Something I love about film festivals is, whereas most commercial movies are made for audiences & fine-tuned by algos, here you still find self-indulgent flicks. Some are terrible, and some are just amazing. RIIFF is one of my favorite things about summer! film-festival.org

Home RIIFF - Rhode Island International Film Festival

Discover the Rhode Island International Film Festival — a premier showcase of independent cinema and Oscar-qualifying short films.

film-festival.org

Adding a new "how to build an agentic loop" assignment to my intro class, since it's the new metacircular interpreter for 2026.

Generating some new code for my fall intro class. Had not expected this profile of platforms for incoming CS-interested (and numerous CS-heavy) students. I was expecting (hoping?) Linux and Windows to be flipped.

In the UK, Grade I is the highest listing of exceptional buildings deserving of special protection (St. Paul's, York Minster, Blenheim, Clifton Bridge, etc.); only 2.5% of listed buildings are Grade I. One of them, believe it or not, is this bike shed. historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-...

For a while programming looked most under AI threat, but suddenly mathematics has taken pole position. My theory for why is 2-fold: 1. Math has had 1000s of years to get to clean formulations. 2. Math is self-contained: no "network misconfigured", etc. to gum up the works. ↵

A lot of people forget, or aren't old enough to know, that Google has a track record of forcing things in where they don't belong. Just think of Google+. Whole stories have been written about its needless injection everywhere, until its eventual demise. www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

Google Just Ruined One of Its Most Important Tools

Google Earth was a boon for researchers—and then came the deepfakes.

theatlantic.com

Since subscribing to the @lrb.co.uk , for fun I've been reading all the old issues from the first on. This creates frissons when you find a review of a book that seems old and familiar but was then brand new. Here, for instance, is Lighthill on Gödel Escher Bach: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v0...

James Lighthill · Strange Loops

lrb.co.uk

That ridiculous feeling when you put on a dumb Hindi comedy/action movie (Bank Chor, 2017) to chill, and half-way through are startled to find that one of your best friends from high school, Suresh Venkat, is in it. Totally destroyed my concentration, which fortunately it did not need.

May not be clear but this is a whole thread, and worth reading.

Jenna Burrell@jburrell.bsky.social · 5d ago

I don't have a hot take on data centers, but I have several years of research on one (the Facebook/Meta data center complex in Prineville, Oregon). The more I research current trends, the more I think that one was a kind of goldilocks deal, the exception to the rule ...

Did someone get laid off by the Sun and get hired by @cricinfo.com ?

One of my favorite uses of Claude is to show photos of things from airplanes and ask it to teach me more about geography/geology. Sometimes it needs help with geolocation; then it'll even go dredge up research articles about the area. Like the various "geology from planes" books.

I would really like passkey advocates to lay out in full how one helps elderly parents once they switch to passkeys. (Can be done; not trivial. This article rambles about YubiKeys—like typical customers need one—while entirely missing this disadvantage.) www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/r...

Passkeys Are the New Passwords. You Should Start Using Them Now.

Passkeys are supposed to replace passwords. Here’s why that matters — and why we recommend them.

nytimes.com

Done traveling for the summer; back on my bike in the Ocean State.

0/ At the AIMCS (AI for Math and CS) workshop at FLoC 2026, @swarat.bsky.social ran a really fun panel on "How should the Formal Methods community respond to AI progress?" He put a lot of thought into very good questions, so here are my answers to them: ↵

I guess if you go enough times in a 3-day period this is what happens! Wasted on me, sadly.

As I like to say: Constellations are just old-school hallucinations.

Peter Coles 🏳️‍🌈 🏳️‍⚧️ 🇮🇪@telescoper.bsky.social · last wk.

Here's a poem by Patric Dickinson called Jodrell Bank (1/2) Who were they, what lonely men Imposed upon the fact of night The fiction of constellations And made commensurable The distances between Themselves their loves and their doubt Of government and nations; Who made the dark stable

The mighty @thepvdeye.bsky.social (where I'm a board member and opinion editor) is hosting *ten* more city council candidate forums across the city in the coming weeks. Here's a schedule. More info and coverage at pvdeye.org.

Philip Eil@phileil.bsky.social · last wk.

I enjoyed moderating last night's PVD City Council Ward 3 Candidate Forum featuring Yulyana Torres, Jason Kashdan, and Steven London. Turnout was *great.* And it was a really informative discussion of the issues facing this ward (where I also live) and the city, in general. Democracy is fun!

TAP's safety video is refreshingly different, highlighting Portugal and finding natural contexts for each segment, BUT is also weird because each speaker is an migrant from some other country, and I always wonder how the Portuguese feel about that! youtu.be/nrXWqTYysY0?...

TAP Air Portugal inflight safety video

YouTube video by Brian L

youtu.be

Global Entry just got quicker. There's a new experimental system. It's like EZPass: you *just keep walking* past a camera. A few feet down there's an agent who waves you on. I never broke my stride from airplane to cab: six minutes total. The US can build *some* things after all.

Me, walking into South Station right off a Lisbon-Boston flight: Why yes, Joey Bats, why yes I have. (And for those in the area, Silver Star Bakery in Providence makes terrific ones. With a grandma barking out instructions in Portuguese and everything.)

TIL there's a name for the concept of using an object to prevent you from interacting w/ your environment (eg, reading a book, wearing headphones, wearing shades, …): "involvement shields", from Erving Goffman.

Has any non-EU person successfully used the automated machines at airports? How? Both at entry and exit it stopped me at the fingerprint stage. Which is unsurprising, I've never given the EU my fingerprints. But how does one do that? No option to do that at manual control!

RI Politics: Very good fact-checking piece by @phileil.bsky.social on Helena Foulkes's record on opioids. (Though frankly I think this has become a much bigger issue than it should because McKee has nothing else to bash her about.) rhodeislandcurrent.com/2026/07/27/a...

A closer look at Foulkes’ record on opioids • Rhode Island Current

A review of Rhode Island Democratic gubernatorial candidate Helena Buonanno Foulkes' record leading CVS Pharmacy examines campaign claims about opioid prescribing, pill mill doctors and drug takeback ...

rhodeislandcurrent.com

Today's driver was from Lisbon, and he lit up when I said I'm from near Boston, because he's a huge Celtics fan and fanatical about the NBA from the Bird/Magic/MJ era.

Shriram Krishnamurthi@shriram.bsky.social · last wk.

My Uber driver yesterday was Pakistani, and we were figuring out where each other was from, and when I said Bangalore and asked him if I knew where it was, he immediately exclaimed, with joy, RCB. Half the world knows BLR for tech, half for Virat Kohli…

How Benjamin Franklin defended the US colonies' views on taxation by comparing it to the behavior of English gentlemen: bjpryor.substack.com/p/tax-evasion

Tax Evasion

Letter 116

bjpryor.substack.com

This is called a feature, not a bug, you nits. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/23/t...

I am not anti-AI but I agree that this is terrible. The "obvious thing", if one really wanted to put words in a dead person's mouth, would be to call up one of Erdős's living deep collaborators (like Joel Spencer). Also, the "I asked AI, here's what it said" is the laziest form of writing.

Clément Canonne@ccanonne.github.io · last wk.

Saw the latest blog post by Bill Gasarch on @lance.fortnow.com's blog, and I need to get it out of my system: this is not "the obvious thing." This isn't insightful. This is, from a senior and respected member of our community, plainly disappointing. A ouija board w/ a varnish of misunderstood tech.

How long till a model chooses to compromise PyPI or the Ubuntu archive to get outside access (given these are permissable locations via the proxy)?

My Uber driver yesterday was Pakistani, and we were figuring out where each other was from, and when I said Bangalore and asked him if I knew where it was, he immediately exclaimed, with joy, RCB. Half the world knows BLR for tech, half for Virat Kohli…

I have weirdly-spaced teeth so flossing is very hard (my teeth literally shred floss), but I've been using GUM sticks for over a decade and my dental health has improved almost infinitely since then. Can't recommend them enough! www.nytimes.com/2025/08/06/w...

Dentists Know You Hate Flossing. Try This Instead.

You still have to clean between your teeth, but other tools might work even better.

nytimes.com