Did not expect to see this on the *Belgian* rail website? Giving real American site energy…

Claude is very useful for summarizing teams on which you don't recognize too many players.

Auf geht's Deutschland!

What on earth is @wahoofitness doing to convince my Android phone that I might want to open a Word attachment in the Wahoo app?

Direct flights to the home of football!

What even are we doing here. I'm not even sure what the ask is. This company wants me to pay them to run an AI that is going to feed my soundbites to…who exactly? No need, my soundbites are available for free right here. (-:

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! cs.brown.edu/people/sk/Co...

there are two kinds of people the ones who stop the microwave with 1 second left and psychos

The ridiculous bag restrictions "for security" for FanZones have been utterly defeated by the addition of a country with bagPIPES. Saw one yesterday, asked piper how he'd gotten his in. He said they were very confused by the pipes; instead inspected his sporran. 🙄 "VERY gently."

I’ve seen the paper. It’s not a jailbreak. It was Defense Oriented Prompting (DOP) - a capability defenders need. My thoughts about the hasty Export Controls that made Anthropic halt access to Fable. If national defense is the goal, this is an own goal against us www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anth...

Given how Zug has become crypto central, it would have been genuinely funnier if they'd set the cap at 21 million.

Memory-safe. 13% faster on average. ⚡️ The TrueType hinting interpreter in macOS and iOS has been rewritten in Swift, replacing the original C implementation. Pixel-perfect accuracy was validated across 27 million glyphs. And the results: www.swift.org/blog/migrati...

Walked around downtown Providence and then went to the FanZone for last night's game. Swear I saw more men in kilts than I did while living in Scotland. Ran into a Tartan Army bagpipe concert in the middle of things. Rocking times.

It's pride month so it seems like a good time to re-post this re. @racket-lang.org !

Wrote this about TUIs to the group Zulip today…

I've been telling people for 25 years that Jane Street is not interested in formal methods. No more! And we're actively hiring to form a new formal methods team! blog.janestreet.com/formal-metho...

That's just the angel's share -- a certain volume of baggage is expected to evaporate while it ages in the cargo hold.

TAP is definitely not giving the vibe of "a really well-run airline"…

Burning of the Gaspee 1772 > Boston Tea Party 1773 www.oceanstatemedia.org/history/did-...

Hey @kensycoop.bsky.social . Took my kid to the zoo today and as we always do, we talked about how each animal must seem strange to the other. Kid asked me a Q I have no idea about but I said "I bet I know who does" (you!): What do we know about the *intuitive physics* models of other animals? ↵

I've spent months rethinking and rebuilding my programming languages course from scratch for the agentic coding era. I wrote myself a memo explaining what I'm doing. I figure others might be interested in the redesign, so here goes! Feedback welcome of course. docs.google.com/document/d/e...

As GenAI systems do more and more, even generate proofs, the focus shifts to getting high-quality specifications. What can a *responsible* programmer do? Any solution should generate work that is *meaningful* and *moderate*. We've been working on that! blog.brownplt.org/2026/06/09/p...

Had a PhD student visiting today, the brilliant Sam Frohlich. Walked her around campus and took her to the wonderful John Carter Brown Library to see the 1776 exhibit, labeled "Foundations of Revolution". Then realized she's from the UK…so quietly led her right back out. (-: CC @kawulf.bsky.social

This ad pitch from Verizon (checked all the links in the email, they're legit) would be totally routine except: it was sent to an email address my kid created JUST for college apps. So someone in the college app chain sold the email…which has tracking. CC @jonboeckenstedt.bsky.social

Incredibly annoyed that I'm going to be away at PLDI on the day the Tartan Army is holding a Scottish fan festival in Providence — and serving IRN-BRU. (I drink one every trip to Scotland, which is enough to fortify me until the next trip. <-;) www.facebook.com/permalink.ph...

Inspired by this post from a while ago, I *finally* got around to writing up a bunch of things I find myself frequently telling people. In particular, [the current] section 5 on classroom tips directly answers this question. parentheticallyspeaking.org/articles/ped...

Being an author in 2026 means having to answer questions like this… (About a book written in 2018. And whose prose is *obviously* no, suggesting this person hasn't really cracked open the book much.)

I don't know why it hadn't occurred to me before that the Portuguese were in Goa, the Portuguese were Catholics, they were in Goa post-Reformation, so…there must have been an Inquisition. Indeed there was, TIL. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goa_Inq...

Output for most languages has not much improved in ~50 years: still linear text. But many program values would be far better off *diagrammed*. PL, cogsci, graph drawing, proofs and performance come together in our new system, Spytial! Give it a try at blog.brownplt.org/2026/05/22/s...

Hey @ohnocastro.bsky.social — I really have to hope that this excerpt does not do justice to Rep. Lima, because the alternative is to consider that the RI House has people *this* smooth-brained. Thanks for your work, @rebeccakislak.bsky.social !

If you don't recognize the reference, it's this old classic about thinking meat. web.mit.edu/people/dpoli...

The US has always been a nation of immigrants. The early US had debates on how long you had to have been here a citizen you could serve in the US Houses. This letter by Ben Franklin summarizes the debate (whose vote ended up very much pro-). bjpryor.substack.com/p/immigrants...

Update: after several months of work, I resigned from the committee yesterday. The answer to all the predictable questions is the predictable answer: yes.

New research thread: 1/ Error messages have always been designed, sometimes painstakingly, for humans. But now we have new "readers" for errors: agentic AI. Should this affect what PLs generate? Can we measure this experimentally? We have some preliminary results: ↵

There's a statistical test called Page's trend test, for testing whether a predicted *ordering* holds — so it would be funny if it were to get renamed to "Page's rank". en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page%27...

Stepped out of my office to get some water yesterday, came back and saw my monitor looking like this, and momentarily considered making it my theme.

Startled to find out that there are young people who haven't read James Iry's magnificent "A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages". Please drop what you're doing and head over. james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brie...

At Brown CS graduation last weekend, I could have sworn I saw a student go by whose mortarboard had the Rustacean logo. I thought I saw it, but couldn't be sure; then a bit later one of my colleagues turned to me and asked, "Was that a … CRAB?!?"

I was so wrong about Vaibhav Sooryavanshi. Last year I was convinced he was a flash-in-the-pan; pre-IPL bowlers would figure out some key weakness, and he'd be brought back down to earth. That can still happen; maybe they didn't take him seriously? But no erasing this season!

Congrats on becoming an FRS, @anujdawar.bsky.social !

Absolutely fascinating piece by David Oks connecting language model oddities to human cultural development. Picked this up courtesy of @deenamousa.com's "Under Development" newsletter. davidoks.blog/p/language-m...

The numbers behind the breakaway that stunned the 🇮🇹 Giro peloton in Milan Full analysis 👇 📰 domestiquecycling.com/en/features/...

OMG Claude, don't say such things in public, children might be present and listening. [Narrator: May. It MAY be.]

The very distinctive-looking Fitbit app just got rebranded as Google Health, and for the past three days I've been trying to figure out why the Southwest app suddenly showed up on my home screen… (Absent this contrast, it's awfully reminiscent of SWA.)

If like me you read the @lrb.co.uk on an iPad and find their app not quite matching your needs, here's a simple open source wrapper that adds a lot of nice features. (You still need to pay for LRB!) A bit annoying to run, but once you have it up, you're good. github.com/shriram/lrb-...

The fact that Claude Code can do all kinds of agentic things but not *checks watch* check a watch will never not be funny.

Our codebases are going to have SO MUCH GARBAGE because developers won't read the agent's work nor know what it's doing if they do.

Our codebases are going to have SO MUCH GARBAGE because developers won't ever read a diff nor know what they're looking at if they do.

Imagine a product so awesome that you can ask them a technical question and they actually respond within minutes (and it's the answer you hoped for).

Listening to Harold Varmus today: "Good stories begin with provocative questions / good stories depend on suitable technologies".