Aaron Steven White

grain.socialAaron Steven White (@aaronstevenwhite.io) on GrainNikon fanboy. Developer of hypo.graycard.app. Living in Rochester, NY. Currently loaded: 🎞️ F2: Kodak Tri-X 🎞️ F2: Ilford HP5 Plus 🎞️ F3: Kodak Gold 🎞️…

Really just want to be outside making dream pop album covers.

grouper.bandcamp.comLinda's Head, by Helen10 track album

They knew we needed this.

Aaron Steven White reposted

Dan Garisto

@dangaristo.bsky.social

NEW: In March the White House released an FY27 budget request that zeroed out the National Science Foundation's directorate of Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE). For months it was unclear what would happen. Now, with FY26 over, the damage to SBE is coming to light. My reporting:

science.org‘Complete devastation’: How NSF gutted its social sciences researchAgency body that funds sociology, linguistics, and archaeology studies in U.S. gave 90% fewer new grants this year

github.comGitHub - FACTSlab/quivers: A functional probabilistic programming language that compiles to PyTorch.A functional probabilistic programming language that compiles to PyTorch. - FACTSlab/quivers

A lot of fun new stuff in quivers.

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.

chive.pubRestricting resolutions: effect-driven semantics of numerical approximationApproximators such as *approximately* or *exactly* have been analyzed either as operators that manipulate a numeral's denotation, or as devices that select a granularity level at which the numeral is

A good chunk of these examples come from a partial implementation of @pkuchmiichuk.com's paper.

A lot of fun new stuff in quivers.

Fixed shape collections are now checked too, and you can `map`, `fold`, and `traverse`.

Named `define`s can be run directly without wrapping them in a probabilistic `program`, making small semantic components independently testable using `qvr run`.

A lot of fun new stuff in quivers.

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.

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.

A lot of fun new stuff in quivers.

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.

Handlers can now be authored in QVR with their coverage, forwarding, and resumption grade.

A lot of fun new stuff in quivers.

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.

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.

A lot of fun new stuff in quivers.

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).

github.comRelease v0.13.0 · idiolect-dev/idiolectAdded Community control plane for 0.13.0. The new idiolect-community crate and CLI lifecycle provide versioned idiolect.toml workspaces, role-aware maintainer/consent/vote/steward/hybrid governanc...

This was so good.

Aaron Steven White@aaronstevenwhite.io

16-year-old me seizing my faculties to buy these Sparta tickets.

Aaron Steven White reposted

Angle Basin

@anglebas.in

22 Sept

Taking another spin of the test pressings to celebrate the fact that AFG just shipped the first pressing of Eigengrau! You can hear the first track and preorder the album at anglebasin.bandcamp.com/album/eigeng....

Aaron Steven White reposted

idiolect

@idiolect.dev

18 Sept

We have a new release (v0.13.0) that introduces a bunch of new community management tooling. There is now one portable path from a governed definition change through consequence analysis, review, verification, signed release, resumable migration, federation, and exit.

15 Sept

Super cool paper by my student @pkuchmiichuk.com that synthesizes Dylan Bumford and @simoncharlow.com's work on effect-driven interpretation with probabilistic dynamic semantics to understand how slack regulators like "exactly" and "approximately" work.

Pavlo Kuchmiichuk@pkuchmiichuk.com

New preprint: In Ukrainian, several approximating devices can stack on a single numeral, and the result conveys the same interval as one device alone. I argue that a numeral introduces the resolutions it can be read at, and that approximators operate on that set the way indefinites and definites do.

Aaron Steven White reposted

panproto

@panproto.dev

github.comGitHub - panproto/didactic: A typed data library for Python on top of panproto.A typed data library for Python on top of panproto. - panproto/didactic

We have new versions of panproto (0.74) and didactic (0.15). didactic adds a public general first-order generalized algebraic data type (GADT) and indexed-family language, and panproto checks the resulting theory.

If you are looking for an NSF Linguistics solicitation, you can stop looking. @juliangrove.bsky.social, @h-a-t.bsky.social, and I got confirmation from SBE that Linguistics has no active solicitation.

This week, we got a notification from SBE that the award was in indefinite limbo. Basically, they're going to keep it active, rather than decline it, in case funding becomes available. But they stressed that that is quite unlikely.

I don't know how common this experience is for this seemingly last cycle for NSF Linguistics. But it's probably time to move into the acceptance stage: there's not going to be new funding for linguistics coming from NSF in the near term.

They had to do a sort of sales pitch for the award to people higher in the chain and see if they would give the go-ahead to do the official recommendation.

Most of the summer passed without word and that PO has since finished their term without replacement.

For context, we submitted a proposal in January and had a relatively standard pre-recommendation meeting with the then-PO a couple months ago. The one where the PO asks you to get materials ready for them to include with their recommendation.

Where the meeting diverged from a standard one is that the PO couldn't promise that they could officially recommend the award in the technical sense.

chive.pubChive | Decentralized Eprint ServiceDecentralized eprints on ATProto.

9 Sept

Imagine telling someone in 2009 that this is what python would become. Deeply cursed.

Aaron Steven White reposted

Chive

@chive.pub

8 Sept

Alongside a bunch of bug fixes, we've got a few new features on chive.pub we're excited about. Most of them involve connecting a paper to other things that relate to it on the Atmosphere and beyond.

6 Sept

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.

5 Sept

Stoked for this to finally be up. Think it came out pretty well.

Angle Basin@anglebas.in

Eigengrau is out 6 Nov 2026. The pre-release is up now on @subvert.fm and @bandcamp.com. Subvert: www.subvert.fm/angle-basin/... Bandcamp: anglebasin.bandcamp.com/album/eigeng...

bandcamp.comBandcamp RadioTune in weekly to hear new music and artist interviews.

5 Sept

Is indie good again?

4 Sept

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.

github.comGitHub - layers-pub/lairs: A read/write dataset client for the Layers format, built on didactic.A read/write dataset client for the Layers format, built on didactic. - layers-pub/lairs

3 Sept

Really excited about this project. You can now access effectively all of UniMorph, Universal Dependencies, Universal Decompositional Semantics, MegaAttitude, and various other linguistic resources in a unified format. And there's a lot more coming down the pike in the near future.

Layers@layers.pub

layers.pub now has an official data PDS at repo.layers.pub as well as a python client and CLI that you can read about at layers.pub/lairs/!

3 Sept

What I find particularly cool about this setup (beyond improved discoverability) is that it makes stand-off annotations a lot easier to work with, especially when multiple annotation layers in distinct datasets point to the same source.

3 Sept

So for instance, both PropBank and UDS annotate UD, and both live in distinct PDS accounts on repo.layers.pub and repo.decomp.io respectively. But they nonetheless point at the same set of UD annotations on repo.layers.pub, making it easy to align the two if desired.

Aaron Steven White reposted

ATProto Science

@atproto.science

28 Aug

We made a thing! Check out our new #ATScience ecosystem map ✨ All projects, organized in one place: atproto.science/ecosystem/

sas.rochester.eduGraduate Program

21 Aug

Come work with CM on multilingual and low-resource NLP!!!

C.M. Downey@cmdowney.com

I'm recruiting Linguistics PhD students! Come work with me on all things multilingual and low-resource NLP! NLP background welcome, but commitment to scientific study of language is essential. My recent work has included ASR for field linguistics and compact LLMs for heritage languages

github.comRelease v0.71.0 · panproto/panprotoAdded panproto_schema::induce and induce_on_vertices (panproto-schema): the supported way to cut a sub-schema, accounting for all twenty-one Schema fields in their own key spaces and rebuilding th...

19 Aug

The solution to one's blood sugar being in the boolean algebra is indeed generally Tanqueray 10 and a walk. post-like.exe.xyz

Aaron Steven White reposted

panproto

@panproto.dev

19 Aug

We have a new release (v0.71.0) that substantially improves automated migration discovery by updating schema morphism search from enumeration and ranking to exact optimization.

@matthollanders.bsky.social

17 Aug

Everyone listens to Grouper at the gym, right?

Aaron Steven White reposted

Matthijs Hollanders

1 Aug

Anyone ever use the geometric Poisson distribution? If I've implemented it correctly in Stan, it's giving me better fits than negative binomial according to PSIS-LOO-CV with a big count occupancy model.

30 July

Training a semantic tagger/parser for ~30 datasets right now, and it is truly wild that, even if this ends up SOTA on all of them, this is at best something that gets shoved into an appendix nowadays.

30 July

Said sort of neutrally to positively, since SOTA-chasing on these sorts of systems was often quite silly. I generally only want these sorts of systems for downstream analysis anyway, so it's pretty cool how easy it is to build good ones now. But they do still take work.

Aaron Steven White reposted

25 July

If you're at SALT, make sure to chat with @juliangrove.bsky.social about arrows for conventional implicature!

This post is unavailable.

hypo.graycard.appHypoHypo is a tool for organizing and sharing your film or digital photography: the gear you shoot, develop, and scan with; the workflows that take a film roll from capture to finished scan; and the prove...

25 July

If you're at SALT, make sure to chat with @juliangrove.bsky.social about arrows for conventional implicature!

This post is unavailable.

This was very good.

Hypo is now out! It provides a rich metadata layer on top of @grain.social records, including gear and workflow abstractions as well as tools for photo annotation and search. If you shoot film, it also provides a stockpile tracker, shot logger, and development timer.

github.comhypo/data at main · gray-card/hypoA client-side app for organizing your photography gear, workflows, and photos on atproto. - gray-card/hypo

23 July

One fun thing: the appview pretty substantially extends lensfun (lensfun.github.io) with a bunch of additional structured data curated directly from camera, lens, film, and chemical manufacturer datasheets with lexicons to represent that data on-protocol.