Sprinkles in particular needs medical care several times a day, for now. It was intimidating at first, but Alex and I can now handle it with pit-crew-like efficiency. I'm already in love with them both.

As of yesterday, Rainbow and Sprinkles have both had their spay surgeries, and we've officially adopted them (this was a foster-to-adopt arrangement). They came to the shelter as strays, and both had other health issues that we're dealing with, though both are now improving.

I recently learned that lenses are just getter/setter pairs. That's all they are. What else are y'all not telling me?

Twitter has its problems -- @alexrudnick calls reading Twitter "pressing the pain button" -- but it's been my memex for ten years, and once I got a good chunk of research funding largely because someone appreciated a joke I made on here. It's a bummer to see it go down the tubes.

Sylvia disapproves of the term "bus shelter" because "it doesn't even shelter the bus"

and to be clear, I genuinely *love* this bit from the timely dataflow book, but I was still incapable of stopping myself from making this and then sharing it with you

A massive strike authorization vote is taking place for 48,000 academic workers within the University of California. The sheer scale of this vote’s impact is immense - around 10% of all postdoc workers in the USA are in the UC system.

Would anyone in the Bay Area like a gorgeous Westinghouse console AM/FM radio/record player? Free to a good home — my family needs to clear it out of my dad’s childhood home in Marin ASAP.

I'm looking for a PhD student interested in connecting classic techniques from linguistic syntax and compositional semantics with software specifications. I really want to dig into *both* the specification side of this (useful tools) *and* the linguistics...

YES. I've been waiting for this dude to rebloom since 2018! Check out that lil flower spike!

https://t.co/eNE0Q7eP0R

Sylvia: Rainbow scratched my arm. me: Why did she scratch your arm? Sylvia: I was teaching her how to scratch.

Happy Friday all.

my attempt to get the students to vote and choose the topic for my winter grad special topics course has ended in a four-way tie lol

(credit: @Twisol)

If you’re applying to grad school and interested in parallel computing for sciences, please consider applying to @cs_cornell and mentioning me in your application!

https://t.co/9qF0Teg3fn

But now, after doing this project, I think vector clocks are *even cooler*, because they let you take something like a happens-before relationship that's spread out over a whole execution, and boil it down to a predicate that's locally checkable. Local reasoning for free!

I've always thought vector clocks were really neat, because they let you take something as ineffable and mysterious as causality, and boil it down to something as simple and concrete as a vector of natural numbers.

A cool thing about our approach, in my opinion, is that since we're leveraging the correspondence between vector clocks and happens-before, we really don't need anything fancy (like, say, a separation logic framework) to be able to do "local reasoning".