Crista 🔶

"You can see everything" is one of the weirdest films I ever saw. Part documentary, part reality TV, part fiction, all wrapped up in Nathan Fielder's trickster style. A lot of loud WTFs.

Those songs about partying through the end of the world? Californians mean it abc7.com/videoClip/19...

A short photographic report of the highlight of my summer: Eira Velha, a white field blend made from a centennial vineyard.

Coming back to the tech/academic world after a summer in the wine world, like: wtf, 60,000 ICLR submissions?!? This is irretrievably broken, time for another glass 🍷

💕 shadow pics

I dived head-on in transformers and ended up in... anti-unification!

Not the biggest fan of Spain right now, but I'm glad they won this year in this place.

Some things get better with age

Tomar. The Templars Fair.

I’m not a Mac person but using this as a home server is a different story… mini but mighty!

One frustrating thing about the tech world is how close we are to being able to decentralize everything, but, somehow, that never materializing. Companies keep wanting to centralize products and services, and people keep falling into those traps.

My own infra: VPS at Hetzner with a 5T storage box ($18/month) , gitea, Mac Mini ($850) at the winery with Gemma3 12b, VPN on all my devices. Ready to roll LLM agents.

That's a wrap, sort of. Today I am officially Emerita Professor. The most rewarding thing was being part of so many young people's bootstrap -- I gained close to 25 children, and they will be in my heart forever! 💖 The group pic here is my latest crop. On to lots of more coding but back to basics!

Self-producing solar energy and storage is very disruptive. Imagine being an energy company used to ppl needing your electricity/gas, and then ppl needing only 1% of that. No wonder there's a war on the decentralization of solar. They aren't going to let that happen without a fight. They may win.

Vibes

Apparently, we now run a hotel for barn swallows. Unfortunately, they don't know how to use the bathroom... 💩

To ppl in Central/Northern Europe: 20 years ago, Portugal became much hotter than it was 40 years ago. There was no A/C almost anywhere. Slowly but surely, people started installing A/C. Energy bills went up. Then people started installing solar panels. Heat => sun, so let the sun cool you.

Am I really going to buy a Beelink mini to code up an administrative assistant for Quinta das Queimas? Yes, yes I am. Local model, low power, harness-first generation-last. Do I have a gazillion other things to do this summer? Also yes. Was this my idea of retirement from UCI? Definitely yes.

I'm old enough to remember when GenAI was going to "solve" customer service. I guess that didn't happen yet?

Post-retirement mood

3 r’s

In Anthropic's own words: "persistent returns to expertise." Ppl shoving GenAI down students' throats need to stop right now. www.anthropic.com/research/cla...

open.substack.com/pub/pragmati...

I hope that some students somewhere will sue some of these universities that are pushing AI down students’ throats, for dereliction of duty

At the end of the term I asked my college creative wriing students to submit anonymous thoughts on AI. No real surprises: Mood ranges from resignation to despair, capitulation from embittered erosion of standards to total, feelings of betrayal from deep to furious. 1/

ICYMI www.youtube.com/watch?v=lI7t...

I am developing a strong allergy to "X is not Y. It's Z".

New form of protest just dropped blog.johanneslink.net/2026/06/09/t...

The amount of AI generated posts on LinkedIn, by real people, is mind boggling. We’re witnessing people losing their minds in real time.

Creating the final exam for a course is almost exactly the same as preparing test data for a model. Varied just enough to test whether they memorized it or generalized it.

This has been a traumatic experience, so I had to write it all down, with all the gory details. tagide.com/blog/llm/the...

Possibly the best way to phish academics would be to just send them email that looks like a request to review an article and embed your malware in the "decline to review" link

First time that I write "if you do that again, I will kill you" and mean it. Kill the session, that is.

Claude Code is mid at naming things.

I like session limits. They force me to step away from the computer and do things IRL. They're like "time to do squats!"

Announcing Vow: a programming language for AI agents, not humans. "The language is not for you. Yours is only the product, plus the vow that it behaves." Self-hosted. Contracts verified by ESBMC. vow-lang.com #agenticcoding #formalverification #programminglanguages

This might nudge me to restart blogging youtu.be/tZbwiJW1uRA?...

This data is going straight to some LLM company for double the price of the ransom. Not much Instructure can do about it. www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-in...

Canvas was hacked. Brace for chaos.

Someone in Nature finally noticed how flawed this paper was. It only took them 1 year. www.nature.com/articles/s41... When it came out, I found multiple inconsistencies in their data just by looking at it for 20 minutes 👇

Personal news! I am retiring from UC Irvine at the end of June 😎 Retiring from UCI, but not retiring in general. What comes next is a combination of independent consulting 🔆📊, running my winery Quinta das Queimas 🍇🍷, and doing research at INESC TEC 👩‍💻. I will still be affiliated with UCI 🎓 (Emerita).

Creating a quiz for my course, I’m very tempted to include questions with “wrong answers only”