enjoy a couple of single-lens phone pictures and extrapolate how cool it was in person :)

it was also the first time i've experienced firsthand how much Starlink is polluting the night sky :(

i went out to this astronomy meetup https://www.arlingtonastronomy.org/ and there were two Newtonian reflector telescopes, one commercial and one homemade. so the extra cool part is we could actually see all four *moons* of jupiter. same way newton did! incredible to me that humans figured out how to do this so long ago; it feels like magic.

wow wow jupiter is so visible!! and venus too but i dont think i've seen jupiter this well before

Orange & door hinge
Door hinge & Door cringe

I don’t think door cringe rhymes with orange

There is disagreement between me and @chrisamaphone about whether “door hinge” and simply “cringe” rhyme

@jcreed @chrisamaphone yes, especially because of homophones (or do you consider them to be different words?)

rhyming with homophones is considered a stylistic device in Turkish folk poetry.

here's an example:

Niçin kondun a bülbül (Why did you perch, oh nightingale)
Kapımdaki asmaya (Upon the grapevine by my door?)
Ben yarimden ayrılmam (I will not part from my beloved,)
Götürseler asmaya (Even if they take me to be hanged)

@chrisamaphone I refer naysayers to Private Baldrick's famous poem about World War I

BOOM BOOM
BOOM BOOM
BOOM BOOM BOOM

#BostonWeekend I've put together an opinionated roundup of things to do in #boston https://github.com/jknizer/awesome-boston

#BostonWeekend We've got a pretty solid #community in the #boston area on the #Fediverse - here's a roundup of local orgs and such that have been active here. https://fedidevs.com/s/Mzgz/ #massachusetts

does a word rhyme with itself?

i'm so confused about linkedin. if i need someone's email address to send them a message, why would i not just send them an email?

like usual men but extremely ripped just absolutely carving knife shredded

https://acronymy.net/define/lumberjacks
—submitted by theo

one can simply... listen to the disco elysium soundtrack... why has this never occurred to me before

Leiden Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics

https://leidendeclaration.ai/

i have work published in taper magazine issue 16: for good measure! a fragment of a code poem in under 2kb 💙 you can read it alongside the rest of the issue here:
https://taper.badquar.to/16/glimpse.html

Today I realized that the snake fight thesis defense thing isn't part of academic culture, it's part of *millennial* academic culture. The McSweeney's article was published sixteen years ago. My students who are graduating with their PhDs in 2026 aren't going to know about it unless I tell them, and they will not necessarily find it funny, and they most certainly aren't going to know about the 64 fanworks on AO3 or necessarily find them funny

Recently I had a chance to be publicly credited in a book for influence that I had in private that had a downstream effect I consider positive, in line with my career goals, but that happened informally. Being credited also would have made it clear that certain parts of my vision for the future are not just things I ripped off of more famous researchers who, by default, get attributed for parts of the vision we share, even when the influence is mutual. This involved a popular science publisher that, in the past, had ignored me when writing about my field of expertise many times, even when other researchers had sent them my name. Even getting interviewed was a first for me for this publisher!

That chance was quashed when the relevant influence was cut from the book. Now there is just a hole there. I have been replaced in the book by the muse of a famous researcher, nameless and never explicitly mentioned. I am a hole.

I am actually very depressed about this, even though it feels irrational to have ever expected this to work out. I know these informal sources of influence are usually left to recommendation letters. I know in this case that I have access to such a letter and that it can make my tenure case. I know that the researcher tried his best and this is more about the author and publisher of the book. And the author has even apologized to me.

But the chance of having this published in a book, as something I could cite and even show my parents, got my hopes up so high. Now the book is sitting on the floor of the entrance to my house, right where I dropped it when I first picked it up and had those hopes quashed. I'm left wondering why, time and time again, I play the role of the nameless muse.

The research communities that I work in (OS, networking, systems in general) are seeing huge increases in the number of papers submitted, which is putting strain on the reviewing process. This sucks, for everyone.

A general strategy that many venues are taking, in order to protect reviewers from overload, is to find more creative ways to reject more papers with less review (extended abstracts submitted alongside the paper, rejection based on intro alone, etc.).

This is exactly backwards, and it is going to harm our community.

[For people not in the field: acceptance rates for papers in our top venues ranges from ~15% - ~20%.]

What we need is creative ways to accept more papers. A lot more.

We are a major source of our own problems. What happens to the 80% of papers that are rejected from our top venues? Most of them get submitted again. And reviewed again. And rejected again. And submitted again.

We are creating so much work for ourselves.

Our low accept rates are already a major source of disillusionment and burnout among our students. We're going to make it worse, and we're going to pay for it.

Decisions about the publishing process get made by relatively senior, established people who can afford rejection, who have grown up in it, who are the survivors of the process. Yes because we're good at it, but also because we got lucky (anyone who thinks the peer review process doesn't involve luck needs to take a harder look).

But it's the students who put in months or years of *actually good work*, then get told "your paper is not worth reading past the introduction."

This is going to discourage students from doing their best work, it fails to give them much meaningful feedback on how to improve it, and it's going to drive people out of research. It encourages students to be less ambitious, and to put less work into each submission, since the overwhelming probability is that it's going to get rejected anyway. Maybe, now, without even being really read.

We need to increase our accept rates.

I know, it sounds hard, it's not the way we have done things, and it therefore makes us uneasy.

But I've been doing this for almost 30 years, and I no longer believe that what we are doing with our high rejection rates is maintaining high standards. I think we're nitpicking ourselves to death, increasing our own workloads, and burning out people who have the potential to be some of our most promising young researchers. The effect is not equal, either: we preferentially drive away students who don't arrive with a healthy (or unhealthy) confidence (or over-confidence) pre-installed. It's incredibly hard to properly nurture people in this environment.

Our goal *should* be to foster a community that produces the highest quality output, passed through a rigorous process that ensures that the resulting papers are sound.

I don't think we're doing that.

So c'mon, let's get creative.

TPC chairs and steering committees, I want to challenge you: look around at the venues that are trying something *other* than finding innovative new ways to reject papers. Look for alternate ways to get more reviewing capacity. Figure out ways to spread reviewing work over time to make it more palatable. Try to reward reviewers who do their job well. Make up new ways to help authors evolve work with some flaws into something that's presentable instead of going through the entire process again. Experiment with ways to add more context other than the binary of accept/reject so papers that may have some caveats can still be accepted. Some venues are trying this kind of stuff. Look at what's working, and be bold, try new stuff.

TPC members: I know, you have a lot of work to do. This is our job, though. Peer review is not some bullshit busywork that is to be avoided or half-assed. We need to be looking for ways to cut down the *other* bullshit busywork that we're asked to do, so that we can do our jobs. The more senior you are, the more ability you probably have to push back on that other bullshit - not just to avoid doing it yourself, but to make sure *nobody* has to do it. Please. Protect your juniors from bullshit so that they can do the work that matters. And all reviewers: we need to adopt an attitude of lifting up ideas that are worth considering, not looking for reasons to slap as many things down as possible.

Yeah, I'm talking about a lot of work. Yeah, none of us have time to do it.

We've got to do it anyway. We're putting too much work into a system that's not going to get fixed by little incremental filters. It's demoralizing. Work for a better publishing system rather than entrenching the worst things about the one we've got.

It'll feel more rewarding.

Need a running example for my NSF CAREER. Would appreciate some help since I suck at examples, but having one would make my proposal way better.

It should be a verification or formal math project (described at a very high level, like "suppose we are verifying a compiler from our own language to CompCert CLight" or whatever) with the following (IME very common) properties:

1. It is well-motivated and based on actual proof developments I can cite.

2.I can simplify it dramatically when discussing it in the proposal for exemplary purposes.

3. The programs, definitions, and theorem statements are not all known in advance---it makes sense for the proof engineer to figure those things out as they go.

4. It depends on a custom library and/or exists in a specific domain that uses a lot of custom definitions and custom styles (but not a monorepo like mathlib).

5. It is something that it would make sense to collaborate on with a sizable group of collaborators, who may be opinionated about questions of proof engineering best practices, or about best practices specific to that domain.

Please let me know if you have ideas. Can be in any proof assistant language.

yeah i send v5 in socks now 😎
https://youtube.com/shorts/3KkozVIlM3o?si=-t8D_NDbzXp9xm51