Mike O'Boyle: I worked all my career in automatic parallelization. A quick summary of the area: we failed.

There is an advert out for a job in Birmingham under my supervision: jobs.ac.uk/job/DFP869/res…
The EPSRC grant funding it is in collaboration with Graham Hutton (Nottingham) on the topic 'Semantics-Directed Compiler Construction'.

Off-by-one error

Can we all stop evaluating research based on whether the results are 'surprising' please?

This is lazy reviewing. Surprising doesn't matter--novelty does. We might all think something's true, but the first work that *shows* it is true empirically makes an important contribution.

This is a game changer! Guardian/Observer article:

theguardian.com/science/2023/d…

More detailed blogpost:

medium.com/quantinuum/eve…

Lets stop writing paper reviews as if they are movie reviews.

Submit to ECOOP'24! Papers are due Jan 17 (1st round) and April 17 (2nd round). Guido Salvaneschi and I are trying a new & exciting review process that we believe will help us make better, more objective decisions-to the benefit of authors and readers alike!🧵

medium.com/@jonathanaldri…

I am giving a short and informal talk at OOPSLA about PL research HuaweiUK in the final 'sponsor' session of the day. Come and have a chat if you are around!

For my colleagues around the world: form unions, go on strike, fight for better working conditions. It works. Being 'nice' doesn't. I've been on strike now most years I've been faculty. Exhausting, but we won. My pension will be around 30+% larger. Many won even more.

You may see the purple circle 🟣 on a lot of accounts right now. It is good to remind people what this symbol means given the political climate: 'purple is the color of the joint Jewish-Arab struggle against violence and escalation, and for peace, equality and social justice'

Call for participation: HAFDAL 2024

The 1st Workshop on Hardware Acceleration of Functional and Declarative Languages (HAFDAL '24) will be co-located with HPCA, Edinburgh on March 2nd or 3rd 2024. This workshop will bring together computer architects and programming language

Regarding the existential risk that AI allegedly poses, in his latest show Bill Maher pressed Tristan Harris to explain what it is. TH seemed to reply that explaining this risk would only make it greater, so he declined to answer. Is that an argument that people make now?

Can we please have a genuine Israeli-Palestinian peace movement in the US? I want one so badly. And peace doesn't mean the status quo before this, it genuinely means recognizing every human's right to life and freedom and self-determination

Even though I see many possibilities to improve our current review and publication system, I can only applaud the professionalism of the current #popl review operation. A big thank you to Derek Dreyer (@[email protected]) who I am sure dedicated a monumental amount of time to organizing it.

To be honest, I think the math community's approach of 'accept correct (and nontrivial) work, and let time determine how it will be useful' works out far better than every other scientific community's attempt to police what will be useful ahead of time

Yep. Sadly this kind of reviewer behavior is the rule, not the exception.
#poplreject

ChatGPT “proves” the cube root of 27 is irrational, then computes it to be 3, then admits it was wrong about its irrationality, and then finally, when asked to find its error, claims it was right all along. Undisputed king of BS.

I'm delighted to announce that the next Midlands Graduate School (MGS) in the Foundations of Computing Science will be hosted at the University of Leicester, UK from 8-12 April 2024. Further details coming soon... cs.nott.ac.uk/MGS/

Six fundamental beliefs that bias our view of the world:

1. My experience is a reasonable reference.
2. I make correct assessments of the world.
3. I am good.
4. My group is a reasonable reference.
5. My group is good.
6. People's attributes (not context) shape outcomes.

Apoorv my wife thought for a long time that Jane Street was a t-shirt company.