PhD viva (thesis defence) for my work on testing compiler-optimised debug info successfully completed! 🎉 Thanks Stephen Kell and @ltratt.bsky.social for all your guidance along the way.

The idea that LLMs are bringing forth a new age of malleability, particularly through vibe coding, is a co-option of what malleability has historically meant. It achieves similar surface characteristics without the restructuring of power and literacy historically EUP advocates aimed to challenge.

A new Lab Note by Ink & Switch Researcher John Mumm, "Progressions", about the learnings from composing independent audio tools into Patchwork, part of our malleable software research www.inkandswitch.com/patchwork/no...

Starting to play with @semble.so. A nice evolution of the idea of social bookmarking.

working on a nonograms implementation in racket based on the switch picross games github.com/lexi-lambda/...

I don't like cover pages on my PDFs so I made a li'l program to strip them from PDFs in my Zotero library uvx no-more-cover-pages github.com/joshuahhh/no-more-cover-pages/

Are there any good places to find volunteering roles? I'd like to find something that makes my community / the world better, and I'm happy to volunteer my time and tech skills to do so. Something fully / mostly remote would be best. I'm based in Glasgow, UK. Global roles okay too.

Not to get political, but America is very pretty and has a lot of nice folks making cool things, and I think if we had a president who wasn’t actively trying to murder us, we could have a pretty good time

I keep seeing posts going "when ICE comes to MY city, we'll be out in the streets even harder" and man, I get that sentiment but I need everyone to understand that the work in Minneapolis is partly confrontational but MORE IMPORTANTLY aaallll the stuff organized in the background to help neighbors

Here are some ways to help Minnesota with all the essential but less visible needs. But also, go get involved with your own community. Make new friends. Get those networks going. Learn what orgs in your city are already doing good work that needs support. Don't wait. www.standwithminnesota.com

Stand With Minnesota Donation Directory

Stand With Minnesota is a hub for supporting, learning, and taking action to support Minnesotans impacted by ICE and federal enforcement.

standwithminnesota.com

Here we go... Announcing the Visible Zorker Project and Patreon! Remember how I did Visible Zork 1 and 2? I'm going to do Zork 3, and then continue through Infocom's entire canon -- in chronological order, one per month. blog.zarfhome.com/2026/01/the-...

TruffleRuby kicks off the year with a new website, a new release, and a blog post to go with it! 🎉 truffleruby.dev/blog/truffle... Many changes: * New versioning * Thread-safe Hash * No system dependencies anymore * Installs in 2 seconds * Development is now fully in the open

New blog post: De-Googling → dubroy.com/blog/de-goog... …in which I tell you about some great services & companies that I'm very happy to have discovered.

Someone should write version control à la carte

This is the issue of our time. How we respond to Trump’s secret police will define our future for generations. Our community is stronger than any masked henchmen. ICE: Get the fuck out of Illinois.

A Dutch worker went viral after explaining to their American boss that they have a life outside work.

Spray paint a plane and they'll detain you without trial and call you a terrorist. Kidnap a foreign head of state - and Keir Starmer will make it clear we've played no part in it but will wait for the scheduled press conference in a few hours before potentially condemning it

@redblobgames.com year in review, on choosing projects: "Is it that I want it done? Is it that I want to be doing it? Is it that I want to have done it? There are times I want to have done something, but when I sit down to do it, I don't actually want to." <3 www.redblobgames.com/blog/2025-12...

many organizations should be cooperatives. but especially those that are nominally nonprofit like mozilla corporation, it avoids the tendency among leadership to cosplay at american psycho

The ACM Digital Library, where a LOT of computing-related research is published (I'd say at least 75% of my own publications), is now not only providing (without consent of the authors and without opt-in by readers) AI-generated summaries of papers, but they appear as the *default* over abstracts.

anyone know any Good Discourse on "what is programming anyway"? random examples of Good Discourse: - Melanie Hoff's "Always Already Programming" (gist.github.com/melaniehoff/...) & Lucy Keer's reflection on it (lucykeer.com/notebucket/a...) - PROGRAMme (programme.hypotheses.org)

Charts and diagrams use visual structure to convey meaning. For example, spacing and alignment groups data, spatial proximity links labels to elements. But this visual structure is typically invisible to screen readers. Introducing Benthic, new research at #ASSETS2025 vis.mit.edu/pubs/benthic/

Benthic: Perceptually Congruent Structures for Accessible Charts and Diagrams | MIT Visualization Group

Graphical representations—such as charts and diagrams—have a visual structure that communicates the relationship between visual elements. For instance, we might consider two elements to be connected w...

vis.mit.edu

Radical idea: The next Dem nominee should run on making bribery actually illegal. In every way.

Ink & Switch is hosting another Social in London on Nov. 11th at the Alan Turing Institute. I'll share some early scientific work in Patchwork, & Marcel will give a peek at the Playbook programmable ink system. Also, lightning talks about "surprises in software". RSVP here: luma.com/71g0lhgo

Ink & Switch London: Building new tools for Science · Luma

Ink & Switch's mission is to help computers become better tools for thought. We believe that the promise of computers as "intelligence amplifiers" or "bicycles…

luma.com

Hey SF folks! I‘ll have a reading (more of a free association of esolang thoughts) Friday Night at Gray Area grayarea.org/event/book-l...

Book Launch & Signing — Daniel Temkin: Forty-Four Esolangs

Gray Area celebrates Artist and Author Daniel Temkin and his new monograph, "Forty-Four Esolangs."

grayarea.org

🫠 automerge.org The new Automerge website is live!! The biggest (smallest) surprise? How fun it was to build the demo! Automerge is so robust, it withstood all our weird ideas — like using physics-driven particles to literally push changes between docs — and it just worked. Perfectly. Every time.

#SPLASH folks, check out our Distinguished Paper (!) talk this afternoon at 14:15 on "Incremental Bidirectional Typing via Order Maintenance". Thomas will tell you how to efficiently update type information (including error marks) in response to local edit actions. A small step *static* semantics!?

New paper with @jakehughes.uk : Garbage Collection for Rust: The Finalizer Frontier. There are lots of GCs for Rust: we tried pushing as far as we could in a new direction, particularly looking at what can be done about the headache that is finalizers.

after careful study, I believe only people born between 1975 and 1995 should be allowed to use the internet