Derek Dreyer

There were few winners at last night's shitfest of lies and carny spectacle. But count every last member of the U.S. women's hockey team among them.

How else do you refer to the thing that was mentioned earlier?

“Aforementioned” is totes useful, as I am told the humans say.

Sounds like my kind of paragraph!!

It would be one thing if the Dems were failing to unite over a genuinely controversial position. But what ICE is doing here is extremely unpopular and losing Trump support rapidly. It is a win-win for the Dems to unite against fascism right now and I am puzzled by these dissenting votes.

Photo of Prof. Dr. Sven Apel wearing glasses and a maroon polo shirt, standing with arms crossed against a light wall with sunlight casting striped shadows. Saarland Informatics Campus logo rests at the top left, while the Saarland University logo rests on the top right. A banner at the bottom reads: “Sven Apel becomes the 11th ACM Fellow of Saarbrücken.”

🏆 Saarbrücken now houses 11 ACM Fellows — about 1/3 of all ACM Fellows in Germany — highest of any location nationwide. This year, only 3 new Fellows in Germany were named, and Saarland University software engineering professor Sven Apel was one!

Congrats, Prof. Apel! 👏

🔗 Read more: sic.link/apel

A hideous, unbelievable insult to our allies, who suffered a full third of the war dead in Afghanistan. And this from a soulless swine who knows everything about using his bone spurs to stay all the way back, entirely off the front lines.

Every day, he shames the United States as a nation.

Simply put: I am in control of the world's largest and most powerful military. And because I didn't get a prize for making peace, I feel entitled to consider going to war with a longtime ally.

This man is mentally ill. That is not hyperbole. He's sick. He must be removed from power immediately.

This is the precise mentality of a toddler preparing to throw a plate of food because it isn't candy. Or an abusive husband preparing to beat his wife.

Except the President of the United States has the singular authority to call for and launch a nuclear attack.

25th Amendment Now.

Hear, hear!

What is the point of adding the annoying header page in the first place? Who thought this was a good idea?

You're in Germany?

Putin said earlier this week that Russia has no plans to invade Europe. I had a deja vu moment when I was listening to his crap:

You *can* say no. Anyone who makes a deadline like that must have budgeted for it not to be met by a significant number of reviewers.

What conference?

I’m confused: aren’t the captions only visible if you turn on CC? It should just be a choice. In general, I use captioning for nearly everything these days and don’t find it distracting.

Can’t you just add it manually?

If something goes wrong with this update, I can't really say I wasn't warned.

On Being Receptive to Criticism Ah, the best-laid plans. Over two months ago, I triumphantly proclaimed that Herr Dreyer was back from the grave. I said I was going to try to push out shorter posts at a higher frequency, perfecti…

After triumphantly proclaiming the return of Herr Dreyer over two months ago, I finally managed to push out a proper blog post. Enjoy.

herrdreyer.wordpress.com/2025/10/19/o...

Lia Schütze, a student at MPI-SWS, presented this poster at our recent retreat. I was blown away. Not only is it a work of art (which she designed herself), but the visuals actually made sense as a structural device for explaining the work.

I guess technically a top hat is somewhat stiff, but I wouldn't know, as I do only mechanized proofs these days and thus only wear robot outfits. My non-mechanized tuxedo doesn't fit anymore.

Shouldn’t an architecture hat be a hard hat?

Shit, I missed it. Still learning to use Google Calendar notifications…

I wrote about Claude Code, which to my absolute astonishment is quite good at theorem proving. For people who don't know theorem proving, this is like spending your whole life building F1 engines and getting lapped by a Tesco's shopping trolley www.galois.com/articles/cla...

The President of the United States is threatening to go to war with an American city.

This is not a joke. This is not normal.

Donald Trump isn't a strongman, he's a scared man. Illinois won’t be intimidated by a wannabe dictator.

So excited and honored to receive an ERC Starting Grant for the project BrainAlign!! BrainAlign will bring LLMs closer to human understanding by directly aligning them with the human brain.

Stay tuned for our findings, and multiple postdoc and PhD openings in the coming years!

You’ve stumped me, but you’ll have to rip my Deutschland ticket from my cold, dead, predictably 1 hour late hand.

Did it start with whisky?

It's official: RTFM, the faculty mentoring workshop, is happening again, this time at POPL 2026 in Rennes. The one we had at PLDI 2024 in Copenhagen was well received, so I'm looking forward to the next edition. Stay tuned!

I don't want to overdramatize. My problems have been addressed with just therapy -- other people have much more serious problems. But I bet I'm not the only one who could benefit from therapy.