iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Michael Coblenz

Legacy Update @legacyupdate.net · 14/06/2026

Is the Microsoft Office Ribbon causing people to have fewer children? A provocative new working paper explores the persistent drop in birth rates since Office 2007 was introduced nearly two decades ago.

The top-left corner of Microsoft Word 2007, showing the ribbon.

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Michael Coblenz @mcoblenz.bsky.social · 17/02/2026

It works in a different version of Safari but switching browsers is not a game I should need to play.

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Michael Coblenz @mcoblenz.bsky.social · 17/02/2026

Update: two hours later, I still can't get access to the paper.

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Michael Coblenz @mcoblenz.bsky.social · 17/02/2026

@jonathanaldrich.bsky.social Do you know what's up with this new ACM DL Cloudflare requirement? I often get stuck for minutes or longer trying to get access to papers. Clicking the checkbox just spins and eventually asks me to check the box again:

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Michael Coblenz @mcoblenz.bsky.social · 01/12/2025

You know what's not right in this "America First" world we live in now? I have to scroll past other countries after I type "U" to get to "United States" (for example, "United Arab Emirates" comes first). I think we need to immediately change our country's name to "_United States". Who's with me?

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Michael Coblenz @mcoblenz.bsky.social · 03/09/2025

Will FL health insurance companies raise their rates? www.nytimes.com/2025/09/03/u...

nytimes.com

Florida Says It Plans to End All Vaccine Mandates

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Michael Coblenz @mcoblenz.bsky.social · 03/09/2025

We rarely give Shakespeare credit for inventing alpha-conversion. “A rose by any other name…”

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Michael Coblenz @mcoblenz.bsky.social · 04/08/2025

Sounds like you already have two trained classifiers!

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Michael Coblenz @mcoblenz.bsky.social · 09/07/2025

But maybe also I pick a different Mastodon server.

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Michael Coblenz @mcoblenz.bsky.social · 09/07/2025

Mastodon is too fragmented. I just focus on Bsky now.

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Michael Coblenz @mcoblenz.bsky.social · 02/07/2025

We'd really appreciate help with our study of Rust programming! If you know Rust, please take about 20-30 minutes to help us find out how to make Rust programmers more effective: ucsd.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

ucsd.co1.qualtrics.com

Rust Learning Quiz

Help us learn more about Rust by taking this short and easy quiz!

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Michael Coblenz @mcoblenz.bsky.social · 29/06/2025

I can understand that. But I stopped checking Twitter long ago, so for me, this is it.

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Michael Coblenz @mcoblenz.bsky.social · 01/05/2025

Preprint of the paper, which my student Savitha Ravi will present: arxiv.org/pdf/2503.12309

arxiv.org

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Michael Coblenz @mcoblenz.bsky.social · 11/04/2025

Lots of great possibilities! Probably worth doing a study to see how various approaches would affect behavior.

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Michael Coblenz @mcoblenz.bsky.social · 11/04/2025

What will you do to make the environmental costs of using this transparent?

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Michael Coblenz @mcoblenz.bsky.social · 04/04/2025

For the record, ChatGPT is happy to take over the job of an air traffic controller. Looks like Musk et al. can save a lot of money on actual ATC staff!

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Michael Coblenz @mcoblenz.bsky.social · 12/03/2025

You are right that the only way to be sure is to re-run the experiment.

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Michael Coblenz @mcoblenz.bsky.social · 12/03/2025

The API delta between the fixed version and the one we used in the experiment is rather trivial, so we felt the results likely generalized. But of course re-running the experiment would be best.

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Michael Coblenz @mcoblenz.bsky.social · 12/03/2025

Also as I understand it, the stack maps approach cannot be made thread safe, which is why I haven't felt motivated to finish this implementation; it still would not be of practical use. Really the whole GC implementation needs a redo.

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Michael Coblenz @mcoblenz.bsky.social · 12/03/2025

On the other hand, the main branch's version has GC enabled. The problem with this is that the mark implementation only handles certain cases, so this is a much more serious unsoundness problem (which is also documented in the paper and the code).

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Michael Coblenz @mcoblenz.bsky.social · 12/03/2025

I think this is the relevant commit. Note it’s on a branch: I never got around to merging. Criticism is welcome. github.com/mcoblenz/Bro...

github.com

Made as_ref and as_mut private. Removed Deref from GcRef. · mcoblenz/Bronze@34c1538

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Michael Coblenz @mcoblenz.bsky.social · 12/03/2025

Sorry I should have read the whole thread before replying! Still getting used to the Bluesky UI.

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Michael Coblenz @mcoblenz.bsky.social · 12/03/2025

The implementation would definitely need a from-scratch redo for real work.

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Michael Coblenz @mcoblenz.bsky.social · 12/03/2025

Can you be more specific? We did fix some soundness problems post-experiment. And the implementation is a partial proof of concept and not a working GC.

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Michael Coblenz @mcoblenz.bsky.social · 26/02/2025