Shriram Krishnamurthi

That ridiculous feeling when you put on a dumb Hindi comedy/action movie (Bank Chor, 2017) to chill, and half-way through are startled to find that one of your best friends from high school, Suresh Venkat, is in it. Totally destroyed my concentration, which fortunately it did not need.

Done traveling for the summer; back on my bike in the Ocean State.

To make it easier esp. for junior folks (students, postdocs, jr faculty) to talk to me, I'm trying a new thing: open office hours at conferences! Come find me at PLDI 2026, using the public calendar linked to the page below. Please feel free to reshare!
https://cs.brown.edu/people/sk/Contact/Calendar/

0/ At the AIMCS (AI for Math and CS) workshop at FLoC 2026, Swarat Chaudhuri ran a really fun panel on "How should the Formal Methods community respond to AI progress?" He put a lot of thought into very good questions, so here are my answers to them: ↵

One of the fun things about being yelled at and 'splained about GenAI coding by various people on here is that multiple people who live in Providence (one whom I didn't know earlier) reached out through DM and said, "hey, wanna talk about AI?", and I've had fun meeting each of them in person. Thanks, Mastodon!

RIP Luna the rat. After her sis Rizzo passed last month, she totally deteriorated. )-:

I would really like passkey advocates to lay out in full how one helps elderly parents once they switch to passkeys. (Can be done; not trivial. This article rambles about YubiKeys—like typical customers need one—while entirely missing this disadvantage.)
https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/what-are-passkeys/

One of my favorite uses of Claude is to show photos of things from airplanes and ask it to teach me more about geography/geology. Sometimes it needs help with geolocation; then it'll even go dredge up research articles about the area. Like the various "geology from planes" books.

Universities are amazing places. I can walk a few blocks from my office and spend the morning hearing @Biella@mastodon.social and @steveklabnik.com back-to-back at a humanities workshop about technology.
https://humanities.brown.edu/events/AILab/scale-workshop

Man, old universities are weird places. Went to attend a talk (featuring linguists and computer scientists debating language models) in a room I hadn't been in before, and it turns out they have a full-ass Flemish tapestry just hanging from the wall.

RE: https://discuss.systems/@keithpjolley/116488992855908604

It's not just "code", it's also algorithms, libraries, solvers, etc. I see this problem all the time with Claude Code, and indeed this was a central theme of our agentic coding class.

Did someone get laid off by the Sun and get hired by CricInfo?

Adam Leventhal and Bryan Cantrill will be talking with @kfisler@mastodon.social and me on the Oxide and Friends podcast this evening (5pm Pacific/8pm Eastern) about our "experiences enabling students with agentic AI". Join in!
https://discord.gg/QrcKGTTPrF?event=1500866494588780544

The blossoms are out on campus, and Marcus Aurelius approves.

I've been waiting for articles that point out the existential threat that AI coding technologies pose to the Indian tech sector. Here's one. I fear that the social and cultural—and hence political—consequences in India could be even worse than in the US.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-04-16/the-ai-revolution-leaves-india-s-tech-graduates-unprepared-for-the-future

Posting on behalf of Apart Research:

Call for mentors: SPS Fellowship (June-Oct 2026).

Already in:
• Erik Meijer, Leibniz Labs (creator of LINQ + Rx)
• me!

Senior formal methods + AI safety researchers, apply by Tue May 5 AoE: https://linktr.ee/apartresearch

Important class updates from Michael Littman:

Now that people are starting to make travel plans to FLoC: if you're doing education, please consider submitting to Tools for Educational Activities in Logic! Lots of categories: you can even re-send us *existing papers* (please see CFP)! (Please reshare!)
https://teal.cs.brown.edu/floc2026/

This NYT article about the Venice (Art) Biennale [ https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/19/arts/design/venice-biennale-trump-us-pavilion.html ] reminds me that last year's Venice Architecture Biennale's American pavilion, Porch [ https://www.porchusavenice2025.org/ ] was simply gorgeous.