Prediction AI will make formal verification go mainstream Much has been said about the effects that AI will have on software development, but there is an angle I haven’t seen talked about: I believe that AI will bring formal verification, which for decades has been a bit of a fringe pursuit, into the software engineering mainstream. Proof

Theory and AI Alignment The following is based on a talk that I gave (remotely) at the UK AI Safety Institute Alignment Workshop on October 29, and which I then procrastinated for more than a month in writing up. Enjoy! Thanks for having me! I’m a theoretical computer scientist. I’ve spent most of my

Book recommendations from my reading in 2025 It is reading season. I know because the nights have grown long, and I just finished hoisting a live tree up a flight of stairs, festooning it with lights, and spending far too much time protecting it from repeated attack by our feline housemates. After all that, and putting the

The RAM Shortage Comes for Us All Memory price inflation comes for us all, and if you’re not affected yet, just wait. I was building a new PC last month using some parts I had bought earlier this year. The 64 Gigabyte T-Create DDR5 memory kit I used cost $209 then. Today? The same kit costs $650! Just in

Why doesnt Apple make a standalone Touch ID I finally upgraded to a mechanical keyboard. But because Apple’s so protective of their Touch ID hardware, there aren’t any mechanical keyboards with that feature built in. But there is a way to hack it. It’s incredibly wasteful, and takes a bit more patience than I think most people have, but

Mihai Ptracu Best Paper Award Guest post from Seth Pettie Scott’s foreword: Today I’m honored to turn over Shtetl-Optimized to a guest post from Michigan theoretical computer scientist Seth Pettie, who writes about a SOSA Best Paper Award newly renamed in honor of the late Mihai Pătrașcu. Mihai, who I knew from his student days, was a brash, larger-than-life figure

Nvidia Graphics Cards work on Pi 5 and Rockchip A few months ago, GitHub user @yanghaku dropped a 15 line patch to fix GPU support for practically all AMD GPUs on the Raspberry Pi (and demoed a 3080 running on the Pi with a separate, unreleased patch). This week, GitHub user @mariobalanica dropped this (larger) patch which does the

Highlights from my appearance on the Data Renegades podcast with CL Kao and Dori Wilson

Notes on the WASM Basic C ABI

Claude Opus 45 and why evaluating new LLMs is increasingly difficult