Knuth on Claude code!
www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/paper...
03.03.2026 23:11
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Knuth on Claude code!
www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/paper...
But if the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs, and arms, and heads, chopp’d off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all, “We died at such a place”
In 2026, colleges must teach students that this is not the end of the world. We must teach hope. Current undergraduates can barely remember a time before the threats of climate change and authoritarianism loomed to catastrophic scale. Since 2010, the future depicted in TV, books, and games has been dystopian or apocalyptic, so for our current students the end of the world feels more familiar and realistic than a future with hope. Now we are asking them to choose majors and life paths when the desirability, indeed the very existence, of whole sectors of employment are in question, due to the overwhelming promises of LLMs and machine learning. As young people hear daily that vocation after vocation may vanish into automation’s maw, and that democracy, liberty, land, sea, and sky are all in jeopardy, despair is growing. Despair is very emotionally tempting. It means freedom from the responsibility to shape the future. This is a terrifying turning point, but many generations before us have faced such turning points, and met them. We can offer our students perspective. Only a few dozen institutions on Earth are more than 900 years old, and the vast majority are universities. The university system is not a house of straw to buckle in this storm: We are the rocks that have sheltered the knowledge, hope, and truth through tumults which have toppled kingdoms while classrooms endured. We can endure this, and be a guiding light through it, but only by recentering, by teaching citizens, not workers; power, not PowerPoint; aspiration, not apocalypse. Despair is how we lose. The classroom is where we battle it. All other battles flow from here. Ada Palmer is an associate professor of history at the University of Chicago.
This, from Ada Palmer as part of The Chronicle's survey of 11 scholars on the future of higher ed, is what I needed to end the week.
I reckon I grew a crystal 1/1000th of that size as a kid in New Zealand. I was impressed at the time 😁
😁
New work! We show that machine-learned operators (MLOs) for PDEs struggle with accurate zero-shot multi-resolution inference. Popular fixes don’t solve it, but multi-resolution training offers robust, cost-effective modeling across scales! https://github.com/msakarvadia/operator_aliasing
Depiction of agent consuming excessive resources while debugging complex distributed system
I enjoyed my visit to U. Würzberg (thanks to host S. Kounev) where I gave a talk covering agents for scientific discovery, Academy agent framework, and agency as new organizing abstraction for CS agents4science.github.io/Assets/wurzb...
Headline: "Scientists discover emperor penguin colony in Antarctica using satellite images"
Yesterday it was cows using tools, today its penguins using satellite imagery.
RIP Gladys West, mathematician who measured the world to unheard precision (radius to tens of centimeters!), paving the way to GPS.
Metra train coming
A picture of robot scientists working in a lab
Remaining slides for my class AI Agents for Science are at github.com/agents4scien.... Human-AI workflows, benchmarking and evaluation, failures and safety, and much more. github.com/agents4scien...
Langchain works well, automating may otherwise tedious aspects of implementing LLM-based agents. We use it for science apps, integrating with Academy to enable scaling and interaction with advanced computing academy-agents.org
Here's the video of my talk on December 10 at Q2B Silicon Valley, reviewing recent progress in quantum computing.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UoJ...
I asked Claude+Opus4.5 to look at CMIP6 climate data in the Earth System Grid Federation; propose and evaluate some novel hypotheses; and post results on GitHub. See github.com/ianfoster/ES.... I list most of my prompts, so you can see how little guidance was provided.
My life aka …
This is my cyclical reminder that there's really only one consistently reliable source of info in the public record that isn't owned by right wing billionaires, who really want to put an end to it.
Please give at least the $2.75 minimum they request if you can.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
Unbelievable. This would be a terrible blow to American science, writ large. It would decimate not only climate research, but also the kind of weather, wildfire, and disaster research that has underpinned half a century of progress in prediction, early warning, and increased resilience.
Okay gang, The Onion is 80 sign-ups away from our 60,000th print subscriber.
This would put us in contention for the Top 10 most circulated newspapers in the U.S.
So! We're giving our 60,000th subscriber a mystery box by our archivist as a nice lil thank you.
Sign up now. I'd give it an hour.
Photo taken from a train station platform showing snowy train tracks with overhead wires and some tall buildings of the Chicago skyline in the distance under a night sky.
Night time photo of twin train station platforms with snowy train tracks under electrical wires in between them.
Get from the Chicago Loop to Hyde Park in 11 minutes with this one weird trick.
“We shed as we pick up, like travelers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those left behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it.”
— Tom Stoppard.
New PNAS paper with the impressive Daniel King, @gagliardilaura.bsky.social and other wonderful co-authors -- www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Opportunity Alert for Faculty in Nigeria
Eric and Wendy Schmidt AI in Science Faculty Fellows at the University of Chicago: uchicago.infoready4.com#competitionD...
Super-science?
In the century leading up to 1975, nearly 6000 freighters went down in the Great Lakes.
The Edmund Fitzgerald was the last.
The last. In 50 years, not a single commercial freighter has been lost in the Great Lakes.
Why?
It's NOAA. Of course it's NOAA.
Over-the-top headline from the NYT, saying, in part: "Lights All Askew In The Heavens / Men of Science More or Less Agog Over Results of Eclipse Observations..."
Happy "Lights All Askew" Day to all who celebrate! (Headline in the New York Times from Nov. 10, 1919, brings Einstein's theory of gravity, general relativity -- along with its alleged incomprehensibility -- to the public.) 🪐🔭🧠📰 #physics #science #histsci #lightsallaskew
Congratulations Dan!
Dropbox informed me today that, at least, "Emojis in filenames are finally here! 🥳" -- what a time to be alive ...
Any details?
