Shriram Krishnamurthi

@shriramk
3.5K Followers
743 Following
7.8K Posts

Brown Computer Science / Brown University || BootstrapWorld || Pyret || Racket

I'm unreasonably fascinated by, delighted by, and excited about #compsci #education #cycling #cricket and the general human experience.

See https://mastodon.social/@shriramk/109302532598801863 for longer #intro.

I wish to be searchable by tootfinder

Work Homehttps://cs.brown.edu/~sk/
Bloghttps://parentheticallyspeaking.org/
ORCIDhttps://orcid.org/0000-0001-5184-1975
Shriram Krishnamurthi7h ago
Startled to find out that there are young people who haven't read James Iry's magnificent "A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages". Please drop what you're doing and head over.
https://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-mostly-wrong.html
A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages

1801 - Joseph Marie Jacquard uses punch cards to instruct a loom to weave "hello, world" into a tapestry. Redditers of the time are not imp...

Shriram Krishnamurthi23h ago
Racket3d ago

(sixteenth RacketCon) call for participation

https://racket.discourse.group/t/racketcon-2026-call-for-participation/4211

Shriram Krishnamurthi23h ago

At Brown CS graduation last weekend, I could have sworn I saw a student go by whose mortarboard had the Rustacean logo.

I thought I saw it, but couldn't be sure; then a bit later one of my colleagues turned to me and asked, "Was that a … CRAB?!?"

Shriram Krishnamurthi1d ago
I was so wrong about Vaibhav Sooryavanshi. Last year I was convinced he was a flash-in-the-pan; pre-IPL bowlers would figure out some key weakness, and he'd be brought back down to earth. That can still happen; maybe they didn't take him seriously? But no erasing this season!
Shriram Krishnamurthi3d ago
Absolutely fascinating piece by David Oks connecting language model oddities to human cultural development. Picked this up courtesy of Deena Mousa's "Under Development" newsletter.
https://davidoks.blog/p/language-models-are-weird-for-the
Language models are weird for the same reason human cultures are weird

You can’t have adaptive learning without strange tics

David Oks
Shriram Krishnamurthi4d ago

OMG Claude, don't say such things in public, children might be present and listening.

[Narrator: May. It MAY be.]

Shriram Krishnamurthi5d ago
The very distinctive-looking Fitbit app just got rebranded as Google Health, and for the past three days I've been trying to figure out why the Southwest app suddenly showed up on my home screen… (Absent this contrast, it's awfully reminiscent of SWA.)
Shriram Krishnamurthi5d ago
If like me you read the @lrb on an iPad and find their app not quite matching your needs, here's a simple open source wrapper that adds a lot of nice features. (You still need to pay for LRB!) A bit annoying to run, but once you have it up, you're good.
https://github.com/shriram/lrb-reader
GitHub - shriram/lrb-reader: Personalized reader for London Review of Books site

Personalized reader for London Review of Books site - shriram/lrb-reader

GitHub
Shriram Krishnamurthi5d ago
The fact that Claude Code can do all kinds of agentic things but not *checks watch* check a watch will never not be funny.
Show threadShriram Krishnamurthi6d ago
Our codebases are going to have SO MUCH GARBAGE because developers won't read the agent's work nor know what it's doing if they do.