It goes on: "The film, rooted in the spirit of ‘Beyond Rebel, Raval’, reimagines a university graduation speech and sets the CUPRA Raval within a story where identity is forged and conventions are challenged"

And THEN: "Built on the belief that the streets teach you the most relevant aspects in life rather than classrooms, the campaign captures a mindset of never stop learning at the ‘University of the Streets’, inspiring a new generation to find their very own way to success"

WTF

Car ads have always been dumb but this is just insulting: https://www.seat-cupra-mediacenter.com/CUPRA-Brand/cupra-news/2026/cupra-turns-streets-into-worlds-most-powerful-classroom-with-university-streets-global-launch-campaign-for-cupra-raval

It starts with:

"CUPRA launches ‘University of the Streets’, with [redacted] as the main protagonists in a film where the streets take over the narrative and the CUPRA Raval emerges as the symbol of a new cultural movement"

I don't own a car. I take public transit everywhere, and I do think personal vehicle use has real environmental costs. But I don't think driving is inherently unethical.

I live in Seoul, and the city makes transit easy for me. That's not a virtue. It's a condition I happen to benefit from. Some people live where transit barely exists, or where it doesn't get them to work, school, or care. In those places, driving is not optional.

The same is true of flying. In parts of Europe you can cross borders by train. In island nations, or in places with weak land connections, flying may be the only realistic option. “Just fly less” means very different things in those places.

A lot of what gets called my ethical choices comes from the conditions I live in. That makes me wary of turning structural failures into personal morality. If the alternative is missing or unusable, shaming people for not choosing it solves nothing.

When environmental harm gets framed as individual moral failure, attention shifts away from the structural changes that would actually matter. It's not an accident that oil companies spent decades popularizing the idea of the personal carbon footprint.

I guess I am officially a hobbyist und soon professionally irrelevant. https://www.principalengineer.com/p/the-7-levels-of-software-engineering

paging Dr. @tante for mental support

@sophieschmieg @soatok

setting some new career goals for myself

https://www.tokyoweekender.com/japan-life/news-and-opinion/japans-capybara-bath-contest/

Hardware design should be SAFER!

Memory-safe software languages changed the world and allowed to us to build massively larger systems. At their heart, memory-safe languages eliminate a category of bugs that pointer-manipulating programs suffer from.

Hardware design needs its own safe programming models but instead of memory, the problem is time! Synchronous hardware design needs to deal with a clock signal which creates discrete time steps. Every hardware module needs to think about how time affects its own logic and everything it communicates with. Getting it wrong leads to all sorts of logical bugs: reading meaningless values and using resources that are unavailable.

Our work on Filament (https://filamentHDL.com) defined a criteria for safe hardware description languages (HDLs) and showed that you can enforce it using a type system and introduce no overheads. Safe HDLs have become an interesting area of research and this year's ASPLOS features two papers exploring different threads:

- Lilac (https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.02570): Builds upon Filament applies its safety guarantees to parameterized designs. A cool outcome of this work was to show that, in addition to helping with verification, safe HDLs enable the design of fundamentally new abstractions!
- Anvil (https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.19447): Explores how Filament's verification abstractions can be applied to a higher-level, message-passing HDL and enforce safety properties!

I'm really excited to see where this line of work goes and what we can build with it! If you're around at ASPLOS and interested in this kind of work, come say hi and go watch the talks!!