If you're ever in Luxembourg, go to Clervaux Castle to see the remarkable "Family of Man" series by Steichen. He was originally from Luxembourg, so he wished for this collection to end up there. steichencollections-cna.lu/eng/collecti... At the entrance is a Sherman Tank from the Battle of Clervaux.

"non-franchise film" … for now.

Robert Lyman argues that we know far too little about the Burma War of WW2, and I think he's even more right than he says: I don't remember hearing *anything* about it in my (Indian) schooling. Indians, Americans, Africans, some Brits…and Gen. Slim. www.tttpodcast.com/season-5/a-w...

Excited and terrified to be visiting and speaking ("Help Wanted with Words and Pictures") at a cognitive science department for the first time. Imposter syndrome at 11. If you're at Indiana University, come by the Mesolab slot, Tue Mar 24, 2pm, 6th Floor Geology Conference Room!

On Monday, @sunshowers.io and @davidcrespo.bsky.social joined me and @bcantrill.bsky.social to talk about their use of LLMs for building software--not to make vibe-coded one-offs, but to build much *more* robust systems software.

For people who love an obscure museum, I commend the Museum of Anaesthesia in London. It's tiny, very nerdy, evinces great professional pride, and run by wonderful folks. Interestingly, one of the books on the museum reading shelf was "Fear". anaesthetists.org/Home/Heritag...

They should just go with the what-three-words: it's already defined, the words aren't likely to get cancelled later, and they'll give it the quirk that British place names have.

RIP Rizzo, the g.o.a.t.est of our pets. Full of life, energy, curiosity, and fun to the very, very end.

This piece from the LRB blog, "It cannot read the human heart", about a (Chinese) plagiarism scandal, has total «Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote» energy, which is both particularly fitting and ironic in this situation. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/fe...

New textbook cover?

Lots of #Banff photos in my TL for #ThrowbackThursday, so here's one I took in 2007.

"For sale: metaverse, never used."

Pope Leo is the first Pope to have ever experienced the US healthcare system, so there's that

40 years of aviation history in one photo. But the reality is, we tried the really fancy one, then retreated to the middle one for sustained daily use.

This article is rightly making the rounds, but somewhat misses the point. The Guardian annoys you because you aren't paying. What is really off here—and the article completely fails to talk about—is what they do to *subscribers*. I'm already PAYING! thatshubham.com/blog/news-au...

TIL that age 22, JM Coetzee, armed with degrees in english and math, moved to England to work as a *programmer*. Thank goodness that didn't last!

@ilyasergey.bsky.social: "I formalised and proved the correctness of Move’s new borrow checker in Lean: 39,000 lines of mechanised metatheory, produced in under a month with the help of an AI coding assistant." How it went, and what it augurs for PL research. proofsandintuitions.net/2026/03/18/m...

I apologize for this idea

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

365 Challenge No.2 2026 - Publish a photo each day on a weekly topic Week 11 (Abstract) - Day 7 - Inside packing material #fotosbyfaj #fajweeklychallenge2026 #photography #blueskykin #abstract more at fotosbyfaj.com

this programming language is batteries included. due to an incident on a United Airlines flight involving those batteries, code written in this language is banned from air travel by the TSA and FAA.

Can't Sonics also reference the Puget Sound?

Tomorrow: Admitted PhD student visit day. Me, today: Getting Claude to write code to get Claude to run experiments to test a conjecture I've had, yeeting cash at it so I can run more in parallel, but trying to stay in Tier 1 so this doesn't goes beyond fun money. What a world.

Hitting new levels of nirvana.

I knew I was in place with a strong Indian population when I landed in Singapore and saw Black Forest Cadbury Dairy Milk.

A fun fact, uncovered while preparing for my next Gresham Lecture (23rd March): "Whereas the size ratio of humans to the Great Pyramid of Giza is 1: 69 million, the ratio is 1: 5800 million for ants and in relation to the largest of their mounds." Go ants!

What if we could extract the world model that television installs in its viewers? Some thoughts about media, world models and culture. open.substack.com/pub/senykama...

Having a hard time believing this ides of March story, you're telling me senators did something other than send out fundraising texts

A little offended Grammarly didn't make a sloppelganger of me

Another banger by J. B. Crawford in his "Computers Are Bad" series, this time going through computer history from PLATO to Lotus Notes. PLATO is probably the most influential computer system almost nobody knows about (unlike, say, Mother of All Demos). computer.rip/2026-03-14-l...

The day for our annual zeppole run! I hesitate to say we gat ours from LaSalle: the choice of bakery inspires strong sentiment in Providence…

awoke from uneasy sleep to find myself transformed into a feature not a bug

Ever wondered why you can see underwater bubbles: invisible air in invisible water? It's because light bends slightly at the boundary between air & water, so light coming from behind the bubble is diverted away from your eye. The resulting dark line shows you the bubble must be there. Beautiful!

He who refuses to do arithmeticis doomed to talk nonsense. —John McCarthy

"Man is born free and is everywhere in supply chains."

it just occurred to me that let there be light was the first prompt

Rinse and repeat until the p-value looks good enough, then ship. They weren't doing science anyway.

A local bus

This is the best product review I’ve read: samhenri.gold/blog/2026031... It doesn’t matter if you’re interested in the MacBook Neo or not; this is the kind of essay that makes you think about the potential of technology and the joys of exploration.

Setting up a night time falconry desplay team called Our Kestrel Manoeuvres In The Dark

TIL that in 1784, @brown.edu President Manning and Chancellor Hopkins (co-signer of the Declaration of Independence) made a petition to a benefactor to get a chair in French established at Brown. The person they petitioned was…Louis XVI. (It didn't succeed.)

"No field of science should be associated with a face." Sabrina Imbler @sabs.bsky.social on what happens with a scientific field is overrun by charismatic megafauna. defector.com/vibrations-f...

Really nice piece by @theanalyst1.bsky.social explaining how the IPL auction was created not just to be attention-getting (they really could have chosen a better name; the Bristol comment is on-the-nose) but to overcome a key weakness in "salary cap" methods. cricverse.substack.com/p/money-for-...

I love a stickler for precision and a discussion about the true nature of things. But I can separate that from observed phenomena. I wonder if during the early days of flight, people said, "Well akshually Mr Wright, you didn't really *fly*". (Yes, this is a GenAI post.)

If 42 states already provide them, then they're not really "incentives" any longer anyway. RI is close enough to CT and MA, we can wait a few extra milliseconds for the packets to round-trip. (-:

Super excitedly looking forward to this workshop on Software, Community, Territory at Brown's humanities center @cogutinstitute.bsky.social : @biella.bsky.social , @steveklabnik.com , @ohrg.org , and all kinds of other amazing people. humanities.brown.edu/events/AILab...

When I lived in the UK ~13y ago, I don't remember ever hearing about Windrush. I feel like I saw *numerous* references to Windrush this past month, including the Waterloo statue and Tube line. Is this a new awareness—if so, what triggered it—or was I just oblivious before?

Education researchers: what are good books by knowledgeable folks (educators, researchers) about how US curricula changed after the "Sputnik moment", and what the lasting consequences were (e.g., did things "revert to norm" in 10 years?)? CC @tonofcrates.bsky.social

"it'll look good on your cv"