Hunter
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hdemeyer.bsky.social
Hunter
@hdemeyer.bsky.social
Informatics PhD student @ UIUC
Interested in interoperability, type systems, wasm, OCaml, version control, and the sociotechnical assemblage surrounding Research Software Engineering
https://researchsoftware.engineer
proud of myself for getting through the ~60 papers assigned in my first grad-level humanities class. that is probably less than a real humanities person would read in a semester but as someone who didn't consider a reality other than technological determinism in august, I feel accomplished
November 12, 2025 at 7:56 PM
description list is is my favorite html element
November 4, 2025 at 9:55 PM
Halloween decreases the amount of social media posts that I understand to basically zero
November 1, 2025 at 9:51 PM
why do I need to restart my wifi driver every time I send an email
October 31, 2025 at 10:59 PM
And all new programming languages that contain abstractions to help humans reason about computation need to provide a huge corpus of correct programs covering a wide range of use cases if they want to succeed, because why should we have to know how to use the language if we want to use the language?
There's relatively little LLM training data for niche languages and this causes poorer coding agent performance. I think this is an existential threat for smaller language communities like OCaml.

My talk at the OCaml workshop gave some actionable steps to mitigate that: toao.com/blog/ai-exis...
Three Steps for OCaml to Crest the AI Humps - Sadiq Jaffer
toao.com
October 25, 2025 at 3:07 PM
some of my reading in the past week (Braverman, Noble, Zuboff) focused on the impact of automation in the mid/late 20th century and in addition to rhyming with AI discourse, it made me nostalgic for when blue collar work meant skilled machinists and wasnt just a euphemism for amazon delivery serf
October 25, 2025 at 2:37 PM
we should have revolted back when web pages stopped being mostly html
October 24, 2025 at 6:11 PM
i miss building stuff
October 23, 2025 at 8:13 AM
university policy on prelims + course schedules are starting to put me in a corner and I'm not sure I'm going to get the things I want out of my program anymore
October 21, 2025 at 6:12 PM
I was looking through some photo memories today and saw that 2 years to the day before my talk at ICFP I was at the first US-RSE conference in Chicago trying to find a PhD advisor. That me could have never imagined I'd be here
October 18, 2025 at 3:47 PM
I chatted with so many awesome people at ICFP yesterday but woke up with basically no voice and decided to do some vocal rest today so I don't sound like RFK Jr during my talk on Friday. I really missed interacting with folks though
October 14, 2025 at 11:41 AM
libc
October 11, 2025 at 10:17 PM
I still haven't fully processed the fact that I'm going halfway around the world later this week
October 7, 2025 at 3:28 AM
only spent 12.5 hours setting up LaTeX and biblatex and biber to format my annotated bibliography, this is gonna save me so much time
October 1, 2025 at 6:25 PM
writing a ppx feels like such a hack but idk what else to do
September 26, 2025 at 7:51 PM
Wrote a mini research statement today and I'm already seeing how the humanities courses I'm taking this semester are helping me be more articulate about my interests
September 24, 2025 at 9:52 PM
Remember, its called LaTeX because it makes your work look sexy
September 23, 2025 at 8:45 PM
is my trackpad dead or is it just arch linux
September 24, 2025 at 1:32 AM
wait maybe if I don't made them polymorphic
de bruijn indices solved λ.0 of my problems
September 19, 2025 at 1:54 PM
de bruijn indices solved λ.0 of my problems
September 19, 2025 at 3:19 AM
wow the video production quality at fun ocaml is really good
September 15, 2025 at 1:01 PM
a few friends had gatherings at different places yesterday and i was able to walk from home to all of them. this is the future liberals want.
September 14, 2025 at 10:33 PM
implications for society generally are worrisome. but also consider that this happened at a place of higher education, an institution that is already very damaged. can universities survive a response that is directed at them?
September 10, 2025 at 9:24 PM
the paper i was trying to read was *really good*...now I'm distracted
September 10, 2025 at 9:15 PM
will 9/10 be as pivotal as 9/11
September 10, 2025 at 9:12 PM