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• Post #4395070

  Something I love about film festivals is, whereas most commercial movies are made for audiences & fine-tuned by algos, here you still find self-indulgent flicks. Some are terrible, and some are just amazing. RIIFF is one of my favorite things about summer! https://film-festival.org/

• Post #4309491

  0/ At the AIMCS (AI for Math and CS) workshop at FLoC 2026, Swarat Chaudhuri ran a really fun panel on "How should the Formal Methods community respond to AI progress?" He put a lot of thought into very good questions, so here are my answers to them: ↵

• Post #4309490

  Done traveling for the summer; back on my bike in the Ocean State.

• Post #4309489

  I would really like passkey advocates to lay out in full how one helps elderly parents once they switch to passkeys. (Can be done; not trivial. This article rambles about YubiKeys—like typical customers need one—while entirely missing this disadvantage.) https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/what-are-passkeys/

• Post #4309488

  One of my favorite uses of Claude is to show photos of things from airplanes and ask it to teach me more about geography/geology. Sometimes it needs help with geolocation; then it'll even go dredge up research articles about the area. Like the various "geology from planes" books.

• Post #4309487

  Did someone get laid off by the Sun and get hired by CricInfo?

• Post #4309486

  That ridiculous feeling when you put on a dumb Hindi comedy/action movie (Bank Chor, 2017) to chill, and half-way through are startled to find that one of your best friends from high school, Suresh Venkat, is in it. Totally destroyed my concentration, which fortunately it did not need.

• Post #3680983

  RE: https://mstdn.social/@plragde/116886399803019269 Polish breweries making mango lassi IPAs is leaving me a tiny bit confused about whether globalization was or wasn't a good thing. (-:

• Post #3478134

  The restoration of the Ghent Altarpiece is *absolutely stunning*. There are lots of videos of the restoration work, so I wanted to see it afresh. The 30 min AR tour is actually not half bad either (& you can skip ~10min if you know all the history). Brilliantly exhibited too.

• Post #2210029

  Posting on behalf of Apart Research: Call for mentors: SPS Fellowship (June-Oct 2026). Already in: • Erik Meijer, Leibniz Labs (creator of LINQ + Rx) • me! Senior formal methods + AI safety researchers, apply by Tue May 5 AoE: https://linktr.ee/apartresearch

• Post #2143826

  One of the fun things about being yelled at and 'splained about GenAI coding by various people on here is that multiple people who live in Providence (one whom I didn't know earlier) reached out through DM and said, "hey, wanna talk about AI?", and I've had fun meeting each of them in person. Thanks, Mastodon!

• Post #1981062

  Adam Leventhal and Bryan Cantrill will be talking with @kfisler and me on the Oxide and Friends podcast this evening (5pm Pacific/8pm Eastern) about our "experiences enabling students with agentic AI". Join in! https://discord.gg/QrcKGTTPrF?event=1500866494588780544

• Post #1920510

  In The Economist:

• Post #1869181

  To make it easier esp. for junior folks (students, postdocs, jr faculty) to talk to me, I'm trying a new thing: open office hours at conferences! Come find me at PLDI 2026, using the public calendar linked to the page below. Please feel free to reshare! https://cs.brown.edu/people/sk/Contact/Calendar/

• Post #1795268

  RE: https://discuss.systems/@keithpjolley/116488992855908604 It's not just "code", it's also algorithms, libraries, solvers, etc. I see this problem all the time with Claude Code, and indeed this was a central theme of our agentic coding class.

• Post #1570639

  Universities are amazing places. I can walk a few blocks from my office and spend the morning hearing @Biella and @steveklabnik.com back-to-back at a humanities workshop about technology. https://humanities.brown.edu/events/AILab/scale-workshop

• Post #1570638

  I've been waiting for articles that point out the existential threat that AI coding technologies pose to the Indian tech sector. Here's one. I fear that the social and cultural—and hence political—consequences in India could be even worse than in the US. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-04-16/the-ai-revolution-leaves-india-s-tech-graduates-unprepared-for-the-future

• Post #1570637

  Man, old universities are weird places. Went to attend a talk (featuring linguists and computer scientists debating language models) in a room I hadn't been in before, and it turns out they have a full-ass Flemish tapestry just hanging from the wall.

• Post #1570636

  RIP Luna the rat. After her sis Rizzo passed last month, she totally deteriorated. )-:

• Post #1570635

  This NYT article about the Venice (Art) Biennale [ https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/19/arts/design/venice-biennale-trump-us-pavilion.html ] reminds me that last year's Venice Architecture Biennale's American pavilion, Porch [ https://www.porchusavenice2025.org/ ] was simply gorgeous.

• Post #1570634

  Now that people are starting to make travel plans to FLoC: if you're doing education, please consider submitting to Tools for Educational Activities in Logic! Lots of categories: you can even re-send us *existing papers* (please see CFP)! (Please reshare!) https://teal.cs.brown.edu/floc2026/

• Post #1570633

  Important class updates from Michael Littman:

• Post #1310913

  The blossoms are out on campus, and Marcus Aurelius approves.

• Post #1266033

  The OOPSLA 2025 Web site is now fully live, including the HotCRP submission site (which is linked to it). Submit away! https://2025.splashcon.org/track/OOPSLA

• Post #1208246

  This is NOT a formal job posting, just testing waters. I have a year of post-doc money. Esp. int'd in formal methods + applied cogsci + diagramming. If you do work tied to my research, reach out (see my page). Must have US work auth, sorry. Please feel free to share/boost!

• Post #1114376

  I have a particular fondness for Hungary because I spent a formative time studying there. It was just after The Wall came down. I had so many encounters that conveyed a sense of hope for a bright future. I imagine the squares of Budapest feel like that again right now. ↵

• Post #1111454

  Scheme, the ur programming language, is 50 years old, as Jason Hemann just reminded me.

• Post #1099687

  Soheila Sokhanvari is an Iranian artist in the UK. She has a brilliant project at the Tate Britain of real passports with fake stamps in them. One of them reads: "Department of State•It Can Happen Here!•So Let's Nuke 'm First•United States of America". https://www.soheila-sokhanvari.com/?gallery=passports

• Post #1055814

  Real or slop? Can you tell which PL paper is real and which is slop? This is brilliant. https://slop.zackg.me/

• Post #978745

  Flag of Greece before and after defragmentation.