib , a library used for graphing in Python. Here’s the short version: a pull request was made by an AI agent. Scott rejected this pull request, in accordance with the project’s standards, because it was made by an AI agent and not by a human. In response, the AI…
The following is a collection of department-specific office hour links pages. Currently, you need to figure out which department the professor is in, then visit the corresponding web page. Biological Sciences Chemistry and Biochemistry Kinesiology and Public Health Liberal Studies Mathematics Physics School of Education Statistics Agribusiness Agricultural Education and Communication Animal…
(EDIT: I’ve rewritten and softened the text below, based on some valuable feedback from people that pointed out that I was wrong. Ah well.) I just read an Ars Technica article by Benji Edwards titled “The personhood trap: How AI fakes human personality” , with the subtitle “AI assistants don’t have fixed personalities—just patterns of output guided by humans.”…
I think I’m not alone in suggesting that the tree, and perhaps the binary tree specifically, is the most foundational data structure in computer science. This raises the question of how binary trees should be introduced, and I’d like to make the case that introducing binary trees as a special case of undirected graphs is not a good idea. I can see reasons why you might think this is a…
This is a short blog post about Prabakhar Ragde’s “Logic and Computation Intertwined”, or “LACI”, currently available online at https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~plragde/flaneries/LACI/ Here is a bad thing about LACI: every time I search for it, my search engine steers me toward articles about the tragic life of Laci Peterson. Here is a good thing about LACI: everything else!…
Yesterday was the election! It looks like Donald Trump is going to be our next president. The democrats lost. As much as it pains me to write that, the simple truth is that it doesn’t help anyone or anything to be cynical, or to flip out, and it really doesn’t help anyone to doom-loop on terrible possible outcomes. So, just to remind myself, here are some things I think are important,…
I don’t have time to write an actual essay here, so I’m just going to take a 5-minute break from what I should actually be doing to share with all of you (my millions of adoring readers) a thought that I’m having while teaching engineering non-majors how to program. To wit: For the last fifty years, cleverness has been extremely important in programming a computer. But…
Peaceful disagreement is the foundation of our American government. It is not surprising that we disagree with each other. Each of us has individual opinions, circumstances, and understanding. Each of us sees a different part of the problems that surround us. Each of us has a different insight into the world, and sees different things that need to change. And, for better or worse, pretty much all…
So, this post isn’t very timely: hopefully COVID–19 will soon go away and we’ll all return to forms of education that actually work. In the meantime, though, I’ve been learning things about online testing. It probably goes without saying that there are many many differences between taking tests online and taking tests in person. However, one of them that hadn’t…
I was forwarded this today. It’s a speech given in 1944 by Judge Learned Hand, on “I am an American” day in 1944, in the middle of a terrifying world war. The first few sentences are somewhat hard to read; his assertion that we are made of people that have chosen to immigrate or are descended from those who did rings terribly terribly false for the thousands and thousands of…
Based on their full-page advertisements in various newspapers, Facebook is extremely upset about Apple’s upcoming move to make cross-app privacy the default. Their two main “hooks” are that it will hurt small businesses, and make the internet less “free”. I believe that neither of these is the case. What is clear to me is that this move will hurt Facebook’s…
NOTE: this text is a brief overview intended for instructors of a CS course that we’re developing; it is not technical. It tries to make the case that our early courses should steer students toward understanding problems in terms of pure functions. If you have suggestions or feedback, I’d love to hear them/it. This section of the course introduces functions, a crucial topic in the…
I’ve updated the dependency chart to match the 2019–2020 catalog. This now includes DATA classes as well as CPE and CSC classes. As before, the arrows just mean that the catalog refers in some way to the pointed-to course in the prerequisites section; it might be that only one of them is required, or some subset. Also, colors relate to number of students that have taken a class.…
Again: not too much new here, but the spring and fall quarters quarter is new: Here’s the college as a whole (we’re better):
Not too much new here, but the winter quarter is new: Here’s the college as a whole (we’re better):
My name is John Clements. I’m a computer scientist and programmer, and quite frankly, it’s hard for me to remain civil in discussion of the Dickey amendment, one of the most pernicious pieces of legislative ledgermain it is my deep displeasure to be familiar with. Since the Dickey amendment of 1996, the Centers for Disease Control—responsible for safeguarding the health of the…
Okay, I’ve replaced this blog post with a perma-link so I can update it without keeping huge amounts of old data around: permanent location
Some good news, here. On my way home from SIGCSE, I drew some more pictures. This shows how each year of incoming students handles 357. Specifically, the x axis shows quarters since the students’ first one, and the y axis shows what fraction of the students have passed 357. Each line shows a different cohort. Some of the lines are longer than others. This is because some cohorts that take a…
As part of our work on our recent SIGCSE paper (citation forthcoming), I took another look at our numbers of incoming students. The results surprised me. This table combines CSC, CPE, and SE students, and associates them with the quarter in which they first took a lower-level CS class. The surprising thing about this—to me, anyway—is that our enrollments have actually been dropping…
Do we need to go through this again? Another entry on the list. Sarcasm aside, this gun really has no plausible purpose aside from killing people. Can we please have an assault weapons ban? July 20, 2012 - Aurora, CO – 12 people dead - Smith & Wesson AR–15 1 December 14, 2012 - Sandy Hook elementary school, Newtown, CT – 20 people dead - Bushmaster AR–15 2 December 2, 2015…