You'll soon find out that some Linux distros are better than others Potter

Do you use unsafe Rust? 🦀 We’re interested in learning from your experiences. Please consider participating in our study! cmu.ca1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_ea…

Thanks to Sam Estep, we squashed a 4+ year old bug in Penrose that makes it *asymptotically* faster! 🪲 Pro tip: if you're using L-BFGS to avoid building a dense matrix… don't build the dense matrix!! Try the new, way faster version of Penrose here: penrose.cs.cmu.edu/try/

a nice feature not mentioned in the release notes: TypeScript 5.1 standard-library function docstrings include mdn links, added by yours truly :) thanks Nathan Shively-Sanders for shepherding this change! now you can reach the docs with one click, directly from your editor

been working on Penrose v3 lately and it's live now! check out our blog post to see what's new: penrose.cs.cmu.edu/blog/v3. special thanks to new coworker

Tired of making the same kind of diagrams over and over by hand (e.g., in PowerPoint)? The Penrose team has been working away on Penrose 3.0, an automated notation-to-diagram tool, finally released today! Check it out here: penrose.cs.cmu.edu/blog/v3

We've been on a somewhat private slack forever. About time to work in the open for real, so join us there!

Penrose is an open-source tool for making beautiful diagrams from any domain of knowledge. Want help using it? Want to help us build it? Or just want to talk about diagramming in general? Come chat with us on @Discord at discord.gg/a7VXJU4dfR. Anyone & everyone is welcome!

genuinely curious: why do some conferences use a one-column layout? isn't two-column just better?

We interviewed 19 Rust developers who regularly write or edit unsafe code. Now, we need your help to evaluate what we learned! If you have ever engaged with unsafe Rust, please consider completing our survey! cmu.ca1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_0k…

want consistent math formatting across github and vscode? give this issue an upvote! github.com/microsoft/vsco…

Very proud of my group Geometry Collective, for their consistent focus on quality in research. We have 5 papers at #SIGGRAPH2024, including two Best Paper Awards and one Honorable Mention. Only 5 and 12 such awards (respectively) are given out total, from a pool of ~840 submissions

generally?

Great work by the Penrose team building Bloom: a lightweight way to make interactive diagrams: penrose.cs.cmu.edu/blog/bloom All coordinates are automatically figured out by the Penrose layout engine, and diagram specifications can be re-used for different content (like HTML/CSS).

took the idea of “run the layout optimizer again when interacting with the diagram” pretty far this summer. Bloom is a React library for interactive diagrams. It lets you reuse the diagram styling just like Penrose, but in a general-purpose programming language.

your computer uses binary to represent numbers, including random ones! but have you ever wondered how it can simulate a fair die whose number of faces is not a power of two? samestep.com/blog/random-in…

My collaborator Troels (creator of the Futhark programming language) published a really nice blog post today about a benchmark suite we've been developing for automatic differentiation; the project makes some cool design decisions, check it out! sigkill.dk/blog/2025-04-0…

how well do you understand how your computer's cache hierarchy affects your programs' performance? samestep.com/blog/random-ac…