What's new in theoretical CS these days?

Koka [1] has “algebraic effect handlers” which are pretty cool. An alternative to monads for modeling effects in a sound way.

Lots of advances in theory of gradual typing. See with by Ben Greenman et al.

That’s just stuff from my neck of the woods. (PL) I would recommend reading stuff from POPL or ICFP or OOPSLA.

[1]: https://koka-lang.github.io/koka/doc/index.html

I'm not really up to date, but a couple recent papers that I found interesting were:

In theoretical distributed computing, The Space Complexity of Concencus From Swap [0] solves a problem that has been open for a couple decades, and won Best Paper at PODC 2022.

In quantum complexity theory, MIP^* = RE [1] was really big deal when it was published in 2020. It got a (relative) ton of press coverage, and there are lots of articles and blog post available that give a high-level of the result and techniques used. I like this one [2] from Quanta Magazine.

[0] https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3519270.3538420

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.04383

[2] https://www.quantamagazine.org/landmark-computer-science-pro...

Maximum Flow and Minimum-Cost Flow in Almost-Linear Time

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31675015

https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.00671

Best to look at recent papers at arxiv https://arxiv.org/list/cs/recent

You can have a look at Baez's work

https://www.azimuthproject.org/azimuth/show/HomePage https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/

computational category theory. Lots of cool stuff there.

HVAC

Lisp is making a comeback

Most bleeding edge stuff is going to be designing the compute pipelines/hardware for ML.