2026.01.30
So I was tickled to see a link to my own blog, kirk.is site on the side
(And then a link to flutterby - another long running blog site, even more aggressively rooted in the page layout tropes of an earlier era.)
I realized that the only reason I could reach out to the first link was because of an oldschool mailto: tag - and that my own site didn't have any "contact me" info. I probably avoided putting my own email up because of spammers, though that fight has more or less moved on. (Also there's a kind of half-wise, half-dumb assumption that most people who view my blog actually know me IRL)
Still, it's nice to see fellow old-school-bloggers still at it. There's probably a kind of mental hangup that keeps us at a pursuit for over two decades... but owning a little piece of the 'net that way before Web 2.0 moved everything onto other people's sites is still kind of fun.
AI assistance produces significant productivity gains across professional domains, particularly for novice workers. Yet how this assistance affects the development of skills required to effectively supervise AI remains unclear. Novice workers who rely heavily on AI to complete unfamiliar tasks may compromise their own skill acquisition in the process. We conduct randomized experiments to study how developers gained mastery of a new asynchronous programming library with and without the assistance of AI. We find that AI use impairs conceptual understanding, code reading, and debugging abilities, without delivering significant efficiency gains on average. Participants who fully delegated coding tasks showed some productivity improvements, but at the cost of learning the library. We identify six distinct AI interaction patterns, three of which involve cognitive engagement and preserve learning outcomes even when participants receive AI assistance. Our findings suggest that AI-enhanced productivity is not a shortcut to competence and AI assistance should be carefully adopted into workflows to preserve skill formation – particularly in safety-critical domains.
Slate on Psychadelic Therapy I have always been intrigued by the potential for psychadelics in therapeutic ways. There are reports that they can be like a head reset so you can actually do what you know you need to do, like give up smoking.
But between the difficulty of research of not really legal things, and as this article points out the startlingly powerful placebo effects... it's tough to know if there's anything actionable to be done right now.
NYC's controversial toll program hasn't just sped up trips inside Manhattan, a new paper finds. It's easing traffic in outer boroughs and neighboring counties.
Huh. I think this goes to show how it's not really possible to accurately predict emergent effects and unintended consequences from making changes to complex systems
See also: Jevons' paradox, where increasing a resource (say, highways into a popular place, trying to ease congestion) actually increases use so much that the problem ends up worse than before.
Average Ukrainian soldier whose killed dozens of people in largest war since WW2:
*Wears a Pikachu patch and another that says "ZSUHub," never issued a unit patch*
ICE Agent:
*Patch has a dagger through a skull dripping blood on an ace of spades with crossed M4s behind it*