BatesLine linkblog

Chesterton's Fence: A Lesson in Thinking

"Chesterton's Fence is a principle that reminds us to look before we leap. To understand before we act. It's a cautionary reminder to understand why something is the way it is before meddling in change.

"The principle comes from a parable by G.K. Chesterton.

"'There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."'"

10 Things From the 2000s That Are Now Collectible--and Valuable - Mental Floss

iPods, Pokemon Cards, Tamagotchi, old game consoles, DVDs, and VCR tapes are on the list. See also 6 Rare Disney VHS Tapes That Are Worth a Lot of Money Today.

On Violations of LLM Review Policies - ICML Blog

The International Conference of Machine Learning identified 497 papers because 398 reciprocal reviewers used an LLM to write the review when they had promised not to use AI. "At a high level, the LLM detection involved watermarking submission PDFs with hidden LLM instructions, which would subtly influence any review produced via an LLM.... First, we created a dictionary of 170,000 phrases. For each paper, we sampled two phrases randomly from this dictionary. The probability with which a given pair of phrases is picked is thus smaller than one in ten billion. We watermarked the PDF of each paper submitted with instructions, visible only to an LLM, instructing it to include the two selected phrases in the review. (A human reading the PDF would not directly see this watermark.)"

John O'Sullivan on O'Sullivan's First Law on National Review Online

Often miscredited to Robert Conquest, O'Sullivan's First Law says, "All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing." His reasoning: "I cite as supporting evidence the ACLU, the Ford Foundation, and the Episcopal Church. The reason is, of course, that people who staff such bodies tend to be the sort who don't like private profit, business, making money, the current organization of society, and, by extension, the Western world. At which point Michels's Iron Law of Oligarchy takes over -- and the rest follows."

Students Say Holberton School Bootcamp Is Like 'Lord of the Flies' - Business Insider

I'm not shocked by this. Friends tell me that the Holberton grads they've dealt with have generally been eager but ill-prepared. Learning to code -- learning how the syntax of a computer language works, how to use the development tools, how to build a running program -- is important, but it's not the same as learning how to solve problems or how to design and integrate large software systems involving multiple engineers.

FIRST & LEGO Education Partnership Update

FIRST Robotics and LEGO are not renewing their long-time partnership, the FIRST Lego League competition, beyond the 2026-2027 season. This is bizarre and surprising. Here is LEGO's statement on the parting of ways: "LEGO® Education will launch a 2027-2028 season, and we look forward to bringing fun, inspiring and creative STEM learning and the important skills it develops to even more children in the future." The Brick Fan blog notes: "LEGO Education back in January announced that they will be releasing a new Computer Science & AI learning solution while the SPIKE Portfolio will be retired at the end of June."

A Reddit user writes:

"FLL used spike prime as its ecosystem, but Lego discontinued the commercial version years ago, and Lego education announced that they're discontinuing the education edition as well. Mindstorms as a brand has completely ceased to exist, which means FLL no longer has a way to get new control systems.

"The only motorized remote control programming system systems LEGO offers aren't able to run autonomously without an active connection to the brick, which breaks a bunch of FLL rules. They also suck compared to spike prime in terms of teach teaching kids to code and use sensors.

"Essentially, Lego moved on. The only people who were buying these kits were FLL teams, and that clearly just wasn't enough to justify the cost of manufacturing them."

When Country Was King « TK Smith

The ballrooms, dance halls, and honky-tonks of Los Angeles and Orange Counties in the 1940s and the bands that played them.

Panoramic view of Ventura and Reseda boulevards, Tarzana. - Panoramic view of Ventura and Reseda boulevards, Tarzana. (recto) - Photographs - Huntington Digital Library

San Fernando Valley, 1946. The impressive Tarzana Rexall building, Lee's Roundup, a Western Swing dance hall. Here's the view today.

This California Marsh Once Spied on the Soviet Navy - @mareislandfoundation on Tumblr

Skaggs Island, north of San Francisco Bay, was home to a base that intercepted Soviet radio signals from across the Pacific and decrypted them.

How far back in time can you understand English?

A travel blog of a trip to the English village of Wulfleet becomes a linguistic time machine, illustrating changes in the alphabet, spelling, and vocabulary from AD 2000 back to AD 1000, before the Norman Conquest.

"But as his post goes on, his language gets older. A hundred years older with each jump. The spelling changes. The grammar changes. Words you know are replaced by unfamiliar words, and his attitude gets older too, as the blogger's voice is replaced by that of a Georgian diarist, an Elizabethan pamphleteer, a medieval chronicler. By the middle of his post, he's writing in what might as well be a foreign language. But it's not a foreign language. It's all English."

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