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  My synaesthete grad student informs me that "Haskell is blue"

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  so we didn't set up for trick-or-treaters this year because the last few years we haven't gotten many, and most of the night we're out of the house anyway -- but this year, just after we got home from trick-or-treating with Sylvia (it was fun; she got quite a haul), some older kids knocked. @alexr answered and said he was sorry but we didn't have candy, and they were like "we take money, too!"

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  The "band" I'm in is getting a wireless in-ear monitor setup. I asked my sister the audio gear knower if there was a limit on how many receivers could connect to the same transmitter (i.e., if we're okay with all hearing the same mix), and she said it was only limited to the number of people who could stand within range. Finally science has established an upper bound on the size of k-pop groups

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  Going to ICFP and/or the Haskell Symposium? Give a 5-10 minute Haskell Symposium lightning talk on the 28th or 29th! https://decomposition.al/blog/2026/07/21/call-for-lightning-talks-haskell-symposium-2026/ Niche and/or cursed topics encouraged. Sign up here 👉 https://icfp26.sigplan.org/home/haskellsymp-2026#Call-for-Lightning-Talks Please boost to help us spread the word!

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  RE: https://mas.to/@kims/117504434934052711 I'm seeing a lot of folks react with some variation on "wow, what a terrible parent", but I actually kind of sympathize with Mayer here: I would find it *really hard* to boil down what makes my kid special into three bullet points. The answer isn't to outsource it to AI, though; ugh. You can just *not do it*. What are you trying to do, get an A in parenting? I promise your kid's teacher doesn't want to read slop. Just show up...

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  Since it's OOPSLA deadline day, let me remind everyone of the existence of Matt Might's Perl script for finding duplicate words in a text file: https://matt.might.net/articles/shell-scripts-for-passive-voice-weasel-words-duplicates/ I've been using this damn thing for like 15 years and it always finds something I didn't catch. I find the "weasel words" and "passive voice" scripts less useful, but the "duplicate words" one is great. Just found a &quo...

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  RE: https://eldritch.cafe/@temptoetiam/117344551555689956 Are the Germans okay?

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  I'm teaching our grad intro PL course for the first time (!) starting this Friday, and I'm gonna do it *my* way, and I'm both scared and excited. It's going to be a *lot* of work. For me, I mean. (And possibly for them! But definitely for me.) Get ready to read some motherfucking TAPL! There's gonna be some Mike Hicks blog posts from 2015 up in this bitch! Wadler and Blott 1989? You know it! The "From System F to Typed Assembly Language" paper? Abso-fucking-lutely...

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  Today I decided that to complete my laptop-docking desk setup (https://recurse.social/@lindsey/117027835791012217), I also needed a mouse. So @alexr unearthed an old wired mouse from his bin of miscellaneous cables, and it was grody and sticky, but I cleaned it all up with some rubbing alcohol and it works great. Is this...permacomputing?

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  to give you an idea of how bad I am at Spanish, and how ill prepared I am, language-wise, for our trip to Spain in two days, I just misread "mejores" (from an email from Iberia Airlines) as "mujeres", which would make this "Women are highly in demand", and was like, excuse me, WHAT did you just say about me

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  RE: https://recurse.social/@lindsey/116938013465737693 Some news. After seeing this blog post, I tracked down the author, Josh Miller, to ask him to come give an invited talk at the Haskell Symposium about enterprise Haskell at H-E-B. And he said yes! https://icfp26.sigplan.org/details/haskellsymp-2026-papers-talks/17/Enterprise-Haskell-at-H-E-B Join us at 4pm Indianapolis time on Friday, August 28, and learn how the biggest (and best) grocery chain in Texas is migrating from COBOL to Haskell...

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  "calling *convention*" oh so you mean it's recommended but not enforced

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  This is Sylvia's D&D character, "Bean". He is a cat who can fly and wields a katana three times his length.

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  A post on the haskell.org blog about using Haskell in production at H-E-B: https://blog.haskell.org/enterprise-haskell-at-h-e-b/ For the uninitiated, H-E-B is the biggest grocery store chain in Texas. I can't tell you how refreshing it is to see an industrial user of Haskell that *isn't* a fintech company for once. 🙅‍♀️ blockchain 🙆‍♀️ beloved regional grocery chain

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  @byorgey@mathstodon.xyz I just wanted you to know that I read http://ozark.hendrix.edu/~yorgey/forest/00FD/index.xml out loud to my students today at the end of the last day of my PL course, and several of them told me that it spoke to them. Thank you (again) for putting it into words.

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  maybe the Canvas hackers will go after Technolutions next. you *know* that shit is horrifyingly insecure

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  @lzg @palvaro @rg9119 When I was in high school, one of my teachers, a woman, gave us the advice to not look too closely at a partner's feet, because it might sully an otherwise good partnership. That advice has not steered me wrong

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  Sylvia excitedly reported that her third-grade class was learning about "telegraphics". After asking many questions, I figured out that she meant tessellations.

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  Whenever we discuss a paper in my distributed systems class, I randomly split people into six groups and they spread out around the building to talk, while I walk from group to group. The groups are different every time. But so far, every time, I'm able to find five groups, while the sixth group goes off somewhere and I can't find or communicate with them until they eventually wander back to the classroom five minutes late. I feel this is rather appropriate for a distributed sys...

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  does anyone know of any computer programs that are good? so far on my list I have ffmpeg, pandoc, and ImageMagick

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  Anyone have suggestions for where my PhD student, @tgoodwin, ought to do an internship? Tim wants to make the Kubernetes programming experience better, and he's looking for opportunities related to that specific goal. Here's a talk he gave jointly with @drmorr at KubeCon a few months ago: https://youtube.com/watch?v=QcYsGytNBe8 And here's our survey of bugs in Knative Serving: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3592533.3592806 Lemme know if you have suggestions!

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  I wonder if there's some well-maintained LaTeX package you can import that has \hyphenation commands for lots of widely (and not-so-widely) used computer science terms? This question brought to you by "of-fload" and "stan-dalone".

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  in a meeting today, I needed to show people a cross-branch diff, and GitHub was so unresponsive that it was faster to first remember the relevant git commands and then type them in than it was to wait for GitHub to load the page. 🙅‍♀️ local-first software for asshole longtermist reasons 🙆‍♀️ local-first software for solving your immediate problems

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  I'm ready for the "new ways to precisely and deterministically express your intent to a machine" revolution. It used to be called "programming languages" but that's boring. Maybe we should call it..."symbolic AI". https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/116218320430326758

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  One of the talks I liked the most at PaPoC was for this paper on CRDTs for spreadsheets: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3806077.3806695 Collaborative spreadsheet apps (Notion, Google Sheets) have offline editing support; what should happen when two replicas that have both been edited offline get merged together? It turns out that both Notion and Google Sheets have pretty weird semantics. Especially Notion. The speaker showed a lot of specific examples that everyone was amused/horrified by.

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  @flippac @jer_gib Yeah, the point of a distributed snapshot algorithm is to record each participant's local state in such a way that, when you stitch them together, they *do* cohere in a specific sense -- but this stitched-together coherent snapshot is not guaranteed to look the same as any given instantaneous global snapshot that could be taken (were it actually possible to do that).

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  For like 15 years, this has been kicking around @alexr's and my home. I *think* it's a @paul_stansifer joint, but I don't remember for sure. I have always loved it.

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  Just got owned by a student who pointed out that a distributed snapshot algorithm that does nothing, takes an empty snapshot, and terminates immediately is both safe and live according to the safety (doesn't take inconsistent snapshots) and liveness (terminates) criteria I had written down.

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  @liamoc That sounds like fun!

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  In my undergrad programming languages course, I ask people to answer some questions in every lecture. I used to do this with online forms, but this time, I went low-tech and started using paper slips. Best decision ever! It's so much more fun! People draw stuff, they add comments in the margins, their personalities come through. It's faster, too, than waiting for people to get out devices and log in and so on. And high-speed scanning + Gradescope makes it logistically easy to...