The Provocateurs: Brave New Bullshit

[Reposting with update.]

Following two sell-out shows at the Fringe last year, I'm on at the Fringe again:

11.25 Monday 4 August, Stand 2 w/Lucy Remnant and Susan Morrison

17.40 Sunday 17 August, Stand 4 w/Smita Kheria and Sarah-Jane Judge

17.40 Tuesday 19 August, Stand 4 w/Cameron Wyatt and Susan Morrison

Shows are under the banner of The Provocateurs (formerly Cabaret of Dangerous Ideas). Tickets go on sale Wednesday 7 May, around noon. The official blurb is brief:

Professor Philip Wadler (The University of Edinburgh) separates the hopes and threats of AI from the chatbot bullshit.

Here is a longer blurb, from my upcoming appearance at Curious, run by the RSE, in September.

Brave New Bullshit

In an AI era, who wins and who loses?

Your future workday might look like this: 

• You write bullet points.
• You ask a chatbot to expand them into a report.
• You send it to your boss ...
• Who asks a chatbot to summarise it to bullet points.

Will AI help you to do your job or take it from you? Is it fair for AI to be trained on copyrighted material? Will any productivity gains benefit everyone or only a select few?

 

Join Professor Philip Wadler’s talk as he looks at the hopes and threats of AI, exploring who wins and who loses.

What is happening in Gaza is an injury to our collective conscience. We must be allowed to speak out

 

A powerful op-ed by Gabor Maté in the Toronto Star.

Just as nothing justifies the atrocities of October 7, nothing about October 7 justifies Israeli atrocities against the Palestinians, either before or since October 7. Recently, I listened to orthopedic surgeon Dr. Deirdre Nunan, like me a graduate of UBC’s Faculty of Medicine, recount her harrowing experiences serving in a Gaza hospital under the siege that followed Israel’s breaking of the ceasefire in March. Her depictions of unspeakable horror, enacted as policy by one of the world’s most sophisticated militaries, were soul shattering. Many other physicians — Canadian, American, Jewish, Muslim, Christian — who have worked in Gaza speak in similar terms. British doctors describe witnessing “a slaughterhouse.” All their testimonies are widely accessible. The leading medical journal Lancet editorialized that in its assault on health care facilities and personnel in Gaza, “the Israeli Government has acted with impunity … Many medical academies and health professional organizations that claim a commitment to social justice have failed to speak out.” ...

It may be true that antisemitic animus can lurk behind critiques of Zionism. But in my decades of advocacy for Palestinian rights including medical visits to Gaza and the West Bank, I have rarely witnessed it. When present, it has a certain tone that one can feel is directed at Jewishness itself, rather than at the theory and practice of Zionism or at Israel’s actions. What is far more common and genuinely confusing for many is that Israel and its supporters, Jews and non-Jews, habitually confound opposition to Israeli policy with antisemitism. This is akin to Vietnam War protesters being accused of anti-Americanism. How is opposing the napalming of human beings anti-American or, say, deploring Israel’s use of mass starvation as a weapon of war in any sense anti-Jewish? ...

People deserve the right to experience as much liberty to publicly mourn, question, oppose, deplore, denounce what they perceive as the perpetration of injustice and inhumanity as they are, in this country, to advocate for the aims and actions of the Israeli government and its Canadian abettors amongst our political leadership, academia, and media.

Even if we feel powerless to stop the first genocide we have ever watched on our screens in real time, allow at least our hearts to be broken openly, as mine is. And more, let us be free to take democratic, non-hateful action without fear of incurring the calumny of racism.

Thanks to a colleague in the Scottish Universities Jewish Staff Network for bringing it to my attention.

How to market Haskell to a mainstream programmer

An intriguing talk by Gabriella Gonzalez, delivered at Haskell Love 2020. Based largely on the famous marketing book, Crossing the Chasm. Gonzalez argues that marketing is not about hype, it is about setting priorities: what features and markets are you going to ignore? The key to adoption is to be able to solve a problem that people need solved today and where existing mainstream tools are inadequate. Joe Armstrong will tell you that the key to getting Erlang used was to approach failing projects and ask "Would you like us to build you a prototype?" Gonzalez makes a strong case that Haskell should first aim to capture the interpreters market. He points out that the finance/blockchain market may be another possibility. Recommended to me at Lambda Days by Pedro Abreu, host of the Type Theory Forall podcast.

The Provocateurs: Brave New Bullshit

Following two sell-out shows at the Fringe last year, I'm on at the Fringe again:

11.25 Monday 4 August, Stand 2 w/Lucy Remnant and Susan Morrison

17.40 Sunday 17 August, Stand 4 w/Smita Kheria and Sarah-Jane Judge

17.40 Tuesday 19 August, Stand 4 w/Cameron Wyatt and Susan Morrison

Shows are under the banner of The Provocateurs (formerly Cabaret of Dangerous Ideas). Tickets go on sale Wednesday 7 May, around noon. The official blurb is brief:

Professor Philip Wadler (The University of Edinburgh) separates the hopes and threats of AI from the chatbot bullshit.

I've been nominated for a teaching award

I've been fortunate to be nominated for a few teaching awards over my career, and even to win a couple. The nomination I just received may be the best.

As a new student at the uni, Philip Wadler was the first introductory lecture I had, and his clear passion for the subject made me feel excited to begin my journey in computer science. In particular he emphasised the importance of asking questions, which made the idea of tutorials and lectures a lot less intimidating, and went on to give really valuable advice for starting university. I enjoyed this session so much, and so was looking forward to the guest lectures he was going to do for Inf1A at the end of semester 1. They certainly did not disappoint, the content he covered was engaging, interesting, and above all very entertaining to listen to, especially when he dressed up as a superhero to cement his point. Because I found these talks so rewarding, I also attended the STMU that he spoke at about AI and ChatGPT, and everyone I talked to after the event said they had a really good time whilst also having a completely new insightful perspective on the topic. In summary, Philip Wadler has delivered the best lectures I have attended since starting university, and I have gotten a lot out of them.

Thank you, anonymous first-year student! 

Telnaes quits The Washington Post

Cartoonist Ann Telnaes has quit the Washington Post, after they refused to publish one of her cartoons, depicting Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Sam Altman (Open AI), Patrick Soon-Shiong (LA Times), the Walt Disney Company (ABC News), and Jeff Bezos (Amazon & Washington Post). All that exists is her preliminary sketch, above. Why is this important? See her primer below. (Spotted via Boing Boing.)

 

Please submit to Lambda Days

 

I'm part of the programme committee for Lambda Days, and I’m personally inviting you to submit your talk!

Lambda Days is all about celebrating the world of functional programming, and we’re eager to hear about your latest ideas, projects, and discoveries. Whether it’s functional languages, type theory, reactive programming, or something completely unexpected—we want to see it!

 Submission Deadline: 9 February 2025
 Never spoken before? No worries! We’re committed to supporting speakers from all backgrounds, especially those from underrepresented groups in tech.

Submit your talk and share your wisdom with the FP community.

 https://www.lambdadays.org/lambdadays2025#call-for-talks

John Longley's Informatics Lecturer Song

From my colleague, John Longley, a treat. 

‘Informatics Lecturer Song’ 

(Based on Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘Major General song’) 

John Longley 

I am the very model of an Informatics lecturer,
For educating students you will never find a betterer.
I teach them asymptotics with a rigour that’s impeccable,
I’ll show them how to make their proofs mechanically checkable.
On parsing algorithms I can hold it with the best of them,
With LL(1) and CYK and Earley and the rest of them.
I’ll teach them all the levels of the Chomsky hierarchy…
With a nod towards that Natural Language Processing malarkey.

I’ll summarize the history of the concept of a function,
And I’ll tell them why their Haskell code is ‘really an adjunction’.
In matters mathematical and logical, etcetera,
I am the very model of an Informatics lecturer.

For matters of foundations I’m a genuine fanaticker:
I know by heart the axioms of Principia Mathematica,
I’m quite au fait with Carnap and with Wittgenstein’s Tractatus,
And I’ll dazzle you with Curry, Church and Turing combinators.
I’ll present a proof by Gödel with an algebraic seasoning,
I’ll instantly detect a step of non-constructive reasoning.
I’ll tell if you’re a formalist or logicist or Platonist…
For I’ll classify your topos by the kinds of objects that exist.

I’ll scale the heights of cardinals from Mahlo to extendible,
I’ll find your favourite ordinals and stick them in an n-tuple.
In matters philosophical, conceptual, etcetera,
I am the very essence of an Informatics lecturer.

And right now I’m getting started on my personal computer,
I’ve discovered how to get it talking to the Wifi router.
In Internet and World Wide Web I’ve sometimes had my finger dipped,
And once I wrote a line of code in HTML/Javascript.
[Sigh.] I know I have a way to go to catch up with my students,
But I try to face each lecture with a dash of common prudence.
When it comes to modern tech: if there’s a way to get it wrong, I do!
But that seems to be forgiven if I ply them with a song or two.

So… although my present IT skills are rather rudimentary,
And my knowledge of computing stops around the nineteenth century,
Still, with help from all my colleagues and my audience, etcetera…
I’ll be the very model of an Informatics lecturer.

You can help Cards Against Humanity pay "blue leaning" nonvoters $100 to vote

How is this not illegal??? Cards Against Humanity is PAYING people who didn't vote in 2020 to apologize, make a voting plan, and post #DonaldTrumpIsAHumanToilet—up to $100 for blue-leaning people in swing states. I helped by getting a 2024 Election Pack: checkout.giveashit.lol. Spotted via BoingBoing. More info at The Register. (Only American citizens and residents can participate. If, like me, you are an American citizen but non-resident, you will need a VPN.)

Remember to vote, tactically (a message for the progressive among you)

 

Happy Election Day!

The above shows an average of five recent polls for my constituency, Edinburgh North and Leith, and comes courtesy of Stop the Tories. Clearly, the Tories have no chance, but I will still be voting tactically. I am a member of the Greens. But if everyone who intends to vote Green instead votes SNP, the SNP will beat Labour (rather than the other way around). While the SNP has made some awful missteps of late, they are the best hope to push Labour toward the more progressive policies from which Starmer has dragged them away. My tactical vote goes to the SNP.