Notices by Shriram Krishnamurthi (shriramk@mastodon.social)

I have a professional and personal interest in accessibility for the visually-impaired. Matthew Shifrin's "Blind Guy Travels" is an outstanding podcast that is unfortunately way too short. Shifrin does a bunch of amazing stuff, like LEGO for the blind.
https://www.radiotopia.fm/podcasts/blind-guy-travels

I've been crystalizing some advice for first-year college students: "Advice to the New College Student in the AI Era". Thesis: "the purpose of going to college is to emerge as close to middle-aged as possible".
https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vTJCxGsti7I_b7VKuAcTtDaR1YnobE8qW4Zy8EWi2u-5_F0vNdFwAG59EQZxFDJuOqjo0cpqQHQlf3Q/pub

Great, the Mastercard I've been using for years with Deutsche Bahn no longer works. Found out the hard way at the airport. But DB takes PayPal, forcing a new payment rail onto my phone. Prolly saves them a % and pushes it on to me (fair) but also eliminates customer benefits of CCs.

I've visited Weimar multiple times; to me it encapsulates the seeming contradiction in the coexistence of "civilization" and butchery. Katja Hoyer's new book about the inter-war years looks very interesting, and is now on my list.
https://www.historytoday.com/archive/review/weimar-katja-hoyer-review

Saw this stunning mural of a peacock in Pawtucket, RI. Painted by Charles Clear in 2022 to help revitalize the Beswick Building. American Buffalo was shot in Pawtucket; you can see the building in the movie.

Babe, wake up, a new word just dropped, here's what an "effmunctional" gating is. (Claude Opus 4.8.)

2/ ↵

1/ ↵

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: ↵

3/ ↵

TAP's safety video is refreshingly different, highlighting Portugal and finding natural contexts for each segment, BUT is also weird because each speaker is an migrant from some other country, and I always wonder how the Portuguese feel about that!
https://youtu.be/nrXWqTYysY0?si=qbfi1wkECBJXCFGF

This is called a feature, not a bug, you nits.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/23/travel/europe-summer-heat.html

One of the things I've appreciated about multiple art-related museums I've been to in Belgium is that they have at least some material for the visually impaired. (This one is from the Burgundians exhibit at KBR in Brussels.)

Alright, Europeans, I have some questions…

Americans on Twitter: Euros, be more like us!
Europeans: ⭢
Americans on Twitter, prolly: No, not like *that*!

The restoration of the Ghent Altarpiece is *absolutely stunning*. There are lots of videos of the restoration work, so I wanted to see it afresh. The 30 min AR tour is actually not half bad either (& you can skip ~10min if you know all the history). Brilliantly exhibited too.

Given how Zug has become crypto central, it would have been genuinely funnier if they'd set the cap at 21 million.

Inspired by a Bluesky post from a while ago, I *finally* got around to writing up a bunch of things I find myself frequently telling people. (Well, I wrote it up a while ago, but not sure I remembered to post it here.)
https://parentheticallyspeaking.org/articles/pedagogy-recommendations/

New research thread:
1/ Error messages have always been designed, sometimes painstakingly, for humans. But now we have new "readers" for errors: agentic AI. Should this affect what PLs generate? Can we measure this experimentally? We have some preliminary results: ↵

For the people who feel LLMs do violence to language, this bit from Claude certainly won't improve their feelings…