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  Having agents make phone calls to (eg) restaurants a loss. It exposes a lack of an API. Restos will be overwhelmed and buy agents to handle the calls. Two giant software stacks will churn taking OOM more time and energy to imprecisely do what an API call could have nailed. ↵

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  I'm corresponding with a person where I'm certain the writing is AI; they say absolutely not, they spent an hour on it; but the rest of the reply has the same smell. They seem to really want me to respond, so I presume they're telling the truth. Have people ALREADY lost writing?

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  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! https://film-festival.org/

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  0/ At the AIMCS (AI for Math and CS) workshop at FLoC 2026, Swarat Chaudhuri 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: ↵

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

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  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.) https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/what-are-passkeys/

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  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.

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  Did someone get laid off by the Sun and get hired by CricInfo?

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  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.

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  RE: https://mstdn.social/@plragde/116886399803019269 Polish breweries making mango lassi IPAs is leaving me a tiny bit confused about whether globalization was or wasn't a good thing. (-:

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  The restoration of the Ghent Altarpiece is *absolutely stunning*. There are lots of videos of the restoration work, so I wanted to see it afresh. The 30 min AR tour is actually not half bad either (& you can skip ~10min if you know all the history). Brilliantly exhibited too.

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  Posting on behalf of Apart Research: Call for mentors: SPS Fellowship (June-Oct 2026). Already in: • Erik Meijer, Leibniz Labs (creator of LINQ + Rx) • me! Senior formal methods + AI safety researchers, apply by Tue May 5 AoE: https://linktr.ee/apartresearch

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  One of the fun things about being yelled at and 'splained about GenAI coding by various people on here is that multiple people who live in Providence (one whom I didn't know earlier) reached out through DM and said, "hey, wanna talk about AI?", and I've had fun meeting each of them in person. Thanks, Mastodon!

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  Adam Leventhal and Bryan Cantrill will be talking with @kfisler and me on the Oxide and Friends podcast this evening (5pm Pacific/8pm Eastern) about our "experiences enabling students with agentic AI". Join in! https://discord.gg/QrcKGTTPrF?event=1500866494588780544

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  In The Economist:

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  To make it easier esp. for junior folks (students, postdocs, jr faculty) to talk to me, I'm trying a new thing: open office hours at conferences! Come find me at PLDI 2026, using the public calendar linked to the page below. Please feel free to reshare! https://cs.brown.edu/people/sk/Contact/Calendar/

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  RE: https://discuss.systems/@keithpjolley/116488992855908604 It's not just "code", it's also algorithms, libraries, solvers, etc. I see this problem all the time with Claude Code, and indeed this was a central theme of our agentic coding class.

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  Universities are amazing places. I can walk a few blocks from my office and spend the morning hearing @Biella and @steveklabnik.com back-to-back at a humanities workshop about technology. https://humanities.brown.edu/events/AILab/scale-workshop

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  I've been waiting for articles that point out the existential threat that AI coding technologies pose to the Indian tech sector. Here's one. I fear that the social and cultural—and hence political—consequences in India could be even worse than in the US. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-04-16/the-ai-revolution-leaves-india-s-tech-graduates-unprepared-for-the-future

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  Man, old universities are weird places. Went to attend a talk (featuring linguists and computer scientists debating language models) in a room I hadn't been in before, and it turns out they have a full-ass Flemish tapestry just hanging from the wall.

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  RIP Luna the rat. After her sis Rizzo passed last month, she totally deteriorated. )-:

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  This NYT article about the Venice (Art) Biennale [ https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/19/arts/design/venice-biennale-trump-us-pavilion.html ] reminds me that last year's Venice Architecture Biennale's American pavilion, Porch [ https://www.porchusavenice2025.org/ ] was simply gorgeous.

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  Now that people are starting to make travel plans to FLoC: if you're doing education, please consider submitting to Tools for Educational Activities in Logic! Lots of categories: you can even re-send us *existing papers* (please see CFP)! (Please reshare!) https://teal.cs.brown.edu/floc2026/

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  Important class updates from Michael Littman:

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  The blossoms are out on campus, and Marcus Aurelius approves.

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  The OOPSLA 2025 Web site is now fully live, including the HotCRP submission site (which is linked to it). Submit away! https://2025.splashcon.org/track/OOPSLA

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  This is NOT a formal job posting, just testing waters. I have a year of post-doc money. Esp. int'd in formal methods + applied cogsci + diagramming. If you do work tied to my research, reach out (see my page). Must have US work auth, sorry. Please feel free to share/boost!

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  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. ↵

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  Scheme, the ur programming language, is 50 years old, as Jason Hemann just reminded me.

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  Soheila Sokhanvari is an Iranian artist in the UK. She has a brilliant project at the Tate Britain of real passports with fake stamps in them. One of them reads: "Department of State•It Can Happen Here!•So Let's Nuke 'm First•United States of America". https://www.soheila-sokhanvari.com/?gallery=passports