Had a fun lunch conversation today about post-PhD careers in academia versus industry, and the frame was around how bullshit manifests in each of them. Some conclusions: 1. In academia, the bullshit is very condensed to particular periods of time, but it's a lot of bullshit all at once. But once you take care of that bullshit, you can basically do whatever you want free of bullshit.

This isn't the flex TERFs think it is. Girls in my swim team in high school refused to change near me in the locker room, or share beds in hotel rooms when we went to travel meets, just because I am bi

https://twitter.com/nypost/status/1552493450062434305

My teammates made me sleep on a hard cot in our hotel once because of their homophobia

Sweet ADHD. I forgot dinner. But I helped someone finish debugging an issue we'd been stuck on, did a pass on a student paper for a Friday deadline, finished a draft of a CACM article for a Friday deadline, met with multiple project teams, and did impactful diversity work. I also ran a few miles, because why not.

It's interesting to build a group of students organically, and watch your interests grow. My students:

- 2 type theory & proofs
- 1 compilers, semantics, & proofs
- 1 hardware verification
- 2 machine learning for proofs Basically it turns out I'm just thrilled to explore the intersection of proofs with literally anything

Next week in my Proof Automation course is all about e-graphs, which are super cute data structures for managing equivalences in all sorts of automation (congruence closure, rewrite systems without or with proofs, program and proof optimizations, and even machine learning tools) E-graphs are hot these days, but they actually date back to Greg Nelson's thesis in 1980: people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~necula/Papers…

Really watching the Israel-Russia-Ukraine Balagan Triangle with great interest. Israel has long played a weird sort of double game with Russia and the so-called West. (My total non-expert thoughts ITT) I'd classify Israel and Russia as frenemies: Israel has a massive Russian Jewish population, visa-free travel to and from Russia, and so on. Putin has long claimed Israel as part of the "Russosphere." Israel is a common vacation destination for Russians too

I actually used to feel comfortable actively declaring she/her until language evolved enough for pronouns to become a sign of active gender identity, which I do not have, so I do not like actively declaring any pronouns anymore

https://twitter.com/BayesForDays/status/1505259985990828034

Like, the starting point changed, and now it kind of feels like I'm starting from a place of neutrality, and so choosing she/her feels very very very different from when it was just the default, and I don't want to choose it, though I'm OK with people defaulting to it

I laugh because I have to, but I'm honestly baffled anyone thinks Jews should feel safe in a country where this shit plays on the radio I guess a good thing to know is that when people say (((globalists))) and talk about a cabal of leaders from Hollywood, politics, and business ruling the world and destroying society, this is classic antisemitism and they mean "Jews," they just don't say it

I don't know how to explain my friendship with Ben, but I love the hell out of him, and I mean that. He has been like a brother to me since college. After meeting Ben, it was sometimes hard to feel much in other friendships because my feelings about his friendship were so deep

https://twitter.com/TaliaRinger/status/1505305061043408897

I would look forward to seeing him all the time, and the feelings were very mutual (in that he also says I am like a sister to him). We were on the same wavelength in a way I can't begin to explain

So, I didn't see a very close friend of mine for many years until today, and turns out in the meantime he has become an amazing photographer. Check out some of his photos of wildlife in Kenya: instagram.com/duckpointfive/ Some of my favorites: instagram.com/p/CZiRM3GuW7d

I had a lucid dream last night, but it was unintentional and I became lucid mid-dream, in an elevator, when some woman with blonde hair did something that tipped me off to the fact that I was dreaming. So I thanked her and summoned some chocolate from thin air One thing I find funny is that even though in lucid dreams, I know everyone else is not real, my first intuition is to just be extra kind and give people things when I have magic powers

What animals aside from humans give each other gifts? Especially small gifts to signal friendliness Not rhetorical, I want to know about animal gifting practices

I solved Semantle #49 in 58 guesses. My first guess had a similarity of 6.78. My first word in the top 1000 was at guess #21. My penultimate guess had a similarity of 37.06 (928/1000). semantle.novalis.org

Below I'll talk about my path since now I'm obsessed with word paths I started getting closer with colors, but only some colors, not others. Red and blue scores highly, so I thought maybe they were associated with "fish," and fish did well

Such a weird article. Name one person who has faced permanent social damage for something harmful they've said *despite having apologized*. Harsh criticism for saying harmful things is to be expected; adults own up, apologize, learn, and repair, and so people forgive.

https://twitter.com/amyjko/status/1504924279724392448

The problem isn't "cancel culture," it's a lack of an apology culture. Everyone who gets "canceled" gets canceled for doubling down on harm.

The depression is bad today. Having time to think about things that aren't work kind of sucks honestly Like my friend is still dead and there's still a war in Ukraine and I'm still single in the middle of the cornfields. I'd rather think about proofs some more

IDK why vector spaces confuse me so much, but higher dimensional topological spaces feel totally reasonable and natural Something about the idea of a vector just seems so fabricated

Honestly do you know what is cool? When you work with students on work that's similar to what you've worked on for a while, sometimes they start to get the same vague feelings and intuitions you have that you still don't have crisp terminology for, and so can't easily communicate And so then finally you're no longer the only person who can feel and see that there is this beautiful and true thing, suddenly someone else feels and sees it too. They are equally frustrated by the inability to communicate it, but at least there are two of you

One thing I really love in type theory is when some property must be used in order to apply some transformation at the universal level, but then in every particular instance, the property can be avoided since it is implied by something else Even better is when in *almost* every particular instance, it can be avoided, but there's some interesting classification of types for which it cannot be avoided (for example, when funext is needed in univalent parametricity)

Reading a lot of celebration posts about getting into graduate school. Congrats to everyone who did! To everyone who didn't, though, remember this reflects much more on the system than it does on you. Anyone who wants to study should have a chance to study, in an ideal world People pick basically arbitrary criteria to distinguish between potential PhD students, and all criteria are unfair in some way. This reflects not on you, but on a system that cannot support everyone who wants to study

You know what definitely earns an instant block from literally anyone, even if I know you well? Tagging me in every post you see about Israeli violence against Palestinians. If you can't see what's wrong with doing that, I don't really want to talk to you I think you'll find I engage in extremely open criticism of the Israeli government, and that I have fringe leftist views relative to almost any Israeli you'll ever meet. But like

While working with a lot of students makes the job really, really, really chaotic *for me*, I really like how helpful it is for students to have a pretty good chunk of people to talk to about similar work. I felt so intellectually lonely in grad school Of course, there are tradeoffs in how much time I can spend on student projects versus how many students I can work with. But I think when I select projects that are all strongly related, mutual student support outweighs anything I could do alone *to a point*