Sam Tobin-Hochstadt

Annoyingly maybe the most important book doesn't have an image on amazon.

racketcon 2026 thread!

to know where you are going, you have to know where you have been: pldb.kirancodes.me Titles and abstracts of 22,324 programming languages papers, from the first POPL in 1973 to this year's proceedings.

Can't do that in that situation, just not a smart play.

Places I hung out with my friends as a teen: - the local college campus - Dennys - Dunkin Donuts - inefficient coffee shops - inefficient college diner - bookstore cafe All spaces built for other purposes staffed by service workers that were probably too big and expensive to run profitably.

I'm 5 or 6 inches taller than my dad, but he was a college wrestler and could do muscle-ups in high school.

Anthropomorphization is in fact an extremely useful tool for understanding and working with AI systems.

We also dive into Racket, programming language design, and Shriram’s decades of experience thinking about how we teach people to reason about programs. A fascinating conversation! ▶️ https://twp.ai/4hvacX 3/3

Defining "rich" as less than 1% of the population is potentially reasonable, but it's also extremely convenient for many people adopting that definition.

It's interesting how now this reads as a story about AI, instead of the intended subject.

moot is genuinely one of the people most responsible for our current predicament.

The ICFP 2026 Programming Contest will run from July 24th to July 27th. We'll get icfpcontest2026.com updated with more information on the contest in the coming weeks :)

I think the SpaceX valuation seems ridiculous, but the reason I invest in index funds is precisely not to make decisions about what individual stocks are a good investment, instead investing in all the big companies. Also, I'm not at all confident that the stock price is going to go down.

No useful information has ever been conveyed in this tiktok pointing at the text format.

Getting the first covid vax felt like the waters parting. Can't imagine feeling any other way about it. Wild that so many people now feel otherwise

New research thread: 1/ Error messages have always been designed, sometimes painstakingly, for humans. But now we have new "readers" for errors: agentic AI. Should this affect what PLs generate? Can we measure this experimentally? We have some preliminary results: ↵

1961: CACM publishes Tony Hoare's quicksort algorithm. 2026: CACM publishes a self-promo article by some random guy who's pitting different LLMs against each other to pump unmitigated slop into a GitHub repo. Is this what my membership money's going toward, @acm.org?

The most important question in computer security is whether memory safety is the main problem and things will get better when C is in the ground, or if similar-scale problems will keep appearing.

Reading this Wikipedia page, it's hard to escape the feeling that no one at all in the entire country really believes in anything the way Soule, or any of the abolitionists, did.

No actually I personally waited for hours in line to see TPM on opening day with all my huge Star Wars nerd friends and we didn't like it.

The Ivy+ schools enroll very close to the same share of American 18 year olds they did 40 years ago. The actual drivers here are (a) broader applications (b) better matching (c) hard-to-get-into majors (d) insufficient university growth in California.

The problem with this analysis is that the American constitutional order really does rely on a lack of polarization to function, and especially to function in a way that makes meaningful changes that those of us on the left want This is a bad thing but that and $4 will get you a cup of coffee.

This image appeared to me today, unbidden

But doctor, I _am_ on Bluesky!

My first job was delivering the Lewiston Sun-Journal in ~1994, at which I definitely made below minimum wage considering how inefficient I was.

How crazy is it that you finish 1:59:41 and come in SECOND PLACE #LondonMarathon

some forum bans are load bearing alexcbecker.net/blog/rationa...

Obviously the decline in trust in elite institutions has multiple causes, but one of them is just that our institutions have broadly become less trustworthy, and fixing this will require them to change. @chrislhayes.bsky.social wrote a whole book about this.

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.

A central problem everywhere is that people want a formula or shortcut around "you just have to be good", but there isn't one, for movies or politics or buildings or software or anything else.

Not my profession, but "affordable housing means housing that people can afford".

It was so distressing having to root for a team wearing Duke on their chest.

Requiring elementary school students to actually memorize their multiplication tables: good Comparing math standards based on word count: wtf?

AI is a huge force multiplier, but only if you have fundamentals to steer it and review it well. That’s exactly why CS education still matters (arguably more than ever). #AI #VibeCoding #CSedu #SoftwareEngineering

@ilyasergey.bsky.social: "I formalised and proved the correctness of Move’s new borrow checker in Lean: 39,000 lines of mechanised metatheory, produced in under a month with the help of an AI coding assistant." How it went, and what it augurs for PL research. proofsandintuitions.net/2026/03/18/m...

People say this sort of thing, but I am never clear on whether it's meant as a normative claim (mostly reasonable) or a claim about what is happening in the world today, in which case it's very obviously false.

It's important to think about what work the claim "Crash Bandicoot is political" is doing in a conversation, and that work is usually supporting the claim "now I get to yell at you about Crash Bandicoot".

This is the first thing that's made me want a game system since Tecmo Super Bowl.

The basic problem in American politics is that everyone thinks that undeserving others of various kinds actually consume an outsized proportion of production, and that this could be redistributed to everyone else cost-free.

This thread is basically how I feel.

I built a new thing: samth.github.io/rackup/ It's an installer and toolchain manager for @racket-lang.org. It works on Mac and Linux, it lets you install any release including from 1996, and it features all the latest bells and whistles. Also it was built almost 100% using AI.

Dad's side: started a freight forwarding company (which I think was just him). Mom's side: HS football coach, printed products salesman/manager/executive.

Because I can't let this go, here's the Big 10 WBB All-Conference teams plotted by @herhoopstats.com Win Shares and @barttorvik.bsky.social PRPG, along with some notable other players. cc @hooplawyatt.bsky.social