Neil Walkinshaw

Open source GZDoom community splinters after creator inserts AI-generated code UZDoom fork promises to fix other top-down leadership problems with the decades-old mod.

Really interesting link from a colleague:

arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/...

Shines a light on how different developer attitudes towards LLM usage in software development (provenance and maintainability versus rapid improvements in functionality?) can impact on established communities and projects.

This looks great - the first chapter has me hooked.

Jon Mattox / Creating Music And Sound on Instagram: "New Order – Blue Monday: The Happy Accident That Made History 🎛️ This percussive synth line was programmed off by a 16th note — a total mistake ca... 4,444 likes, 106 comments - creatingmusicandsound on November 14, 2025: "New Order – Blue Monday: The Happy Accident That Made History 🎛️ This percussive synth line was programmed off by a 16th note ...

Talk about a bug becoming a feature! How the synth track in New Order's Blue Monday started out as a programming accident. (By @jonmattox.bsky.social) www.instagram.com/reel/DRCt5vk...

The Causal Testing Framework (CTF), which enables the use of Causal Inference to test properties in software, is now available on Conda-Forge!

anaconda.org/conda-forge/...

Research funding is a key determinant of scientific progress. However, current allocation procedures for third-party funding are criticized due to high costs and biases in the selection. Here, we present data from a large German funding organization on an implementation of a lottery-first approach followed by peer review to allocate funding. We examine the changes in submissions and funded projects of female applicants after implementation, estimate the costs of the overall allocation process, and report on the attitudes and satisfaction of researchers and reviewers. The data show an increase of 10% in submissions and a 23% increase in funded projects from female applicants with the lottery-first approach compared to a previously used procedure. Additionally, the lottery-first approach was estimated to have 68% lower economic costs compared to a conventional single-stage peer review approach. Satisfaction with this funding approach was high and around half of applicants preferred an initial lottery followed by peer review over a conventional approach. Thus, the lottery-first approach is a promising addition to allocation procedures.

Lottery before peer review is associated with increased female representation and reduced estimated economic cost in a German funding line https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-65660-9

New from @rmrahal and colleagues

Funder was German Foundation for […]

[Original post on mastodon.online]

arXiv is now only publishing CS pre-prints that have been accepted after review.

blog.arxiv.org/2025/10/31/a...

I think this is a good thing...

ICST 2026 - Research Papers - ICST 2026 The Research Papers track of ICST 2026 invites high-quality submissions in all areas of software testing, verification, and validation. Papers for the research track should present novel and original ...

📣 ICST 2026: Call for Research Papers!

The International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST) 2026 call for research-track submissions.

📅 Important Dates:
Abstract Due: Dec 15
Full Paper Due: Dec 22

🔗 Learn More & Submit:
conf.researchr.org/track/icst-2...

You can now upgrade a retro Casio watch with Bluetooth, step tracking, and games Are these iconic Casio digital watches still as desirable with smart features?

I used to have one of these! Love the idea of "modding" an old casio watch! 🔧

You can upgrade a Casio watch with Bluetooth, step counting, and games | The Verge share.google/Zma7UEjgKPfp...

Developed a pesky running injury. Not looking forward to working through the suggestions illustrated by ChatGPT, especially the straight leg raise...

New open access book out from our MORPHSS project lead @samuelmoore.org:

"By deploying theoretical literature on science & technology studies, care ethics, & the commons, the book critically interrogates open access & reimagines a more ethical future for researcher-led publishing."

#OA #AHSS

Courts service accused of covering up IT bug that caused evidence to go missing Sources say judges in courts and tribunals will have made rulings when evidence was incomplete.

As with the post office Horizon bug, years of institutional coverup and mismanagement after the bug is exposed. This probably causes more damage than the technical bug itself.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

An account of what is possibly the first "monkey tester" (or at least when the term originated) - a program to automatically generate random test inputs. Developed in 1983 to test MacWrite and MacPaint!

www.folklore.org/Monkey_Lives...

Howard G. Smith MD, AM on Instagram: "A defective iOS (iPhone/iPad) app can rapidly deplete your Tandem insulin pump battery and trigger a dangerous shutdown The Food and Drug Administration and Tand... 0 likes, 0 comments - drhowardsmithreports on August 15, 2024: "A defective iOS (iPhone/iPad) app can rapidly deplete your Tandem insulin pump battery and trigger a dangerous shutdown The Food and Dr...

Tandem's t:connect iOS mobile app that controls monitors the t:slim X2 insulin pump and its battery causes a battery depletion and an unexpected pump shut down. #tandem #insulinpump #iOSapp #tconnect #battery #shutdown #hyperglycemia #recall
www.instagram.com/p/C-s-U3fxxBg/

I found this very interesting. Could be interesting to consider a variant of this for research paper submissions to Computer Science conferences, where the ballooning review burden is completely unsustainable.

Would need to devise different measures to prevent misuse though.

UK unis sign up to £10M Oracle Java subscription framework : Deal includes 'waiver of historic fees'

An odd licensing approach - hardly going to make Java the obvious teaching choice for higher education in years to come?

www.theregister.com/2025/06/13/j...

GitHub - DES-Lab/AALpy: An Automata Learning Library Written in Python An Automata Learning Library Written in Python. Contribute to DES-Lab/AALpy development by creating an account on GitHub.

AALpy - a very elegant Python library (not by me!) implementing several finite state machine inference algorithms. Includes active and passive approaches, state-merging and observation-table based ones.

github.com/DES-Lab/AALpy

GitHub - erikbern/git-of-theseus: Analyze how a Git repo grows over time Analyze how a Git repo grows over time. Contribute to erikbern/git-of-theseus development by creating an account on GitHub.

Simple visualisations of code "survival" over time: github.com/erikbern/git...

Several groups of students have tried this on a variety of OSS projects. Anecdotally it seems that the "half-life" of the code for a given version is remarkably short! Would welcome pointers to studies on this!

UK driverless cars unlikely until 2027 - Uber says it's ready now The previous government had said autonomous vehicles were

Procedures for testing driverless cars (at least the underlying ML) are still effectively in their infancy, so it's interesting that these will be on UK roads so soon. Particularly interested in accountability (moral & legal) when accidents inevitably occur.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Blast from the past: "How Do We Trust Our Science Code?"

Most scientific research code is low quality and riddled with bugs, written by people who aren't professional software developers. And we shouldn't expect them to be!

(Written eight years ago, Jesus)

www.hillelwayne.com/post/how-do-...

Reminder: I am hiring 1-2 PhD students to research the use of LLMs to augment human-written test suites!

Interested? Apply here: www.chalmers.se/en/about-cha...
Reach out if you have questions!

#softwaretesting #softwareengineering #softwaredevelopment #LLM #AI #PHD

I'm seeking 1-2 Ph.D. students, who will conduct research on how LLMs can extend and augment the software tests created by humans. Please apply, share, and get in touch if you have questions!

Apply at: www.chalmers.se/en/about-cha...

LLMs can't stop making up software dependencies and sabotaging everything : Hallucinated package names fuel 'slopsquatting'

LLMs hallucinating nonexistent software packages with plausible names leads to a new malware vulnerability: "slopsquatting."

3 from me!

[REVIEW]: The Causal Testing Framework · Issue #7739 · openjournals/joss-reviews Submitting author: @jmafoster1 (Michael Foster) Repository: https://github.com/CITCOM-project/CausalTestingFramework Branch with paper.md (empty if default branch): Version: v10.0.1 Editor: @daniel...

So impressed by the JOSS publication model. The whole process is run on GitHub! Reviews are submitted as issues! github.com/openjournals...

Who needs big publishers. If there were a way to introduce anonymity into the reviewing process (surely possible), this is the way forward imho.

The Causal Testing Framework Foster et al., (2025). The Causal Testing Framework. Journal of Open Source Software, 10(107), 7739, https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.07739

Our Causal Testing Framework, part of the EPSRC-funded CITCOM project, has just been published in @joss-openjournals.bsky.social.

joss.theoj.org/papers/10.21...

Supports testing of "hard-to-test" systems with large input spaces, nondeterminism and long execution times.

Enter the Gungeon Enter the Gungeon is a gunfight dungeon crawler following a band of misfits seeking to shoot, loot, dodge roll and table-flip their way to personal absolution by reaching the legendary Gungeon’s ultim...

I never play computer games these days. But I got to spend a couple of hours playing Enter the Gungeon (enterthegungeon.com) with my son (very much the gamer) , and it's fantastic. Retro and amusing - highly recommend!

Especially short-sighted, given that so many key technologies that underpin the strong growth in the US economy, especially in AI, have emerged from these very research institutions.

Does authorship mean anything when academic papers are simply citable tokens? The bibliometric infrastructure of citations has become an inescapable organising feature of academic life. Drawing on a range of evidence of the use and misuse of citations data, Stuart Macdonald …

blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsoci...

Be cited or perish? I don't recognise some of the worst practices in CS (hope I'm not being naiive!), but concerning nonetheless...

School phone policies and their association with mental wellbeing, phone use, and social media use (SMART Schools): a cross-sectional observational study There is no evidence that restrictive school policies are associated with overall phone and social media use or better mental wellbeing in adolescents. The findings do not provide evidence to support ...

This article claiming "no evidence" that mobile phone restrictions in schools have no impact on social media usage or wellbeing has been widely reported in the UK: www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

Worth noting the absence of any causal analysis, despite many confounding factors.