Strange Loop 2023
2023-09-21..2023-09-22
St. Louis, United States
[Strange Loop 2013, Strange Loop 2014, Strange Loop 2015, Strange Loop 2016, Strange Loop 2017, Strange Loop 2018, Strange Loop 2019, Strange Loop 2021, Strange Loop 2022, Strange Loop 2023]
who it's for
programming language researchers, distributed systems engineers, security researchers, platform engineers, machine learning engineers, developer tools engineers, game developers
topics
CRDT real-time collaborative editing; WebAssembly cross-platform runtimes; capability-based UCAN authentication; deterministic spacecraft simulation; large-scale git indexing; Android 2G radio mitigation; meta-circular Clojure interpreter; type safety for vanilla JavaScript; GraalVM productionization; small generative models for comedy
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Making Hard Things Easy | Julia Evans | 43m |
Claims why basics stay hard include hidden caches and invisible libraries, sprawling codebases (the browser has 20 million lines), and surprising execution… | ||
| Playing with Engineering | AnnMarie Thomas | 45m |
Playful methods produce measurable outcomes: undergraduate labs build publishable sensors from Makey Makey and motion capture, convert circuits into squishy… | ||
| How to Build a Meaningful Career | Taylor Poindexter, Scott Hanselman | 41m |
Says a meaningful career comes from deliberate choices not vague passion and gives concrete, repeatable things: the luck formula opportunity + preparedness… | ||
| A Long Strange Loop | Alex Miller | 54m |
A conference-origin story with numbers and failures not fluff: early shows scale 300 → 600 → 1100 then thousands, over 5,000 CFPs and ~1,000 talks, a… | ||
| Comedy Writing With Small Generative Models | Jamie Brew | 43m |
A clear decision: concrete methods and results. Starts from predictive-text reverse engineering (observing 2-word context on a 2015 Android), implements… | ||
| The Economics of Programming Languages | Evan Czaplicki | 44m |
Argues that language outcomes trace to real money and organizational choices not rhetoric giving numbers like $49 billion traffic acquisition cost and… | ||
| Playable Quotes for Game Boy Games | Joël Franušić, Adam M. Smith | 36m |
A working prototype extracts tiny, runnable slices of Game Boy ROMs so moments become a playable quote rather than a giant video clip — typical quotes touch… | ||
| New algorithms for collaborative text editing | Martin Kleppmann | 40m |
Prototype called Upwelling experimental editor builds real-time CRDT editing with explicit drafts and merges that behave like Git branches and rebases, and it… | ||
| The Attacker Has Expensive Radio Equipment, But Your Android Phone Is Resilient | Yomna Nasser | 30m |
Phones historically accept rogue 2G towers that harvest IMSIs, intercept or modify traffic, and even push malware — Stingrays and phone‑borne fake base… | ||
| IPVM: Seamless Services for an Open World | Brooklyn Zelenka | 42m |
Claims a concrete stack: UCAN Invocation for capability-based auth, a hash‑linked task format and Interplanetary VM (IPVM) scheduler that runs WebAssembly… | ||
| Lessons from building GitHub code search | Luke Francl | 36m |
GitHub builds a new engine called Blackbird that indexes 60M+ repos and 160 TB of content and achieves reindexing from scratch in ~24 hours by combining… | ||
| Designing Dope Distributed Systems for Outer Space with High-Fidelity Simulation | Toby Bell | 45m |
A deterministic, event‑driven simulation runs the exact compiled C++ GNC code for both VISORS CubeSats faster than realtime so one minute of wall time covers… | ||
| Building Koi Pond: Simulating Millions of Slack Clients | Maude Lemaire | 32m |
Builds a concrete load tester called Koi Pond that replaces thousands of headless Chrome clients with lightweight Go simulators and a keeper/school… | ||
| Turning GraalVM from Research to Product | Thomas Wuerthinger | 37m |
GraalVM moves from research to product by shipping a working runtime: a native-image ahead-of-time compilation path that yields ~40% lower memory, slightly… | ||
| Babashka: a meta-circular Clojure interpreter for the command line | Michiel Borkent | 40m |
Babashka is a Clojure-based command-line interpreter compiled to a single binary with GraalVM native-image and real-world Java interop; it starts in about 22… | ||
| Didn't Chrome Already Have a Root Store? | David Adrian | 40m |
Chrome launches an official root store in Chrome 105 and ships a built-in certificate verifier, running a dual verifier trial to compare platform vs Chrome… | ||
| Building Strong and Sustainable Open Source Projects | Lawrence Gray | 51m |
Claims concrete practices that worked: a visualization library Yellowbrick with active governance, layered documentation (user tutorials contributor guide code… | ||
| Human Involvement Behind Remote Desktop Protocol Brute-Force Attacks | Andréanne Bergeron | 43m |
Researchers deploy PiRDP high-interaction honeypots and capture 3.4 million connection attempts over three months to quantify human involvement in RDP… | ||
| Can a Programming Language Reason About Systems? | Marianne Bellotti | 41m |
Fault is a domain-specific language that compiles to SMT‑LIB2 and targets SMT solvers such as Z3 and other SMT backends, converting C‑style… | ||
| Designing Fully Rationalized Commercial Buildings with Generative Software | Jen Carlile | 36m |
A generative platform engineers schematic‑level commercial buildings from a buildable envelope and program, runs a constraint solver to place desks and cores… | ||
| Risks and Opportunities of AI in Incident Management | Emily Arnott | 36m |
Claim: large language models act as an incident sidekick by parsing repositories, generating ad‑hoc test scripts, and drafting targeted retrospectives, cutting… | ||
| Without Open Data, there is no Ethical Machine Learning | Erin Mikail Staples | 38m |
Claims that open data is necessary for ethical ML, documents companies like Reddit Twitter and Snapchat restricting API or dataset access, and quantifies harm… | ||
| Astronaut Horse: Stable Diffusion Artist Collaborations | Tom Betthauser | 49m |
Open-source Stable Diffusion workflows get specific: a pipeline uses textual inversion trained on 5–15 images to create new tokens, batch-prompting produces… | ||
| Unmasking the Godfather - Reverse Engineering the Latest Android Banking Trojan | Laurie Kirk | 39m |
Reverse engineering shows the Godfather Android banking Trojan (derived from Anubis, sample from 2021) actually hides readable Java via obfuscation and encoded… | ||
| Ectype - bringing type safety (and more!) to vanilla JavaScript | Holly Wu | 28m |
Claims a library + linter/type-checker pair that gives JavaScript static type-safety and runtime type introspection without compiling, with types represented… | ||
| Why Programming Languages Matter | Andrew Black | 57m |
Covers concrete claims and artifacts: seven languages touched (not six), a working Eden preprocessor that hides network packing, an Emerald implementation with… | ||
| Programming Distributed Systems | Mae Milano | 41m |
A concrete claim: a new language and compiler called mixy enforces that “strong outputs must stay strong” with an information‑flow type system so improper… | ||
| Concatenative programming and stack-based languages | Douglas A. Creager | 41m |
Shows a concrete claim and demonstrations: a formal semantics for a tiny stack language, reductions from C → Lambda → SK → stack code proving Turing… | ||
| Inside the Wizard Research Engine | Ben L. Titzer | 44m |
Wizard is a research Wasm engine that ships an in-place interpreter plus a simple Baseline JIT and an API of probes that can insert and remove probes at… | ||
| Formal semantics for multi-language programs | Amal Ahmed | 40m |
Presents a concrete recipe: add typed boundaries between two languages, run each fragment with its own operational semantics, and convert values at the… | ||
| Experimentation: putting research papers into prod | Leemay Nassery | 32m |
Claims that interleaving yields two orders of magnitude more sensitivity than classic A/B testing and that Netflix Amazon and Airbnb use interleaved… | ||
| War Time Proofs and Futuristic Programs | Valeria de Paiva | 41m |
Claims that Gödel’s Dialectica interpretation gives a concrete Curry–Howard variant and that a categorical construction (given in 1988 and extended since)… | ||
| From Geometry to Algebra and Back Again: 4000 Years of Papers | Jack Rusher | 32m |
Claim: replace our patchwork vector/matrix machinery with Geometric Algebra because one uniform algebraic system captures scalars, vectors, bivectors and… | ||
| An approach to computing and sustainability inspired from permaculture | Devine Lu Linvega | 55m |
An argument for small, resilient computation that names limits and shows work: living with 200 watts of solar aboard a 33 ft boat drives a return to old… | ||
| A JVM threading model for the containerized times | Luiz Hespanha, Flavio Brasil | 31m |
An adaptive threading model called navu continuously measures fine‑grain CPU behavior (histograms sampled every 100 ms) and uses a control loop plus… | ||
| Is my Large Language Model a Strange Loop? | Zac Hatfield-Dodds | 40m |
Claims that language models evolve internal algorithms get backed by concrete probes: convolutional features can be replaced with hand‑written vision code… | ||
| Computational Physics, Beyond the Glass | Sam Ritchie | 39m |
Claims an actual, runnable system: a port of a Lisp computer algebra engine into the browser that compiles symbolic expressions to fast JS and runs full… | ||
| Supporting Data Journalism through Compilers for Visual Inputs | Parker Ziegler | 37m |
Research demonstrates that visual graphics become code: reviz reverse engineers SVG subtrees from DOM into partial JavaScript programs with parameter holes… | ||
| Swift as C++ Successor in FoundationDB | Konrad 'ktoso' Malawski | 42m |
Claim: Swift replaces C++ in FoundationDB by compiling Swift and C++ side‑by‑side, calling C++ directly via clang modules and emitting LLVM IR, and exposing… | ||
| Oatmeal is Cheap: A Fundamental Theorem for Procedural Generators | Younès Rabii | 42m |
A provable link ties a generator’s compressed source length to the size of its possibility space and to the maximum artifact complexity so three simple… | ||
| Using data-driven metrics to anticipate and prevent security incidents | Caitlin Buckshaw | 36m |
A new PSIRT Engineering team at GitHub claims it prevents future incidents and reduces pressure on incident response by capturing every incident into issues… | ||
| Cursorless: A spoken language for editing code | Pokey Rule | 39m |
A spoken programming language that actually edits code by composing tiny English-like pieces claims to be fast, practical, and fun it uses tree-sitter… | ||
| Software & The Game of Go | David Nolen | 34m |
Argues that writing software mirrors learning Go by showing concrete rule mechanics (liberties, ko, life and death), historical data (the AlphaGo vs Lee Sedol… | ||
| Birdsong as code | Chris Ford | 36m |
Code transcribes birdsong into explicit models using Clojure + Overtone inside Vim, synthesizers and harmonic-series envelopes to recreate a pied butcher bird… | ||
| The Lemniscate | Ann Johnson, Charles Comstock | 48m |
An interactive LED sculpture is programmable from a Raspberry Pi 400 browser kiosk that compiles a small vector language to WebAssembly and uploads bytecode… | ||
| nothing matches | ||