Will Crichton

@tonofcrates
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173 Posts
Cognitive engineer, assistant professor of computer science at Brown.
Websitehttps://willcrichton.net/
Research Labhttps://cel.cs.brown.edu/
Show threadWill CrichtonMar 9

@tonyg @shriramk @regehr @lindsey @GeorgWeissenbacher @jfdm @csgordon @jeremysiek

A simple, albeit terribly incomplete, analogy is that an LLM is a fancy search engine. Like any search engine, it can hinder thinking (e.g. searching for solutions to a homework problem, plagiarizing sources for an essay) or support thinking (e.g. facilitate debugging, surface unexpected sources).

Show threadWill CrichtonMar 1
Here's a couple I could scrape off arXiv at least.
Show threadWill CrichtonMar 1
I reeeeally wanted to produce a mosaic of all the teaser images, but unfortunately the ACM DL's "download all proceedings" button is completely broken (like 500 Internal Server Error), and the site is too scrape-resilient to access programmatically. We've truly given up on having *a* proceedings in favor of random access.
Will CrichtonMar 1
Interesting to note that in a convenience sample of ~10 UIST'25 papers, 100% have teaser images. The "visual abstract" seems to have reached complete coverage, despite not being a formal requirement of the CfP.
Show threadWill CrichtonJan 7
@lindsey @adrian @MonniauxD @regehr @smurthys @shriramk They do! That's a nice idea, I'll have to try that out next semester.
Show threadWill CrichtonJan 7
@markusde At long last, we have formalized the Iris Unimodality from the classic PL paper "Don't Formalize The Iris Unimodality".
Show threadWill CrichtonJan 7

@lindsey @adrian @MonniauxD @regehr @smurthys @shriramk Extra 2c: I experimented this semester with iPad+Notability as a digital whiteboard. Eg: https://cel.cs.brown.edu/csci-1951q-f25/assets/lecture8.pdf

Students overall responded positively, although the lack of corresponding textual notes was a hindrance (esp bc my handwriting and organization is still rough). When queried, the students voted 19 to 1 in favor of digital whiteboard vs. physical whiteboard in a room with wall-to-wall whiteboards.

Will CrichtonJan 6
Anil DashJan 5
The number one thing I've been hearing from people in tech lately is, basically, "How the hell am I supposed to work in this industry anymore?" Though most folks are kind of afraid to say it out loud. So I wrote about how to think about it: https://www.anildash.com/2026/01/05/a-tech-career-in-2026/
How the hell are you supposed to have a career in tech in 2026?

A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

Anil Dash
Show threadWill CrichtonDec 29
@coder Oh whoops, well it should be public in a few days, so just imagine I posted the previous message on January 5, 2026.
Show threadWill CrichtonDec 29
@coder We are also working on an EPUB backend for Typst: https://github.com/breezykermo/rheo