It's interesting how now this reads as a story about AI, instead of the intended subject.

Adam Rawnsley@arawnsley.bsky.social · yesterday

Today, August 4, 2026, is the setting of Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” about a fully automated house continuing on after the family who lived there and the world around it died in a nuclear blast.

Happy “liberal arts professor helps save the Union” day to all who celebrate

moot is genuinely one of the people most responsible for our current predicament.

Ash Parrish, Kotaku's LeBron James@adashtra.bsky.social · last mo.

Gonna go back in time and help moot get some hoes

One of the hardest things to accept is “my ideas are correct but unpopular” and it’s particularly tricky for leftists who romanticize “the people”

The ICFP 2026 Programming Contest will run from July 24th to July 27th. We'll get icfpcontest2026.com updated with more information on the contest in the coming weeks :)

ICFP Programming Contest 2026

The 29th ICFP Programming Contest runs July 24–27, 2026. An online programming competition for teams of any size, anywhere.

icfpcontest2026.com

I think the SpaceX valuation seems ridiculous, but the reason I invest in index funds is precisely not to make decisions about what individual stocks are a good investment, instead investing in all the big companies. Also, I'm not at all confident that the stock price is going to go down.

ryan cooper@ryanlcooper.com · 2mo ago

"If all goes well for SpaceX next week, Musk could very well be the world’s first trillionaire, at least on paper, thanks to large ownership stakes in two companies that, taken together, make less than zero profit." prospect.org/2026/06/10/e...

No useful information has ever been conveyed in this tiktok pointing at the text format.

@rprobbins.bsky.social · 2mo ago

A different take on that statement from an archaeologist 💯💯💯🎯

Getting the first covid vax felt like the waters parting. Can't imagine feeling any other way about it. Wild that so many people now feel otherwise

New research thread: 1/ Error messages have always been designed, sometimes painstakingly, for humans. But now we have new "readers" for errors: agentic AI. Should this affect what PLs generate? Can we measure this experimentally? We have some preliminary results: ↵

1961: CACM publishes Tony Hoare's quicksort algorithm. 2026: CACM publishes a self-promo article by some random guy who's pitting different LLMs against each other to pump unmitigated slop into a GitHub repo. Is this what my membership money's going toward, @acm.org?

The most important question in computer security is whether memory safety is the main problem and things will get better when C is in the ground, or if similar-scale problems will keep appearing.

Luis Villa@lu.is · 2mo ago

In a CRA webinar last week, I commented it is possible that C/C++ are a per se CRA violation, since C/C++ are insecure by design. An attendee replied "but C/C++ is what embedded use" and I said, more or less, "tough". Here's @gregkh.bsky.social on it: www.zdnet.com/article/rust...

Reading this Wikipedia page, it's hard to escape the feeling that no one at all in the entire country really believes in anything the way Soule, or any of the abolitionists, did.

Snowden St.@snowden.st · 7mo ago

one of the best white boys to do it was Silas Soule who was an abolitionist in bloody Kansas, served in the Union Army, abstained from Sand Creek, testified against Chivington, and was murdered on the streets of Denver for his courage.

No actually I personally waited for hours in line to see TPM on opening day with all my huge Star Wars nerd friends and we didn't like it.

ellie lockhart (she/they)@eleanor.lockhart.contact · 3mo ago

if you remember hating TPM as a kid - which I do too! - you probably had a dad or older brother who told you you were supposed to hate it because he did (that happened to me!)

The Ivy+ schools enroll very close to the same share of American 18 year olds they did 40 years ago. The actual drivers here are (a) broader applications (b) better matching (c) hard-to-get-into majors (d) insufficient university growth in California.

Nilo@nilo.bsky.social · 3mo ago

There's some truth to this, but I think there's a general refusal online to acknowledge that there are actually very few spaces at elite American institutions, the admissions process is pretty random, and obviously you can do great in life going to UC Davis or Cal state Fullerton.

The problem with this analysis is that the American constitutional order really does rely on a lack of polarization to function, and especially to function in a way that makes meaningful changes that those of us on the left want This is a bad thing but that and $4 will get you a cup of coffee.

Jake Grumbach@jakemgrumbach.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Given the argument that ended the VRA, I think it’s time liberals did some self reflection about the now decades long obsession with partisan polarization as the problem, as opposed to authoritarianism, extremism, oligarchy, and racism

This image appeared to me today, unbidden

But doctor, I _am_ on Bluesky!

Peter@notalawyer.bsky.social · 3mo ago

has the new york times ever thought about doing a focus group with someone who has read a book

My first job was delivering the Lewiston Sun-Journal in ~1994, at which I definitely made below minimum wage considering how inefficient I was.

Infinite 8@eternal.blacksky.app · 3mo ago

Hey how make much did you make an hr on your first job and what was the job? I made $5.25 at Hollister in 2008

How crazy is it that you finish 1:59:41 and come in SECOND PLACE #LondonMarathon

some forum bans are load bearing alexcbecker.net/blog/rationa...

Rationalism's Lamprey

How Steve Sailer wormed his way into Silicon Valley's hivemind through Slate Star Codex.

alexcbecker.net

Obviously the decline in trust in elite institutions has multiple causes, but one of them is just that our institutions have broadly become less trustworthy, and fixing this will require them to change. @chrislhayes.bsky.social wrote a whole book about this.

Mark Copelovitch@mcopelov.bsky.social · 4mo ago

I want to come back to this crucial point from @nickfleisher.bsky.social, with data. If you're going to write a report about "declining trust" in universities, then you better benchmark that to other institutions, & you cannot identify causes of that decline w/o accounting for the broader trend.

I have a particular fondness for Hungary because I spent a formative time studying there. It was just after The Wall came down. I had so many encounters that conveyed a sense of hope for a bright future. I imagine the squares of Budapest feel like that again right now.

This one still fuckin kills me

A central problem everywhere is that people want a formula or shortcut around "you just have to be good", but there isn't one, for movies or politics or buildings or software or anything else.

@lastpositivist.bsky.social · 4mo ago

I don't quite agree with this framing, and I say this as a Let That Be Your Last Battlefield defender. It could definitely be flatly preachy at times. I think that it's really just a skill issue, if your preaching is sufficiently inspiring and the stories It features in sufficiently engaging is ok.

Not my profession, but "affordable housing means housing that people can afford".

Jake Anbinder@jakeanbinder.bsky.social · 4mo ago

I think we need an inverse thread where we talk about things that normal intelligent people universally agree upon that are for some reason hot takes within your profession

It was so distressing having to root for a team wearing Duke on their chest.

Ben from Iowa@turbocorn.bsky.social · 4mo ago

DUKE (complimentary)

Requiring elementary school students to actually memorize their multiplication tables: good Comparing math standards based on word count: wtf?

TPM@talkingpointsmemo.com · 5mo ago

Math, with its black-and-white rules and rigid structure, might seem to be beyond politics. But right-leaning education advocates are now pushing new model math standards.

AI is a huge force multiplier, but only if you have fundamentals to steer it and review it well. That’s exactly why CS education still matters (arguably more than ever). #AI #VibeCoding #CSedu #SoftwareEngineering

@ilyasergey.bsky.social: "I formalised and proved the correctness of Move’s new borrow checker in Lean: 39,000 lines of mechanised metatheory, produced in under a month with the help of an AI coding assistant." How it went, and what it augurs for PL research. proofsandintuitions.net/2026/03/18/m...