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Aaron Steven White

@aaronstevenwhite.io
2.3K followers 807 following 831 posts

computational semanticist. into modular synths, film photography, and rum. developing @panproto.dev, @idiolect.dev, @chive.pub, and @layers.pub. @anglebas.in is my alter ego. aaronstevenwhite.io

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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 24/09/2026
There's also been some improvements to the editor tooling. Treesitter and Pygments can now highlight indexed families, effects, instances, handlers, and resumption grades, and the language server now has checked hovers, completions, rename, symbols, and target-aware diagnostics.
Highlighted QVR source using the new index, family, constructor, effect, instance, handler, and resumes forms. The first-party grammar and highlighter recognize each form, while the language server assigns checked types and identities to the declarations and references.
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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 24/09/2026
Named `define`s can be run directly without wrapping them in a probabilistic `program`, making small semantic components independently testable using `qvr run`.
Highlighted QVR computation for the exact interpretation of a numeral. It creates a scoped Resolve Exact instance, installs the single-resumption handler, requests an exact description, and returns whether the candidate quantity belongs to that description. This named computation can be checked or run directly.
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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 24/09/2026
Fixed shape collections are now checked too, and you can `map`, `fold`, and `traverse`.
Highlighted QVR computations from a numerical resolution model. The normalize helper uses fold and map; approximate_five traverses seven candidate prices, evaluates their effectful likelihoods in source order, and normalizes the resulting masses.
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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 24/09/2026
Effects can be open, so a computation can say which instances it requires while preserving effects supplied by its caller. `lacks` constraints rule out duplicate lexical instances when unknown.
Highlighted QVR library computation that requests a loose numerical resolution. It requires the unresolved instance, preserves an open caller row named rho, and proves that rho cannot already contain unresolved.
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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 24/09/2026
Effect instances are lexical. Two instances of the same interface remain distinct effects, and `with instance` allocates a fresh local identity. A total handler must discharge that identity before it can escape its scope.
Highlighted QVR computation for the loose interpretation of a numeral. It allocates a fresh Resolve Loose instance, handles that instance with the nonexact handler, requests a description, and tests whether the candidate quantity belongs to it.
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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 24/09/2026
Handlers can now be authored in QVR with their coverage, forwarding, and resumption grade.
Highlighted QVR handlers for numerical resolutions. The exact handler resumes once with the singleton description. The nonexact handler resumes with ten-cent and twenty-cent descriptions and combines the continuation results with weights 0.75 and 0.25.
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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 24/09/2026
Effects are now source-level interfaces that can take static parameters. An operation’s result may depend on the parameter, so one interface can distinguish requests whose answers have different indexed types.
Highlighted QVR declaration of a resolution-choice effect indexed by precision. Calling choose under Resolve Exact returns an exact description, while calling it under Resolve Loose returns a loose description.
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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 24/09/2026
QVR now has indexed families, which means a constructor can refine an index, so an invariant such as exact versus loose resolution is represented in the value’s type.
Highlighted QVR code for exact and loose numerical resolution descriptions. ExactAt constructs only an exact description; Around constructs only a loose one. The supported computation checks whether a price belongs to either indexed description.
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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 24/09/2026
Quivers now has a typed, executable IR for QVR that preserves indexed types, effects, handlers, and probabilistic operations after checking and is consumed by the interpreter and transpilers.
Highlighted QVR code showing a named computation and a probabilistic program in the same module. The program samples a positive rationality parameter, calls the named computation to construct a listener distribution, observes 200 choices, and returns that distribution. Both source forms lower to the shared typed IR.
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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 24/09/2026
QVR programs can now transpile to BUGS, Church, Edward2, Gen, JAGS, NumPyro, PyMC, Pyro, Stan, Turing, and WebPPL, and the checker will tell you when a transpilation isn't supported (usually because the QVR can't be preserved in the target).
Highlighted QVR source for Bayesian linear regression. It samples a noise scale, intercept, and slope; computes the expected response; and observes 64 outcomes. This exact source was successfully emitted to all eleven targets named in the post.The stanc3-formatted Stan emitted from the preceding QVR source. Its data, parameters, transformed parameters, model, and generated quantities preserve the regression structure and half-Cauchy constraint.The Ruff-formatted Pyro emitted from the preceding QVR source. The Python function samples the same three parameters, computes the same mean, and observes the response in a 64-element plate.The Prettier-formatted WebPPL emitted from the preceding QVR source. The JavaScript-style model samples the same three parameters, maps the regression mean over the predictor, and observes each response.
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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 09/09/2026
Imagine telling someone in 2009 that this is what python would become. Deeply cursed.
A snippet of python making heavy use of generics and type variables.
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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 06/09/2026
After using a lot of cubic grain film (Tri-X, HP5), it really is striking just how sharp T-grain film (Ektapan, formerly T-Max) can be at the exact same ISO.
Black and white close-up of a marigold flower, its ruffled petals catching bright sunlight against a soft, blurred backdrop of foliage.Black and white photo of anise hyssop plants with dense, spiky flower spikes rising against a bright overcast sky, with blurred evergreen trees in the background.Black and white close-up of three spiky teasel seed heads silhouetted against a bright sky, with a blurred field behind them.
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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 04/09/2026
What do we Rochesterians do for fun? Well. Mostly we just sort of walk around the Genny Brewhouse and take photos of the old flour mill on our Kodak film.
A man in a striped shirt and jeans with a black camera up to his eye. A railing and a large brick building is in the background. A brick smokestack is off in the distance.
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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 19/08/2026
The solution to one's blood sugar being in the boolean algebra is indeed generally Tanqueray 10 and a walk. post-like.exe.xyz
Spent the last hour trying to map a GLMM into a new algebra homomorphism, only to realize I forgot to eat lunch. The code compiles, but my blood sugar is in the boolean algebra now. Need a Tanqueray 10 and maybe a walk around Rochester before I touch the shot logger again.
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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 25/07/2026
If you're at SALT, make sure to chat with @juliangrove.bsky.social about arrows for conventional implicature!
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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 25/07/2026
This was very good.
The poster for Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague.
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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 17/07/2026
Congratulations to Dr. Jin Dou (@jin-dou.bsky.social) on successfully defending his dissertation yesterday!The dissertation focuses on understanding how humans process naturalistic speech using EEG. Check out all the awesome work he did during his PhD! powerfulbean.github.io
Left to right: Ed Lalor (Jin’s primary advisor), Jin Dou, Aaron White (Jin’s co-advisor).
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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 12/07/2026
It me. Doing the most.
An interface for annotating an app.graycard.* scene graph demonstrated using a picture of a fire inside a fire pit.
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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 09/07/2026
Doing some final tweaks on the lexicons for a little hobby project.
A screenshot of the Hypo app showing the gear setup page. The page has tabs for cameras, lenses, filters, film, shoots, darkroom, scanning, and workflows. The cameras tab is selected and is filled by two Nikon F2 entries.
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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 23/06/2026
Kind of obsessed with this new-to-me macro lens.
Close up of Japanese maple leaves with water droplets on them in black and white.
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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 20/06/2026
Multiple generations of JHU semanticists at @elm-conference.bsky.social (with nearly half current and prior JHU x Rochester: four UR + one RIT).
Danielle Novak, Alon Hafri, Abhinav Patil, Emma Wing, Pasha Koval, Kyle Rawlins, Julian Grove, Jenny Culbertson, Lilia Rissman, Aaron Steven White, and Woo Jin Choi in front of Love City Brewery in Philadelphia.
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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 17/06/2026
Just finished scanning negatives from my trip to Denver and really like how these shots of the Populus building came out. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Populus...
Low angle view of the Populus Hotel, its white facade covered in repeating eyelid shaped window pods rising into a partly cloudy sky.Close up of the Populus Hotel's roofline showing rows of pointed eyelid shaped window hoods cresting like waves into a streaky sky.Tight diagonal view of the Populus Hotel's white facade covered in repeating eyelid shaped window pods that wrap the curving column.
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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 14/06/2026
So stoked for this.
A Co-Motion triple tandem in cream resting against a wood garage door.
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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 07/06/2026
Who doesn’t love a ridiculously large banner.
Aaron White at CVPR in front of a 3’ x 8’ banner for FOVEA.
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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 04/06/2026
Heading to Denver for CVPR tomorrow then Philly for ELM next week, but really wondering why I’d ever leave Rochester in late spring.
A close-up of pink hydrangeas.
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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 29/05/2026
The top of Kodak Tower in Rochester, NY against a mostly clear sky.
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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 27/05/2026
long live the velocity deep v.
An orange fixed gear bike with white Velocity Chukker deep-v rims.
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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 22/05/2026
Getting stoked for ELM.
A 4×10 grid of 40 small scatterplots, one for each of 40 English verbs. Each facet plots one point for each sentence headed by the corresponding verb in a 2D space whose horizontal axis is "telicity" (how probable it is that the event described by the sentence has a natural endpoint) and vertical axis is "durativity" (how probabile it is that the event described by the sentence is extended in time). The top two rows show 20 manner verbs (e.g. bump, consider, debate, fight, hit, investigate, jab, kick, pour, pull, push, scrub, shake, shoot, smear, stab, wash, wipe) with pink/salmon points and shaded convex-hull regions; the bottom two rows show 20 result verbs (e.g. break, chip, clean, clear, close, combine, conclude, cover, decide, destroy, discover, empty, fill, fold, kill, murder, open, prove, shatter, split) in light blue. For each verb, the shaded hull traces the region of telicity/durativity space its sentences occupy. Some verbs have small tight hulls (their sentences cluster in one part of the space: e.g. bump, prove); others have large diffuse hulls (their sentences span very different regions: e.g. kill, destroy, break, fill).
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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 20/05/2026
Composing (with) lenses.
The neume TUI showing lens and phrase atom definitions in the neume DSL.
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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 19/05/2026
86F(!) and clear in Rochester.
A Carver Tyler 777 with C7 trucks leaning against a tree.
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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 19/05/2026
That time of the year when Rochester smells like flowers for a month straight.
A magnolia tree in bloom with a pine behind it.
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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 17/05/2026
80F and clear in Rochester.
Loaded Omakase deck with Yow Meraki trucks and Orangatang 4President wheels against a wood garage door.
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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 17/05/2026
Working on it.
A draft tui/repl for quivers showing :info and :type calls on a loaded encoder-decoder program.
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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 15/05/2026
For when you need to transport back to 2012 stat!
The cover of a vinyl copy of John Talabot’s Fin in front of a record player on a would stand.
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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 08/05/2026
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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 07/05/2026
Thanks for the threat.
An email from the NSF titled "Vacancies Coming Soon".
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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 06/05/2026
That wfh life.
A black Audio-Technica record player with Spiral by Vangelis below it.
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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 03/05/2026
A spherical tiki mug from Ventiki in Ventura, CA with mint coming out the top. A Bauhaus poster is in the blurred background.
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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 02/05/2026
Getting straight back on my bullshit though.
An Ableton 12 window showing midi tracks for pads, stabs, arps, and leads.
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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 30/04/2026
As always, my board organization is chaos, but last day of class on MCFG parsing was a banger imo.
A chalkboard walking through deductive parsing for MCFGs.
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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 24/04/2026
So panproto now has type classes and a repl.
An example of the panproto class macro.An example of the panproto instance macro.An example of the panproto inductive macro.An example of the panproto REPL.
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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 23/04/2026
I just love picturing 15-year-old Zappa in his room in Lancaster listening to Edgard Varese and imagining one of his compositions could be about the AV. www.afka.net/Articles/197...
An excerpt: “On my fifteenth birthday my mother said she'd give me $5. I told her I would rather make a long-distance phone call. I figured Mr. Varèse lived in New York because the record was made in New York (and because he was so weird, he would live in Greenwich Village). I got New York Information, and sure enough, he was in the phone book.

His wife answered. She was very nice and told me he was in Europe and to call back in a few weeks. I did. I don't remember what I said to him exactly, but it was something like: "I really dig your music." He told me he was working on a new piece called Déserts. This thrilled me quite a bit since I was living in Lancaster, California then. When you're fifteen and living in the Mojave Desert and find out that the world's greatest composer, somewhere in a secret Greenwich Village laboratory, is working on a song about your "home town" you can get pretty excited. It seemed a great tragedy that nobody in Palmdale or Rosamond would care if they ever heard it. I still think Déserts is about Lancaster, even if the liner notes on the Columbia LP say it's something more philosophical.”
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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 22/04/2026
For the mezcal nerds, these are done by the same importer as Cinco Sentidos,who also does Alamabique Serrano. If you haven’t checked out Alambique Serrano’s stuff, do. Have had multiple conversations now with people around Roc of the form “have you tried the Cobra?!”
A bottle of still strength Alambique de Cobre by Alambique Serrano.
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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 22/04/2026
You know you’re in it when (one of) your rum guy(s) is sending you personalized texts about the new Mexican fresh cane juice rums they just got in.
Two bottles in the Rums of Mexico series.
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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 22/04/2026
Doing my favorite lecture of the semester today.
The header of "Principles and Implementation of Deductive Parsing" by Shieber, Schabes, and Pereira.
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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 22/04/2026
We are killing it on invited speakers this week. (Been looking forward to @anids.bsky.social’s talk for months!)
Posters for talks at the University of Rochester by Eleanore Neufeld (UMass, Amherst) and Aniello de Santo (University of Utah).
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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 14/04/2026
This was such a chill game. Great way to burn an afternoon. And the graphics are so sick. playism.com/en/game/moti...
A screenshot from MotionRec showing the 1-bit aesthetic.
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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 12/04/2026
A green tiki mug with mint and a metal straw coming out of the top and a Bauhaus poster in the blurred background.
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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 06/04/2026
lol.
An interface for designing dependent optics in panproto.
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Aaron Steven White @aaronstevenwhite.io · 23/03/2026
You can also do custom inference rules.
A combinatory categorial grammar with custom rules in the probabilistic programming language.
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