Putin said earlier this week that Russia has no plans to invade Europe. I had a deja vu moment when I was listening to his crap:

If something goes wrong with this update, I can't really say I wasn't warned.

After triumphantly proclaiming the return of Herr Dreyer over two months ago, I finally managed to push out a proper blog post. Enjoy. herrdreyer.wordpress.com/2025/10/19/o...

Lia Schütze, a student at MPI-SWS, presented this poster at our recent retreat. I was blown away. Not only is it a work of art (which she designed herself), but the visuals actually made sense as a structural device for explaining the work.

I wrote about Claude Code, which to my absolute astonishment is quite good at theorem proving. For people who don't know theorem proving, this is like spending your whole life building F1 engines and getting lapped by a Tesco's shopping trolley www.galois.com/articles/cla...

The President of the United States is threatening to go to war with an American city. This is not a joke. This is not normal. Donald Trump isn't a strongman, he's a scared man. Illinois won’t be intimidated by a wannabe dictator.

So excited and honored to receive an ERC Starting Grant for the project BrainAlign!! BrainAlign will bring LLMs closer to human understanding by directly aligning them with the human brain. Stay tuned for our findings, and multiple postdoc and PhD openings in the coming years!

It's official: RTFM, the faculty mentoring workshop, is happening again, this time at POPL 2026 in Rennes. The one we had at PLDI 2024 in Copenhagen was well received, so I'm looking forward to the next edition. Stay tuned!

I'm back. herrdreyer.wordpress.com/2025/08/03/h...

Look, ma, I'm a hacker! 🤣

I appreciated them asking me about classical music, one of my primary sources of renewable energy in life.

I received a heartbreaking email today: A paper in a special issue I’m editing is being retracted because one of its authors is afraid of losing their job and their legal status in the U.S. if they publish a scientific study on evolution. Yes, on evolution, nature's engine of diversity.

Does unsafe undermine #rustlang 's guarantees? steveklabnik.com/writing/does...

Based on the responses to this post, it would seem Bluesky is not a significant improvement on X.

Is it possible to build a formally verified GC for OCaml that can be plugged into the compiler? We should how to in: "A Mechanically Verified GC for OCaml" kcsrk.info/papers/verif... This has been accepted to the Journal of Automated Reasoning. Code: github.com/prismlab/ver...

Showed "8 1/2", my favorite film, to colleagues at MPI last night. Despite not being Italian, a Catholic, a filmmaker, a creative genius, or having a mistress (!), I find I relate to this film like no other. It captures how I experience the world and myself, and offers therapy for the impostor.

Are there not more than a handful of Republicans willing to stand up to Trump's assault on science? This kind of politicization of science is a disaster for science in America, and thus for science in general.

Well-deserved! Iris is also a really great example of how well-engineered artifacts make it dramatically easier to pursue technically deep research.

Very proud to announce that the first Iris paper received the 2025 Most Influential POPL Paper Award this week. This is a testament to the amazing contributions of a wonderful international network of collaborators. www.youtube.com/live/ZKwpY0g...

I am very happy for @herrdreyer.bsky.social and @natefoster.bsky.social who have become ACM Fellows! Well deserved!

My father was an amazing person, so brilliant and funny, so passionate yet pragmatic, so caring and nurturing of others. I am so sad to have lost him, but I am also so happy when I think of all the people he touched and who carry a piece of him in their souls. May we all keep his spirit alive.

Delighted to learn that the Faculty Mentoring workshop (RTFM@PLDI'24), organised by Amal Ahmed, @herrdreyer.bsky.social, and myself, was appreciated by the PLDI community: blog.sigplan.org/2025/01/02/s... If you'd like to help with organising the 2025 edition of RTFM, please, get in touch!

The idea for the paper came to Dr. Woodcock during a lunchtime discussion with Jay Falletta...The two were working on a project about washing machines, which strain Australia’s extremely limited water resources. They were “a little bit bored” by the task, Dr. Woodcock acknowledged.

I finally watched "Torn Curtain", a late Hitchcock film that is generally considered a failure. Much to my surprise, I thought it was a lot of fun! Paul Newman and Julie Andrews were clearly miscast and have zero chemistry, but... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torn_Cu...

I wonder if I am the only person on earth who celebrated Christmas/New Year’s by watching both Squid Game 2 and Wanda (a classic depressing 1970 film by Barbara Loden, which Pamela Anderson recommended on her Criterion Closet picks). www.criterion.com/films/29450-...

I love this. And good call on snagging the entire Bergman set, Pamela -- it cost me a couple hundred bucks! www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyo_...

I'm only here because a bunch of interesting people moved here. I have no expectation that people will behave better here. www.politico.com/news/magazin...

New rule: Authoritarians don't get to win just because it's the first Tuesday of the month.

The paper on data-race-free OCaml is out! If you want to learn more about the zoo of new mode axes (contention, uniqueness, portability, ...) and cool new abstractions like capsules, it's all there! iris-project.org/pdfs/2025-po...

I keep trying to migrate this one and the video gets corrupted. It’s just that powerful! #FunctionalProgramming #Haskell #OCamel #Programming

Post you from a different era 1983, my University of Glasgow matriculation card.

If you are looking for a quick way to follow everyone you used to follow on the vile site, there’s a solution! “Sky Follower Bridge” - works like a charm. Make sure to give some monetary love to the developer! lifehacker.com/tech/use-thi...