To: the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the ones who see things differently

Subject: you should write an Onward! paper

alarmingdevelopment.org/?p=1708

I'm going 'on tour' soon... among others, going to be in the Bay Area on Tuesday 7th and Wednesday 8th November. Happy to chat with anyone who's around! Also will have some time in New Zealand and Australia the fortnight after that...

No coincidence that the first such statement comes from one of few institutions retaining a shred of academic self-governance.

(But no time for Cam-complacency. The votes were alarmingly close, no doubt owing partly to recent Regent House gerrymandering.)

Saw a tweet (or was it a toot?) in the last week or so about how apparent AI 'advances' are at least partly a function of giant compute resources being owned by few companies -- clearly true.

Like a fool, I did not 'like' it. Can anyone help me find it? Looking to mine this seam

Does anyone know a good reference for static analysis taxonomy like 'flow-sensitive', 'context-sensitive' etc.? I think I absorbed them as folklore, but hopefully they're described somewhere.

Some years ago I took on a related question (static vs dynamic) humprog.org/%7Estephen/blo…

Interesting post, interesting discussion but (my take) missing the elephant.
Languages grow huge because existing approaches to interop are so dire. This amplifies the incentive to pile all features into one language, rather than express parts of a codebase in languages that suit

Popped into the new West Cambridge library (sorry, 'high-intensity study space' -- you can't make it up) and chanced upon some academic texts that seemed a bit too appropriate.

Although it's provocative to label bikes as 'unsustainable', there are lots of interesting observations here about modern manufacturing, materials, and market dynamics all conspiring to worsen long-term value. solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2023/02/can-we…

Keeping Microsoft Teams running has become a daily permacrisis. MS seem to have stopped offering the Linux client (empty dir?!); web one doesn't work in Firefox; Chrome now randomly crashes with GPU-related errors; Android one is now flaky on my old phone. packages.microsoft.com/repos/ms-teams…

A razor-sharp thread well worth reading, not just for the references to 'stochastic parrots' and 'Hapsburg AI'. Declining signal-to-noise is the tragedy of our age, quality being replaced by superficial plausibility... yet S/N was Google's initial strength.

Just joined Mastodon by following these steps. They rely on an API due to get paywalled off *tomorrow*! fedifinder.glitch.me

Also, an additional essential step (for me): switch to 'light mode'. I really don't know how people live in the dark like that without falling asleep.

It seems common that university courses on operating systems include a bit about how to implement malloc() and free().

But why? It seems out-of-place, needing so much awkward caveating: 'we are now [potentially] in user-space'; 'unrelated to all that page-table stuff'; etc.

Until today I thought 'statistical multiplexing' was an idea basically every computer scientist would know...

... but I notice it doesn't have a Wikipedia page, and the top search results are super-specific to networking, which the idea is not.

How giant is my misapprehension?

I spend far too much of my life fighting presentation/diagramming software that doesn't work.

Does anyone have a solution that isn't either 'I use [Windows/Mac]' or 'I mastered Tikz and then wrote a custom UI layer for Inkscape'?