Heather Miller

Quitting programming as a career right now because of LLMs would be like quitting carpentry as a career thanks to the invention of the table saw.

Matthew Weidner.mp4 Whether your app is local-first or more traditional, collaborative text editing is a tricky problem that requires advanced algorithms. Or does it? In this ta...

Watch @mweidner.bsky.social talk about collaborative text editing without CRDTs or OT. youtu.be/5CFrpd0sG-g?...

It just occurred to me that open source software—the original spirit of OSS—could be ripe for a renaissance as all commercial software is being loaded full of LLM slop

Exclusive: NSF faces radical shake-up as officials abolish its 37 divisions Changes seen as a response to presidential directives on what research to fund

Exclusive: National Science Foundation staff were told today that the agency’s 37 divisions—across all eight directorates—are being abolished and the number of programs within those divisions will be drastically reduced.

Build Edge Native Apps With WebAssembly Edge computing is transforming as more powerful runtimes like WebAssembly enable developers to build entire applications at the distributed edge.

I wrote an article at @thenewstack.io about how Wasm is proving to be the best compute platform for edge computing.

thenewstack.io/build-edge-n...

personally would like to see every store show what part of the price increase is due to tariffs bc if these tariffs ever come down, i need to see that price go right back down

Very psyched to see that lean can run in the browser--I *believe* this is *all in wasm* (based on the network tab in chrome devtools). If so, this is extremely impressive: I used it to check a 400-line file live.lean-lang.org

Distributed Systems Programming Has Stalled Over the last decade, we’ve seen great advancements in distributed systems, but the way we program them has seen few fundamental improvements. While we can sometimes abstract away distribution (Spark,...

New Blog Post! www.shadaj.me/writing/dist... I argue that we’re *still* lacking a programming model that’s native to distributed systems, and outline what’s missing.

Extism - Make all software programmable | Confoo 2025 Extism is a cross-language plugin framework for building with WebAssembly​. It's goal is to make all software programmable.

Slides from my talk "WebAssembly, Extend Anything with Everything, Everywhere! " at #confoo are online. gamma.app/docs/Extism-...

Showed how to extend #frankenphp with an @extism.bsky.social / #wasi markdown middleware plugin, generating html at 3k req/s. Kudos to @dunglas.dev, FrankenPHP rocks!

It doesn't help that the we in ML often only design abstractions leak all kinds of implementation details. Folks often define ML itself in terms of techniques, not problems!

But it's prematurely abstracting that leads to the bitterness of wasted effort, and not "modularity doesn't work for AI". 2/2

Composition & abstraction are the foundations of CS, but are clearly absent in modern ML.

It's not that they're not crucial for intelligent software. But it takes building many half-working systems to abstract successfully, and it takes good abstractions to have primitives worth composing.

🧵1/2

Will future SWE agents be computer-use agents?

We explore this shift in Programming with Pixels: an agent environment where agents interact with VS Code to perform a wide variety of software engineering tasks

Code/agent environment: github.com/Programmingw...

Homepage: programmingwithpixels.com

I JUST WANT TO GENERALLY APOLOGIZE TO MATH TEACHERS AT LARGE FOR BEING A LITTLE SHIT AT 15 WHO WAS EXTREMELY SURE OF THE COURSE MY LIFE WOULD TAKE AND DECLARING I DID NOT NEED TO LEARN TO SOLVE FOR X. I'M SO SORRY. I DEFINITELY DID NEED TO LEARN THAT.

Distributed Programming autocorrect of the day:

Disturbed Programming

Still not wrong

my german husband just referred to the red team as KFC, totally earnestly

I feel seen

Yes, I know that the economics of conference organizing is to blame.

I can lament about what we lost though. It was really nice when there used to be conferences that were really cross-tech/cross-platform watering holes. Really wonderful opportunities for communities to learn from one another!

What happened to industry conferences that were truly cross-industry/-platform/-technology?

Now it seems like every company has their own conference that masquerades as a general AI/SE conference, but is really a gimmick to promote their products/platforms & to own entire communities...

Photo of a small crab from NOAA’s social media. It’s covered in spikes

Just making sure that everyone is aware of this crab that NOAA scientists found

Several other CS faculty women were discussing this the other day– most people BF in a Zoom call, usually with the camera off. Same for pumping mamas.

For in-person meetings, I personally just told everyone in my group to plan for lots of schedule readjustments. So I do the same as you ☝️

"prompt engineering" is much more about effective processes for creating good prompts for your data, than it is about specific techniques. which is to a large extent why platforms like dspy work: they kinda force you into a processes, while attempting to automate the techniques.

I’ve basically given up on social media since having a second baby and keeping my demanding jobs. Idk how other people do it

oops oh yeah most of the people in my online social media circle are men and they are not a food source for an infant, so they have much more free time. iykyk

I'd like to thank that one student in the corner who nodded along with me all semester. You make it all possible.

Pipelines & Prompt Optimization with DSPy Writing about technology, culture, media, data, and all the ways they interact.

Really enjoy DSPy’s workflow for LLM work. Handing off the specifics of prompt generation and engineering back to the LLM makes a lot of sense: www.dbreunig.com/2024/12/12/p...

@pchiusano/arcella | Unison Share Append-only data structures atop object storage.

share.unison-lang.org/@pchiusano/a...

Just getting started on this @unison-lang.org library for highly scalable append-only distributed data structures atop object storage. It's an absolute delight writing stuff like this in @unison-lang.org.

#JobAlert! Come join me at Carnegie Mellon's School of Art— we're hiring an open-rank tenure-track professor in "Experimental Animation and Emerging Media Practices"! Deadline is Jan 5: art.cmu.edu/employment/#...

Compound AI Systems, Inference-time Compute Meetup @ NeurIPS 2024 · Luma Meetup for practitioners and researchers working on and interested in compound AI systems, inference-time strategies and scaling laws, networks of networks,…

Compound AI Systems, Inference-time Compute Meetup @ NeurIPS 2024, with many AI luminaries as panelists. Poster submissions are open: lu.ma/q5r8b67t

me too 🙈

This is surprising to no one, but, just saying it again for anyone who forgets–

Maternity leave is INCREDIBLY disruptive
(Note: parental leave is disruptive too, but maternity leave is another level.)