Dan Plyukhin

They Live (1988) has a quote that shows why natural language specs should be read carefully:

"I came here to chew bubblegum and kick ass, and I'm all out of bubblegum."

A naive formalization of the spec might lull your ass into a false sense of security

Nice, thanks for sharing! Definitely taking a look when it's open source. Quality OSS actor projects are really important for researchers (obvs) but hard to come by. Also a nice way to learn about ad tech :) What's the main objective now?

CP 2026 - PLDI 2026 Choreographies are coordination plans for concurrent and distributed systems, which define the roles of the involved participants and how they are supposed to work together. In the paradigm of choreog...

The 2nd Workshop on Choreographic Programming (CP 2026) is co-located with @sigplan-pldi.bsky.social this year! Talk proposals are due in just a couple months. Please out the website and please share widely. pldi26.sigplan.org/home/cp-2026

14 two-year postdocs for academics of any nationality who cannot continue their research due to US politics. Do share if you know of such.

YouTube video by Type Theory Forall #58 - Constructivism and Computation Content - Andrej Bauer

In case you missed it, watch this clip from our interview with Andrej Bauer. I love when CS researchers can articulate a philosophy behind their work, and Andrej DELIVERS www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcTF...

I Want You to Understand Chicago Politics Chicago 2025-11-08 I want you to understand what it is like to live in Chicago during this time. Every day my phone buzzes. It is a neighborhood group: four people were kidnapped at the corner drugstore. A friend a mile away sends a Slack message: she was at the scene when masked men assaulted and abducted two people on the street. A plumber working on my pipes is distraught, and I find out that two of his employees were kidnapped that morning. A week later it happens again. An email arrives. Agents with guns have chased a teacher into the school where she works. They did not have a warrant. They dragged her away, ignoring her and her colleagues’ pleas to show proof of her documentation. That evening I stand a few feet from the parents of Rayito de Sol and listen to them describe, with anguish, how good Ms. Diana was to their children. What it is like to have strangers with guns traumatize your kids. For a teacher to hide a three-year-old child for fear they might be killed. How their relatives will no longer leave the house. I hear the pain and fury in their voices, and I wonder who will be next. Understand what it is to pray in Chicago. On September 19th, Reverend David Black, lead pastor at First Presbyterian Church of Chicago, was praying outside the ICE detention center in Broadview when a DHS agent shot him in the head with pepper balls. Pepper balls are never supposed to be fired at the head because they can seriously injure, or even kill. “We could hear them laughing as they were shooting us from the roof,” Black recalled. He is not the only member of the clergy ICE has assaulted. Methodist pastor Hannah Kardon was violently arrested on October 17th, and Baptist pastor Michael Woolf was shot with pepper balls on November 1st. Understand what it is to sleep in Chicago. On the night of September 30th, federal agents rappelled from a Black Hawk helicopter to execute a raid on an apartment building on the South Sho…

Kyle Kingsbury is not a journalist. He is not an op-ed writer.

He is a computer safety researcher.

And he has written one of the most compelling, comprehensive accounts of the ongoing hell in Chicago that you could possibly imagine.

In under 1600 words.

aphyr.com/posts/397-i-...

• Professors should never put a student's words or work into an AI software without their consent. • Professors should also be transparent about their Al usage with grading, curriculum building, and any other way they might use it in their teaching. • If a professor does use Al chatbots in the classroom, they should explain their reasoning behind this decision and how its usage will help students meet learning outcomes. • Professors should additionally respect a student's choice to refuse Al. To do this, it would be ideal that they have assignments that students can choose from that do

Eminently reasonable proposed principles for professors’ use of AI, from a student refusinggenai.wordpress.com/2025/08/29/a...

Woah. Have all NSF-awardees been signing this for the past year or so?

First they took my em-dashes away, now this. Am I a robot?? I have so many captchas to apologize to

ATTN @icfp-conference.bsky.social attendees: before entering airport security, check out the Jewel indoor rainforest! Pretty striking even when the waterfall isn’t running 😳

[ICFP/SPLASH'25] Orchid West - ICFP Papers and Events (Oct 15th) YouTube video by ACM SIGPLAN

Watch the talk here: www.youtube.com/live/SM1oFG_...

Take notes, this will be on the exam!

Medical science is so biopunk. Couple weeks ago I paid $3000 to upgrade my snout. Def better than my starting loadout:

+ increased O2 intake
+ buffs to endurance and mental acuity
+ regain more health from sleep

Finally making plans to attend SPLASH in Singapore next month! First time a conference "travel etiquette" page has warned me about receiving the Death Penalty 😄😄😄😰

If you always wanted to learn about the semantics of languages like Choral and HasChor, look no further! dplyukhin.github.io/files/relax-...

Highlights:

(1) Past models need dozens of rules to explain the semantics. Ours has ten.

(2) We give laws to help you design the right semantics. The laws work: we found three bugs in previous versions of Chorλ.

(3) Ours is similar to non-strict calculi, but with a "choreographic" flavor.

Choreographic λ-calculi are a hot topic. You might know models like Pirouette (POPL 2022) or Chorλ (ICTAC 2022).

But did you know researchers don't agree what the "right" semantics should even be?

Our ICFP pearl builds a tiny calculus from scratch, and shows the right semantics is... non-strict!?

Hey CS instructors and TAs, what’s your policy on students using LLMs?

(A) not allowed
(B) sometimes allowed
(C) required or encouraged

I think so too! A few interesting research problems to solve before it’s ready for production though, eg, rethinking some akka/pekko APIs to work well with actor GC

Ikr! I bet you could find ideas in forums, but I spoke to Jonas Bonér and he never mentioned any projects on that front. Maybe because fault recovery comes across as an intractably hard problem?

The title is "CRGC: Fault-Recovering Actor GC in Apache Pekko". The authors are Dan Plyukhin (SDU), Gul Agha (UIUC), and Fabrizio Montesi (SDU)

I gave a talk at PLDI '25 about the future of Actor GC in Apache Pekko - with applications to #akka #erlang and #elixir. It's the culmination of my 6+ year PhD at UIUC, and I tried to make the talk really fun and easy to follow :)

Check it out here: www.youtube.com/live/lGM37Z3...

[PLDI'25] Cosmos, Violet & Tulip - PLDI Research Papers (Jun 20th) YouTube video by ACM SIGPLAN

If you're reading this post, you're probably procrastinating. Why not watch my PLDI talk, "CRGC: Fault-Recovering Actor GC in Apache Pekko"?

It goes live in 1 hr (11:30 KST). I tried to make it entertaining 🙂

#akka #erlang #elixir www.youtube.com/live/lGM37Z3...

For the record I agree that state sponsored killing is wrong in any context, but not for the reason you cited. The joke tries to get at why I think the logic in the post is a bit twisted

If there are crimes for which death is too extreme a sentence, and crimes for which it is not extreme enough, by the intermediate value theorem aren’t there crimes for which it’s appropriate? /s

A decent employee (me) sabotaged by an awful manager (also me)

Sometimes it takes me all day to get nothing done

typedef struct { /* * Data mainly modified when someone is listing * the content of the table. */ union { ErtsPTabListData data; char algn[ERTS_ALC_CACHE_LINE_ALIGN_SIZE(sizeof(ErtsPTabListData))]; } list;

Under the hood, #Erlang does a lot of tricks to improve performance.

The fields of this C struct are modified by different CPUs. If you packed fields normally, modifications by one CPU will invalidate the cache of another CPU.

So the devs added padding, and now fields are on different cache lines!

Haskell could almost compete with Racket for language-oriented programming, but the current interface for monads is impossible to use without first learning the Haskell metalanguage

TIL monads give you some compiler optimizations for free!

E.g. gcc has the semantics of assignment built-in, so it optimizes away `int y = x; x = y; ...`.

If you write it in Haskell with the State monad, GHC will delete that code using beta/eta reduction. Even though GHC doesn't know about State!

More like curing toothache by replacing your jaw with a cool robot jaw that doubles as a pencil sharpener!

But seriously, does this mean you prefer deep embeddings over mixed embeddings for (say) a simple imperative language? I’m new to this whole conversation :p