ISP Column - January 2026
Russ Cox (@rsc@hachyderm.io)
“Floating-Point Printing and Parsing Can Be Simple And Fast”
The fastest known floating-point printer and parsing algorithms - fixed-width printing, shortest-width printing, and parsing, all in 400 lines of Go.
https://research.swtch.com/fp
https://research.swtch.com/fp-proof
What's "new" in Miri (and also, there's a Miri paper!)
It is time for another “what is happening in Miri” post. In fact this is way overdue, with the previous update being from more than 3 years ago (what even is time?!?), but it is also increa...
[fix, rel/tag] keep is_admin_scoped_multicast to prevent breaking change by zeeshanlakhani · Pull Request #73 · oxidecomputer/oxnet
We currently want to avoid cascading oxnet version changes across Oxide repositories; so, we keep the previous name in addition to our "local" adds.
This change includes comment renaming.
Cloudflare outage on November 18, 2025
Cloudflare suffered a service outage on November 18, 2025. The outage was triggered by a bug in generation logic for a Bot Management feature file causing many Cloudflare services to be affected.
Laurence Tratt: Async and Finaliser Deadlocks
Oxide
A Brutal Look at Balanced Parentheses, Computing Machines, and Pushdown Automata
Google, FFmpeg & The Open Source Funding Dilemma
A recent discussion highlights the growing tension between tech giants and the volunteer-run open-source projects that form the backbone of the internet, raisin
`SocketAddrV6` is not roundtrip serializable · sunshowers
An investigation into some lesser-known IPv6 features.
Emergent introspective awareness in large language models \ Anthropic
Research from Anthropic on the ability of large language models to introspect
Corrosion
Corrosion is distributed service discovery based on Rust, SQLite, and CRDTs.
Why SSA? · mcyoung
The IDEs we had 30 years ago... and we lost
A deep dive into the text mode editors we had and how they compare to today's
Why Signal’s post-quantum makeover is an amazing engineering achievement
New design sets a high standard for post-quantum readiness.
To panic or not to panic
From a user's perspective an uncaught panic in a Rust program is a crash. A panic will terminate the thread and unless the developers have taken some care, that leads to the program terminating. This is not an exploitable crash and Rust usually ensures that destructors are called, but the
Signal Protocol and Post-Quantum Ratchets
We are excited to announce a significant advancement in the security of the Signal Protocol: the introduction of the Sparse Post Quantum Ratchet (SPQR). This new ratchet enhances the Signal Protocol’s resilience against future quantum computing threats while maintaining our existing security guar...
What can we expect of LLMs as Software Engineers?
I got home about a month ago from a conference tour through Romania, Belgium, and the Netherlands. I gave a talk about LLMs in all three places, and then one more time once I got home to Chicago. M…
Moving Faster by Not Breaking Things - ACM Queue
Abdul Rahman Sibahi | A Dumb Introduction to z3
Exploring the world of constraint solvers with very simple examples.
Linear scan register allocation on SSA
A linear scan through the history of… linear scan register allocation.
WebAssembly: Yes, but for What? - ACM Queue
Rambles around computer science
It Is Time to Standardize Principles and Practices for Software Memory Safety – Communications of the ACM
Twenty-one co-authors, spanning academia and industry, with expertise in memory-safety research, deployment, and policy, argue that standardization is an essential next step to achieving universal strong memory safety.
Let’s talk about AI and end-to-end encryption
Recently I came across a fantastic new paper by a group of NYU and Cornell researchers entitled “How to think about end-to-end encryption and AI.” I’m extremely grateful to see th…
Code review in the Rust compiler
I recently joined the general code review rotation for the Rust compiler, which increased the number of reviews I do. This post describes my experience, and contains some thoughts about reviewing in general.
Fish 4.0: The Fish Of Theseus
A smart and user-friendly command line shell
Made with Org-Mode
I finally made a personal site using org-mode's built-in ox-publish exporter.
I've written my personal website with org-mode for years (it is, after all, one of the most reasonable markup languages to use for text). But until this point, I've used Hugo (with the ox-Hugo exporter). It worked fine, but it always seemed just a little bit too complicated for my needs. I wanted to find something where I could basically understand all of the components and where the gap between my org-mode files and the published output was as small as possible. I wanted to focus more on the writing and less on understanding the framework.
Building a Emacs Org-Mode Blog
As my WordPress website nears the end of its subscription, I've decided this would be a perfect opportunity to build my own website using a pure Emacs and Org mode setup. While using WordPress I already composed my posts in Org mode and published them using the org2blog package. This works fine, but WordPress is overkill as I don't the editor, themes, or plugins. A simpler solution would be to utilize the HTML exporter built into Org mode. The result is a simple, fast website, built entirely with Emacs.
Can AI do maths yet? Thoughts from a mathematician.
So the big news this week is that o3, OpenAI’s new language model, got 25% on FrontierMath. Let’s start by explaining what this means.
A Revolution in How Robots Learn
A future generation of robots will not be programmed to complete specific tasks. Instead, they will use A.I. to teach themselves.