Roses are red...and orange, and blue, and 
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We went to the "international rose test garden" today that's downtown 
and then on a long walk through the giant forest to see the big stand of 
redwoods.

I may be, as people say, a Professional Computer Toucher but I never 
feel as at home as when I'm in the woods.

I don't feel like these are contradictory. Computation---at its 
best---is an extension of mind and body, a way to extend our ability to 
think and communicate and observe the world around us.

It's not weird to feel at home in the loud-quiet of a forest and also 
use those tools to think any more than it'd be a contradiction to use 
pens and paper while hiking.

I want to find ways to convey some of these thoughts when I'm teaching 
computer science. My job, strictly speaking, is to prepare students for 
very particular curriculum so they can transfer to 4-year schools 
well-prepared.

But I'd be lying if I didn't think the unspoken part of my job is to 
give burgeoning programmers and computer scientists a healthier view of 
what computers are good for, especially as the current trend is "turn 
over more control and autonomy to janky machine learning interfaces".

If I have to read one more "is programming obsolete now that we have 
LLMs!" thinkpiece I'm going to lose it.

What's frustrating is that I don't even think things like LLMs are 
innately bad. They're just not good for the things that capital wants to 
use them for.

I have a project on the backburner about using local, smaller, LLMs with 
students and showing them what they're good for and what they aren't. 
The tl;dr is "don't ask qquestions, use it to help process large 
quantities of information for a first pass". They can actually be 
fantastic learning tools that way, but you wouldn't know it from the 
hype.

The more students I can convince to use their knowledge for convivial 
means and not to be the arms manufacturers of modern capital the better.