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Bill Pugh

@bill-pugh

Retired Professor of computer science at UMD, and engineer at Apple on exposure notifications. Active maker, burner, traveler, husband, father.

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16.11.2024
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Latest posts by Bill Pugh @bill-pugh

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GenAI in CS Education Consortium Shaping the Future of Computer Science Education in the Age of AI. Everything instructors need to get started integrating AI into their CS courses.

For anyone thinking about how to update CS curriculums to reflect the impact of GenAI on software development, you definitely need to check out this web page. www.teachcswithai.org

09.08.2025 13:28 πŸ‘ 5 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Hello, #aejmc25 folks: If you're interested in teaching data journalism (including sports) or using AI to assist reporting, let's talk! I've got online teaching materials and data to share. DMs are open or email dpwillis AT umd.edu

07.08.2025 16:27 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

How about providing a way to opt out of all ActBlue emails and messages? For example, I’m getting donation spam to a work email that I never want to receive political solicitations on.

06.08.2025 21:57 πŸ‘ 20 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
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Over the last two years we have seen an acceleration on AI, but if AI is going to enable humans in their day to day tasks, it most probably will be via XR. The issue then is if a selection has real-world consequences, we will need great precision to interact.

05.08.2025 08:15 πŸ‘ 9 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
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β€œBoth of them.”

02.08.2025 04:33 πŸ‘ 20959 πŸ” 11672 πŸ’¬ 461 πŸ“Œ 768
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Motherfucking wind farms…

30.07.2025 17:02 πŸ‘ 47121 πŸ” 17684 πŸ’¬ 1138 πŸ“Œ 2378
CMSC398Z - Coding with AI

And I’m delighted that Derek reached out, and that he’ll be helping me offer the course. It is going to be better and more fun with Derek involved.

www.cs.umd.edu/class/fall20...

30.07.2025 22:58 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

This billionaire’s fortune is built atop research funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, and yet he seeks to destroy that agency and its investments in the scientific engine that has fueled our tech industry since the 1950s. And why? Because it tried to include more diverse scholars?

12.07.2025 14:19 πŸ‘ 2307 πŸ” 722 πŸ’¬ 115 πŸ“Œ 42
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Hello. I live in Los Angeles. The president is lying.

08.06.2025 21:54 πŸ‘ 46989 πŸ” 14531 πŸ’¬ 2960 πŸ“Œ 1367

Risky post!

(This is great, fun to read and the frustrated tone throughout really does capture how it feels sometimes to be an experienced programmer trying to argue that "LLMs are actually really useful" in many corners of the internet)

02.06.2025 23:41 πŸ‘ 151 πŸ” 19 πŸ’¬ 13 πŸ“Œ 3

Error in the report: Louisiana, where subsidence is causing between 25 to 35 square _feet_ of land loss per year.

Should be square _miles_.

02.06.2025 10:48 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Given how LLMs work, I’m not particularly surprised by these weird small errors. More, I’m surprised that these kinds of errors occur so rarely that it isn’t an obstacle to using them for writing code.

11.05.2025 21:18 πŸ‘ 3 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Playing with using Gemini for code generation. Overall smart, but occasionally wrong in weird ways. In some Java code in one place, it threw in an extra right parenthesis.

In Swift code, it used calls to checkedMul to avoid integer overflow, but that is a Rust feature and not supported in swift.

11.05.2025 21:18 πŸ‘ 4 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 2 πŸ“Œ 0
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Exclusive: NSF faces radical shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions Changes seen as a response to presidential directives on what research to fund

Exclusive: National Science Foundation staff were told today that the agency’s 37 divisionsβ€”across all eight directoratesβ€”are being abolished and the number of programs within those divisions will be drastically reduced.

08.05.2025 23:35 πŸ‘ 2099 πŸ” 1529 πŸ’¬ 155 πŸ“Œ 438
Peter Sellers as James Bond

Peter Sellers as James Bond

Repost with your favorite James Bond (Wrong answers only)

20.04.2025 18:41 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

also got my first NSF grant terminated! what emoji do i put in my handle to signify this?

19.04.2025 07:33 πŸ‘ 55 πŸ” 8 πŸ’¬ 6 πŸ“Œ 0

for anyone else in the united states, and quite possibly for jordan wick as well, this is a go-to-prison-forever level offense

15.04.2025 18:07 πŸ‘ 95 πŸ” 23 πŸ’¬ 5 πŸ“Œ 2

niche but here goes: if you met your sugar daddy/mama online but NOT on a dating app β€” I’d like to talk.

Plz RT, this is a tough one journalistically lol

14.04.2025 23:04 πŸ‘ 18 πŸ” 18 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
Person holding a cardboard sign which reads "Hand off working COBOL code"

Person holding a cardboard sign which reads "Hand off working COBOL code"

Now there's a protest sign you don't see often.

06.04.2025 02:05 πŸ‘ 3622 πŸ” 992 πŸ’¬ 49 πŸ“Œ 75

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I’m avoiding coming down on the question of whether coding assistants are already widely used, or are too flawed to be used for anything other than code completion. I’ve seen both viewpoints.

At this point, I think it is clear that it is very possible that they will be widely used in 3-5 years.

04.04.2025 16:26 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
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ChatGPT - AI Coding Assistants Impact Shared via ChatGPT

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I asked ChatGPT to do a deep research to prepare a report. It was useful, but didn’t identify any efforts at universities other than the UCSD link above.

chatgpt.com/share/67ed92...

04.04.2025 16:26 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

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3) Less focus on details of syntax and APIs, when tools will be able to fill in many of those details.

04.04.2025 16:26 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

🧡My thoughts:
1) More focus on reading and critiquing code; useful even before coding assistants, but even more useful when developers will need to review code generated by coding assistants.

04.04.2025 16:26 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

Does anyone have pointers to efforts by CS departments to update their curriculums in anticipation of the changes in tasks and skill sets that will be needed by software developers when/if coding assistants become widely used?

🧡

04.04.2025 16:26 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
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In This Era of AI, Will Everyone Be a Programmer? ChatGPT and Large Language Models are viewed by many as a threat to the field of computer science education because they’re able to produce code on command. But the retooled, foundational course, β€œInt...

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I know that UCSD has updated their intro course, but I don’t know if they have made changes throughout their curriculum.

today.ucsd.edu/story/in-thi...

04.04.2025 16:26 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

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4) Developers will spend less time doing what typical programming assignments ask them to do: given a precise description of a project, write code that implements it. However, assignments like these might be helpful in building up the intellectual scaffolding needed in software development jobs.

04.04.2025 16:26 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

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2) More focus on higher-level tasks, such as given an ambiguous problem statement, working to figure out exactly what is needed to address the problem (including discussions with users and other stakeholders).

04.04.2025 16:26 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

It would be really nice if BlueSky didn’t put 60 different posts in my feed all sharing the same news article. Maybe group them some how (here are 60 different posts all commenting on this article).

Particularly bad is @wired.com reposting every single post commenting on one of their articles

25.03.2025 16:03 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
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The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat about upcoming military strikes in Yemen. I didn’t think it could be real. Then the bombs started falling.

These guys inherited one of the most functional state apparatus in the history of the world and they are inhabiting it like a crack house.
www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc...

24.03.2025 19:10 πŸ‘ 5737 πŸ” 1454 πŸ’¬ 178 πŸ“Œ 111
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U.K. Tourist Returns Home in Chains Like β€˜Hannibal Lecter’ Becky Burke was released in chains and handcuffs after spending 19 days in an ICE detention facility

U.K. tourist Becky Burke finally returned home to Wales on Tuesday after spending 19 days in a U.S. ICE detention facility. Her parents relayed their daughter’s description of her release from ICE, saying how she was taken in β€œleg chains, waist chains and handcuffs,” which left her β€œtraumatized.”

21.03.2025 00:43 πŸ‘ 10299 πŸ” 4815 πŸ’¬ 890 πŸ“Œ 601