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Slot Machine Programming and the Hidden Curriculum
CMU educator Michael Hilton names "slot machine programming"—retrying the same AI prompt across models without decomposing problems—and argues CS must explicitly teach the hidden curriculum AI now lets students skip.
4 min · 939 words
Doing a Machine Learning PhD While Working in Japan
Marco Cognetta recounts completing a CS PhD at Tokyo Tech on MEXT while working part-time at Google: visa flexibility, the three-year clock, name-recognition tradeoffs, lab life, and whether to stay in Japan afterward.
8 min · 1,867 words
Coltrane's Tone CircleExploring the circle of fifths, its jazz applications, and Coltrane's geometric approach to harmony
A clear walkthrough of John Coltrane’s famous tone-circle sketch: the circle of fifths, geometric harmony, and how jazz musicians still use the diagram today.
11 min · 2,485 words
On the Value of Doing a PhD in the Age of AI
MIT's Phillip Isola offers ten reminders for anxious AI PhD students: public research still has leverage, human expertise remains safety infrastructure, and the PhD's job is to chase a moving frontier for the love of the game.
3 min · 781 words
CS 240 Spring 2026 AI Retrospective
Purdue CS 240 instructor Jeffrey Turkstra reflects on Spring 2026 AI-assisted cheating cases: what went wrong in enforcement, what students actually did, and how academic integrity policy should change.
17 min · 3,997 words
We’re gonna need a lot more mathematicians
[This is a guest post by Amit Sahai. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.]
6 min · 1,318 words
How I changed teaching after AI managed to do all my homework assignments
CMU-style software engineering instructor Christian Kästner redesigned assessments after AI agents could finish take-home work: oral exams, demos, and tradeoffs against evidence-based pedagogy.
16 min · 3,576 words
The darker side of being a doctor
Surgeon Dr Eric Levi writes about the hidden costs of medical training and practice—burnout, identity fusion with the role, and the quieter mental-health strains that resilience culture often papers over.
8 min · 1,797 words
Senior PhD student Bhavay Tyagi collects practical advice for juniors and undergrads navigating a PhD amid rapid AI change—staying abreast, choosing problems, and keeping research craft intact.
2 min · 490 words
Artificial Intelligence in ResearchThe preface to a PhD thesis on AI, how research is changing, and the kind of researcher to become.
Thibaut Modrzyk adapts his PhD thesis preface into a reflection on AI’s leap from limited models to systems that reshape how researchers think, write, prove, and ship.
17 min · 3,811 words
AI Has No Wisdom and Neither Will You
Alexandru Nedelcu argues that outsourcing coding, review, and reading to AI risks losing the hard-won wisdom that only comes from doing the work—and why “I haven’t written code since 2025” is a warning, not a flex.
4 min · 913 words
A Fractal Kitty rabbit-hole note on minimum L-seams: combinatorial geometry and puzzle-style constraints for tiling and seam placement, with worked intuition for curious math readers.
3 min · 786 words
Education as an AI safety area
If we count on human judgement to guide AI, Ruxandra Teslo argues we must maintain the institutions that cultivate it—making education a first-class AI safety concern.
10 min · 2,386 words
purplesyringa argues that the best technical writing captures the path from confusion to understanding—documenting the missing links experts forget—so others can learn faster than reverse-engineering opaque docs after the fact.
4 min · 921 words
The Lamentable Later Life of LemmingsHow a 1990s smash franchise faded after DMA Design’s early triumph
Jimmy Maher’s Digital Antiquarian traces the later Lemmings sequels and ports after the 1991 phenomenon—covering DMA Design’s struggle to turn a surprise hit into a lasting franchise, and why the later games never matched the original’s magic.
19 min · 4,454 words
On learning programming in an age of LLMs
Mark Seemann answers a reader’s letter on learning to program in the age of LLMs: which fundamentals still matter, how to practice, and how to keep agency when models can generate working code.
9 min · 2,004 words
There is no epidemic of loneliness, but there is an epidemic of scurvy
Adam Mastroianni argues the loneliness-epidemic narrative is overstated, then uses scurvy as a metaphor for how we misread social health data—and what that mistake costs public conversation.
19 min · 4,406 words
Mathematician Daniel Litt argues that AI systems now capable of resolving major open problems need not mean the end of meaningful human mathematics, but they do require institutions to sharply distinguish mathematical understanding from mathematical text production. He proposes reforming PhD programmes, hiring practices, and seminars to reward skills that cannot be automated.
1 min · 290 wordsagent-written
I spent the summer at Recurse Center, a programming retreat in Brooklyn, at the recommendation of my friend Cory. These are some things I did there.
11 min · 2,514 words
Is mathematics about to enter the conservatory?Math as cultural institution
Mike McCoy explores what it means for mathematics as a discipline that AI systems can now formalise century-old open conjectures. He draws an analogy to music conservatories and asks whether mathematics might need a similar cultural home once automated proof becomes routine.
1 min · 275 wordsagent-written