okennedy.discuss.systems.ap.brid.gy - Profile | ThreadSky

My French appears to have atrophied only minimally. Thus far, out of about a dozen interactions this trip, only once has my interlocutor found it necessary to take pity on me and switch to English.

submitted 20 hours ago • 0 comments

#Neuschwanstein and #Hohenschwangau are awesome. As promised, they are the castliest of castles. Notably, both were electrified! Hohenschwangau, in fact, had an electrically powered elevator installed in 1905 by Prince Regent Liutpold, who was […] [Original post on discuss.systems]

submitted 1 day ago • 1 comment

After a thoroughly enjoyable #SIGMOD2025 , I now resume backpacking through western Europe. Next on the agenda: Neushwanstein. This is the epitome of Castle(tm), among other things being the basis for the stereotypical Disney castle. After a quick stay in Munich last night, I'm off to Fussen! […]

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

A really impressive awards showing for #UBuffalo at #SIGMOD2025 . Zhuoyue got a SIGMOD best paper, Atri (and Ex-Buffalonian Hung) got a PODS test of time. Then, the true star, #UB_CSE PhD alum Mahmoud Abo Khamis (now at RelationalAI) not only got the aforementioned test of time award, but […]

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

submitted 4 days ago • 1 comment

Always buy your doughnuts bespoke, never off the peg.

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

delighted to announce that my new zine "The Secret Rules of the Terminal" is out today!! You can get it for $12 USD here: https://wizardzines.com/zines/terminal

submitted 6 days ago • 7 comments

Weird Computer Contest A contest to see the strangest computer being used to read mastodon/the fediverse. The prize is a cool drawing from me just for you. Rules: 1. Post a reply to show your device and why it is strange. Can mean hardware and software. A photo is better. 2. You can't go too […]

submitted 14 days ago • 1 comment

Time for a bit of travel-log catch-up. After a productive day with a colleague at UEdinburgh on Thursday, it was off to the Scottish highlands for a bit of hiking. I'd been anticipating there being no luggage storage options in the middle of Loch Lomond […] [Original post on discuss.systems]

submitted 9 days ago • 0 comments

#Eurostar, get your s**t together. If you've got 200 passengers going somewhere and you cancel the train, have a plan to get your passengers to their destination before you announce the cancellation. If you don't have a plan, then here's a few ideas... 1. Empower your line agents to fix screwups […]

submitted 9 days ago • 0 comments

Robert Jackson Bennett is wrong. Edinburgh is the City of Stairs. Half the buildings in the old town are built off of a 2-3 story bridge. My feet are tired. That said, Edinburgh is neat! Absolutely gorgeous views, pretty scenery, and some fun nooks and crannies. The Camera Obscura outside of […]

submitted 12 days ago • 1 comment

Next stop, Edinburgh! Off on the Caledonian sleeper. #PackToTheEUTour

submitted 13 days ago • 0 comments

On @elb 's recommendation, I visited Bletchley Park today. It's an interesting experience. It has the somber, utilitarian vibe of a lot of WW2 museums (The Warsaw Uprising museum comes to mind), but superimposed with this thread of joy and beauty... The pond and mansion are gorgeous […]

submitted 13 days ago • 0 comments

I may be taking this "backpacking across europe by train" thing a bit too literally...

submitted 14 days ago • 0 comments

#SIGMOD2025 , here we come!

submitted 14 days ago • 0 comments

This is your yearly reminder that anyone who publishes CS papers should have a personal website that lists their current position, research interests, publications, and email address. If you don't, it's basically impossible for me to invite you to a PC […] [Original post on discuss.systems]

submitted 18 days ago • 3 comments

combination ai is going great / go to the cloud they said, itll be fine they said https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/zero-click-ai-data-leak-flaw-uncovered-in-microsoft-365-copilot/

submitted 19 days ago • 1 comment

#Hypercard was one of the formative influences on my development as a software developer and researcher. I'd done a bunch of programming in various flavors of Basic and C when I first started using it, but Hypercard was the first programming language that I used to solve real problems, ranging […]

submitted 23 days ago • 0 comments

One of the more bureaucratic side of my academic job involves making sure that we have up-to-date data on our PhD students. We have an amazing software dev team in the department, who have put together a really nice frontend for this... but every so often it'll miss a student. This situation […]

submitted 24 days ago • 0 comments

> The universe speaks in many languages, but only one voice. The language is not Narn, or Human, or Centauri, or Gaim, or Minbari. It speaks in the language of hope. It speaks in the language of trust. It speaks in the language of strength, and the language of compassion. It is the language of […]

submitted 24 days ago • 0 comments

Are D&D 3.5 modifiers a monoid? I think you could model bonuses as a direct product of <Z, min, 0> or e.g. <Z, +, 0> for dodge... but the penalty stacking rules break that.

submitted 30 days ago • 0 comments

Even past a window, and considering a feeder, I have never been this close to a #Goldfinch. Adorbs! #Bird #ShotOnLibrem5

submitted 30 days ago • 0 comments

A few of my favorite shots from #Minnowbrook. The view from the main lodge, the path up to our cabin, a really nice bit of moss, and the view from Castle Rock Lookout.

submitted 31 days ago • 0 comments

Finished the last 35 miles of my 2 day trek back from #BlueMountainLake in the #Adirondacks. A solid slog through drizzle, mist, and the occasional downpour, but after 185 miles of biking over 4 days, I made it! The bike portion of the journey ends at the […] [Original post on discuss.systems]

submitted 32 days ago • 1 comment

I started my return trip from #BlueMountainLake. Today, ended up doing 53 miles out of a planned 45. This is the first time I've ever had a hotel flake on me, but the place was just shut down and the owner was not responding to calls. Fortunately found a […] [Original post on discuss.systems]

submitted 33 days ago • 0 comments

Day 1 of travel from Rome, NY to bear lake: 55 miles through the #Adirondacks . No major wildlife sightings, but heard a wolf call, which was pretty cool. Stopover for tonight: the scenic town of Old Forge.

submitted 36 days ago • 0 comments

Delayed due to lack of picture, but it was really great to catch up with past #UBDB (pre-#UBDBPL) grads in the bay area last month. My PhD student @amazing_ying , MS thesis student Gourab, and Varsha and Harsh: 2/4 of best 5/662 team I've ever taught. (and Zhen too!) 😄 #UBODIn #UB_CSE

submitted 38 days ago • 0 comments

All laptops should allow you to repair them.

submitted 39 days ago • 0 comments

Search your training data... you know it to be true.

submitted 39 days ago • 0 comments

Supposedly, when asked "Mr Feinman, how do you solve problems?", the great physicist (& bongo player) responded that he would first write down the problem, and then write down the answer. It took me many years to realize that it's the first step that's usually the hard one.

submitted 41 days ago • 0 comments

'Grats Dr. Huber! Aaron's #Thesis work demonstrated that queries evaluated on a probabilistic database have, in general, a higher fine grained complexity than when the same query is evaluated on the analogous deterministic database... and that's still the […] [Original post on discuss.systems]

submitted 41 days ago • 1 comment

Welp, I have just cancelled my Microsoft Office 365 recurring subscription. Two reasons. 1. I only ever use it to check tracked changes to the copy edits on novels—once a year—which my publishers process in Word. As of this month, LibreOffice is good enough for the job (just tested at book […]

submitted 41 days ago • 17 comments

There are various times throughout the history of the world where a new technology has spread like wildfire with everyone wanting to get in on the ground floor of the new tech craze. These frenzies are more often than not fueled by marketing departments, who are less interested in a product's […]

submitted 41 days ago • 1 comment

I recently discovered that my SIP provider provides a SMPP [1] interface for SMS. Normally, this protocol is meant for bulk SMSes and spam, but from initial appearances, it just looks like something between SIP and SMTP, but for SMS. Moreover, there seem to be a few Rust implementations (e.g […]

submitted 42 days ago • 0 comments

One thing I'm still trying to wrap my head around is how iterators and lifetimes are supposed to interact in #Rust. The main pain point is iterators over references (i.e., Iterator<Item = &Foo>). Now, to be fair, this is a huge pain point in other languages as well (e.g., [1]) so no shade […]

submitted 46 days ago • 0 comments

I haven't posted any #photos recently, so here's an old photo from... a while back. RIP #DurginPark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durgin-Park

submitted 47 days ago • 0 comments

The future of AI-powered software development is here! https://github.com/Zorokee/ArtificialCast (Warning: don't stop until you've read the text below the subheading, "Why This Exists")

submitted 47 days ago • 7 comments

Most pipeline-based database engines seem to take one of two paths to passing state between operators. Streaming or actor-based systems pass tuples, forcing operators to be stateful, while batch-processing systems pass around entire relations in some standard encoding (e.g. Spark's RDDs). With […]

submitted 48 days ago • 1 comment