Vadim Zaliva @vzaliva@types.pl

My son's 10-year-old iMac still has some left. Installed Linux on it today.

I have personal email archive going back more than 2 decades. When I die someone should be able to train a very convincing language model simulating me based on my outbound emails and social media posts.

Feeling a bit nostalgic, and wrote a blog post about a mail client we wrote in 1995. https://lambda-files.crocodile.org/2023/02/computer-archeology-umt-ultimate-mail.html

It is ironic that ChatGPT access requires verifying that you are a human.

Even Consumer Report recommends using memory-safe languages! https://advocacy.consumerreports.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Memory-Safety-Convening-Report-1-1.pdf

@JetBlue WiFi claims to be fast, even to watch videos. It looks like it is indeed optimized for that: wide download bandwidth at the price of high latency and noticeable packet loss. Good for movies but poor for work :(

--- 8.8.8.8 ping statistics ---
608 packets transmitted, 600 received, 1.31579% packet loss, time 608249ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 632.000/1058.264/2814.529/264.364 ms, pipe 3

Speaking of masks (which are people are right to wear!), I discovered an embarrassing problem. I could not recognize some people I know while they are masked, and I could not read their badges without putting my glasses on. So, dear friends, my apologies if I did not acknowledge you at #popl. P.S. Maybe an even bigger font for badges for people like me?

Some people feel that they have to explain to me why they are wearing masks at the conference. This is absolutely unnecessary. They are in their right to do so, and it is probably a wise decision.

"segments are distinguished by colour" in #popl presentation makes the former Accessibility Chair in me ill at ease.

"I will try to give you intuition by sticking to Super Mario analogy" Youngju Song #popl talk

I was expecting more people at POPL. :)

I am flying to POPL tomorrow and will be in Boston until Sunday. I will be glad to see everybody in person. Ping me if you want to meet.

Hard drives die. RAID is your friend. But even with it remember to store your really important data in two physical locations. (Replacing HDD in home NAS device)

Everybody is excitedly reposting ChatGPT-generated dross. It might be amusing but it is not very interesting. Yes, ChatGPT is pretty good at mimicking humans, but it is just that. It does not produce any new ideas, and any answers it gives are not supported by sound reasoning. I do not say that underlying technology is worthless. Let's just move past party tricks and try to make something useful out of it.

To-do list for today. And I am not against magic in general. Just "Obj.magic". :)

I first tried pair programming in the early nineties with @owl. It was primarily out of necessity: we had to share HP Appolo 735 workstation. Today 25+ years later, he was helping me to find a tricky bug, and we did it again. Interestingly, both back then and today we worked in #emacs text editor.

My colleagues are evaluating bit-vector libraries for #Coq. 11 identified so far. I think the solution is to write yet another one to rule them all :)