Cyrus Omar in NYC
@neurocy.bsky.social
🌱 ruining programming forever @ hazel.org 🌱 professoring @ Michigan 🌱 poetry 🌱 dendrites 🌱 immersion 🌱 flowers 🌱 resisting idiocracy https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~comar
this is extremely good, not because I think Harris is likely to be the nominee again but because this is how expanding the Court becomes table stakes for everyone who wants to run for President
Taegan Goddard@politicalwire.com · 5d agoHarris Says Supreme Court Should Expand to 13 Justices https://politicalwire.com/2026/07/31/harris-says-supreme-court-should-expand-to-13-justices/
The Local-First Conf 2026 talks are up! I always get hallway tracked real hard at this event so I'm really excited to catch all the talks I missed... www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...
Local-First Conf 2026 - YouTube
youtube.com
Would assume everyone knows it by now, but just in case "First the traitors, then the invaders" is an explicit reference to The Turner Diaries, where a white supremacist revolution overruns "The System" and kills all their enemy during the evocatively named "Day of the Rope".
The Turner Diaries - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
Sunder Katwala (sundersays)@sundersays.bsky.social · last mo.X owner Elon Musk indicates he would prioritise political violence (assassination of pro-migration politicians is the common sense meaning) over violence against "invaders" (refugees, asylum seekers, maybe ethnic minorities generally) while endorsing call for violence (killing) against both groups
Just in case you still use any Basecamp products, DHH is crashing out about his AI product gently pointing out that it’s bad for him to have extermination fantasies about the Roma people.
Musk calls for the assassination of a reporter who embarrassed him with basic questions
Sunder Katwala (sundersays)@sundersays.bsky.social · last wk.There is simply no ambiguity in what Elon Musk is arguing and endorsing here.
The solution to AI safety is not to train closed models so that they never "press the nuclear button." Because we can't stop the bad guys from finding workarounds or using open models. The solution is formal security guarantees that models don't have nuclear buttons to press.
Engineering management after the cost of code collapsed: “Investing in machine-checkable correctness is now among the highest-leverage infrastructure work an org can fund” karimjedda.com/engineering-...
A reminder that UC _faculty_ and Faculty Associations — not the universities themselves nor their administrators — are waging this battle in court, demonstrating great bravery and moral clarity.
White House admits it used keywords to kill billions worth of California research grants
Federal agencies that terminated more than a thousand research grants at the University of California last year admitted that they used keywords related to diversity, gender, vaccine hesitancy and COV...
apnews.com
I'm in NYC and freeish on Wednesday if anyone wants to hang / talk about PL / make a geospatial silent disco in central park
HearHere, our geospatial silent disco system, doing it's thang at my place. still some bugs to iron out but it's happening!!!
A Haitian friend lives is terror as the July 24 deadline for termination of TPS looms. He smiles as he always does but can’t help but look pained, “they will start deportations” he said. This is a man my son runs to from across the street to hug. Not sure how to raise him in this cruel world.
the degree to which they want to destroy one of the jewels of the American republic—our exceptional research universities—is just gobsmacking
Ben Allen@evodynamics.bsky.social · 3w agoCongrats we just made it impossible to come here for a PhD www.bostonglobe.com/2026/07/16/m...
Ouroboros tentacle dissolves into bowler hat jellyfish and jumping anemones. Probably my coolest 3d find so far
this is absolutely wild. where does roberts think these agencies come from?!? who invested them with authority to act? whose mandate are they designed to execute? the president is the chief EXECUTive. his job is executing the will of Congress as it spells out in its duly-passed laws!
Aubrey Gilleran@aubreygilleran.bsky.social · last mo.Yes, Congress should be able to do these things. A court this contemptuous of Congress deserves to be packed by Congress, not only to correct these disastrous precedents but also because Congress needs to show both Article II and Article III who’s boss.
GOOD NEWS! A personalized mRNA vaccine, known as mRNA-4157, has shown promise in keeping melanoma, a deadly skin cancer, from returning. FIVE years later, NEARLY 70% of people in the vaccine group are CANCER-FREE. The vaccine also cut a person’s risk of the cancer metastasizing by NEARLY 60%.
A personalized vaccine for melanoma cut the risk of cancer returning after five years
If the vaccine is effective in a late-stage trial, it would be “paradigm-shifting,” one expert said.
nbcnews.com
there's something remarkable how on a scientific level we're performing what would essentially be miracles and on a cultural/political level, we're going in reverse
WAFB@wafb.com · last mo.New Orleans man becomes first in Louisiana functionally cured of sickle cell disease: https://www.wafb.com/2026/06/23/new-orleans-man-becomes-first-louisiana-functionally-cured-sickle-cell-disease/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=bluesky_
My afternoon has been derailed by @oppi.li pointing me to the absolutely gorgeous font collection at djr.com/fern
Fern
A humanist bookface, reimagined for the web.
djr.com
Try a little Rhombus! a fun way is functional pictures docs.racket-lang.org/rhombus-pict/ (you may already be familiar with the Functional Geometry by Peter Henderson eprints.soton.ac.uk/257577/1/fun... or the SICP picture language) Start with docs.racket-lang.org/rhombus-quick/
Pict: Functional Pictures
docs.racket-lang.org
Racket@racket-lang.org · last mo.Rhombus version 1.0 is now available! Release announcement blog.racket-lang.org/2026/06/rhom... Get Rhombus: rhombus-lang.org/download.html Rhombus is a general-purpose programming language that is easy to use and uniquely customizable.
Worse than it sounds, approximately zero new NSF grants are being funded right now: the cuts and hare-brained reallocation leaves only enough to keep previous grants funded. Research groups that do fundamental research will be unable to accept new students at all.
Science Magazine@science.org · last mo.Exclusive: The National Science Foundation is trimming this year’s budgets for hundreds of its traditional basic science programs by roughly 20% to 30%, even though its overall budget is down just 3%. https://scim.ag/4xY2KCm
"The truly visionary AI for Science company is not automating experiments or AI-generating Nature papers, but building technology to improve the collective sensemaking ability of scientists @cosmik.network and alphaXiv are both examples of startups trying to build new sensemaking infrastructure"
Science as Collective Sensemaking
What is Science?
republicofscience.substack.com
Rhombus is very cool, Racket with a well-designed extensible conventional notation.
Racket@racket-lang.org · last mo.Rhombus version 1.0 is now available! Release announcement blog.racket-lang.org/2026/06/rhom... Get Rhombus: rhombus-lang.org/download.html Rhombus is a general-purpose programming language that is easy to use and uniquely customizable.
I love well-supported unsurprising results. Truly.
Ethan Mollick@emollick.bsky.social · 2mo agoMore evidence, from a large-scale study in China, that using AI hurts learning if it undermines mental effort. When homework time drops due to AI use, so do test scores. Across studies, there is a clear theme: AI tutoring in support of classes is good, using AI to "help" with homework is bad.
Really nice work by Celeste Barnaby and colleagues at #PLDI on active learning for program synthesis. Various synthesizers, including LLMs, can produce multiple candidate programs given an underspecified intent. This system figures out multiple choice questions to ask the user to disambiguate.
