Congratulations to Dr Luke Dramko (my lucky 13th PhD graduate!) for his successful and stellar defense yesterday of “Neural Decompilation with Minimal Risk.” The last chapter isn’t published yet but STAY TUNED because it’s a symbolic approach for proving the fidelity of neurally-decompiled code. 1/

You know, instead of debating how we should go overboard to protect the one man who's the most hated provocateur of malevolent violence in the entire nation, we could just remove him from office through the normal procedures.

Need a breather from the 29 sessions on AI for Software Engineering at #ICSE2026? Fuzzing is still the gorilla in the room when it comes to automatic testing in practice. 1/

#Pittsburgh street sweep parking enforcement is weaksauce; passed a sweeper weaving around ?? illegally parked cars. Cue acute memories of life in Cambridge 20 years ago, when a car would drive around at 6 am blaring STREET CLEANING. ALL CAHS PAHKED ON EVEN NUMBAHED SIDE WILL BE TAGGED AND TOWED. 1/

All these hot takes on the leaked Claude Code codebase. Listen. All code looks terrible if you’re just looking at it, vibed or not. The real question I, paying customer, have is totally unrelated to the specifics of Anthropic’s codebase and is instead this: wtf, you guys. What the shit is this.

So many trend articles are just wishcasting or dooming.

Sharon 🪳🌹@sharonk.bsky.social · 7mo ago

this is objectively not happening, Fox

An article that wasn't focused on elite colleges might be capable of considering that disability accommodations are about a student getting a good education for themselves rather than framing things in terms of a hunger games competition for who gets to be elite in society

First snow of the year, at the perfect temperature, and CMU students responded by building DOZENS of snowmen of all sizes all across campus. It was delightful. The (college) kids are alright. ☃️ #proflife (These were done by my kids, who are also delightful.)

Book reviews came back! Generally very constructive, but I’m delighted to learn that reviewers reading 300 pages STILL manage to pick out the EXACT same detail to give EXACTLY opposing feedback. R1: “excellent lay explanation of technical concept X”, R2 “some explanations inaccessible, e.g., for X.”

After that meeting, I'm never playing poker against Zohran Mamdani.

My kids are pressuring us for pet rats. Resisting, for now, but I see the writing on the wall. My long-ago advice to @shriram.bsky.social soon will come full circle.

www.cics.umass.edu/news/fse-tes... Incredibly honored to receive the ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering 2025 Test of Time Award honorable mention for our work on overfitting in automated program repair. with Ted, @clegoues.bsky.social, Earl.

Hoping this isn’t a sign of a streak, as the second conference in a row where my travel home is fubar (bumped from first flight; still technically possible to make my second, we’ll see). Am accepting thoughts and prayers at this time.

Claire Le Goues @clegoues.bsky.social gave a fantastic ISSTA @issta.bsky.social 2025 keynote this morning on software correctness in the age of generative AI.

Successfully defended my thesis today! Call me Doctor now :D Big thank you to my advisors @vhellendoorn.bsky.social and @clegoues.bsky.social! :)

SUP fellow yinzers flying back from Cancun tomorrow: let the record show that I DID pay an extra $120/ticket to carefully select seats such that my spouse and I were seated next to our 4 and 6 yo minor children, and it was American Airlines that decided to separate us. 🙃

‘You Can’t Let This Happen,’ Says Fundraising Email From Sitting U.S. Congressperson

I dearly wish that the MSM would give Ted Cruz’s stupid list the primetime mockery coverage it deserves. Turns out if you search for the word “inequality” you get….Math proposals. Very woke and neo-Marxist. 🙄

all I know is that had President Biden forced out the FAA chief under pressure from his top adviser and his corrupt motives, and then the next week there was a plane crash that killed more than 60 people, Republicans would be howling that it was an impeachable offense.

Apparently all the PhD researchers holding prestigious NSF-funded research fellowships are having their salaries withheld until some unspecified time when the leadership figures out how to eliminate any grant funding that doesn’t align with the president’s political ideology.

Ben Stone@benstemon.bsky.social · 2y ago

It’s official: all funding requests made on Tuesday by postdocs for their salaries have been unilaterally rejected by NSF.

Government by ever growing katamari damacy ball of awful, incompetent, evil shitheads is going well.

Not gonna lie I did kinda expect our Democratic politicians to have something like a plan to counter the 920-page detailed fascist blueprint that was published in April 2023

Void shout: want a student to run experiments via OpenAI. Can't get to Tier 2 until 7 days after buying $50 credit. Can't get to 3 until actually using $50, waiting 7 more days (it's kinda hard to spend $50 at Tier 1, for the record). Can't add more than $50 at once. Their "support" is ChatGPT. 1/

In professional news: one of the things Biden signed his last week of office was a recognition of a set of PECASE awardees. Unbelievably honored (not to mention completely dumbfounded) to have been included on that list. 1/ www.cmu.edu/news/stories...

CMU Researchers Receive Presidential Early Career Awards

Carnegie Mellon University's Ismaila Dabo, Claire Le Goues and Aaditya Ramdas are among the recipients of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest accolad...

cmu.edu

Check out what my soon-to-graduate student Kush has been up to with the FAIR team! I particularly like how TestGenEval incorporates multiple metrics of test suite adequacy. 😊

Kush Jain@kjain14.bsky.social · 2y ago

Thrilled to announce our new work TestGenEval, a benchmark that measures unit test generation and test completion capabilities. This work was done in collaboration with the FAIR CodeGen team. Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2410.00752 Leaderboard: testgeneval.github.io/leaderboard....

Gave the last lecture of the semester yesterday, so of course 6 hours later I was down with a chest cold, and as of today/next day, I’ve totally lost my voice. #proflife

In parenting wins, I’m pleased to report that my 3-yo son’s consistent, natural, uncoached/unprompted reaction to seeing a cybertruck in the wild is to burst out laughing, point, and say, “that’s so silly!”

BTW, if you’re interested in leakage in LLM-based SE results — this other paper doesn’t focus on leakage, but takes a bit of a side quest on the subject, related to the BigVul dataset and vulnerability detection.

Dr. Claire Le Goues@clegoues.bsky.social · 2y ago

We have other recent results on LLM-based security vulnerability detection that includes similarly alarming indications of leakage on BigVul, even though that’s not the main point of the study…(s/o to the student, Aidan, not On Here.) arxiv.org/abs/2406.05892 So…yeah…we may have a problem. 😅 /fin

Live view of professors joining Bluesky.

a woman is opening the trunk of a blue hyundai car

ALT: a woman is opening the trunk of a blue hyundai car

media.tenor.com

I'd like to thank that one student in the corner who nodded along with me all semester. You make it all possible.