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.
CMU Intro to Database Systems (15-445/645 - Fall 2024)
https://15445.courses.cs.cmu.edu/fall2024/
Compiling Pattern Matching
I am a computer programmer. I'm primarily interested in compilers for strict functional languages.
Readme
Writing and Speaking with Style Benjamin C. Pierce and Rajeev Alur University of Pennsylvania This is the course webpage for CIS8100, a semester-long course on technical writing and speaking for PhD students in engineering and the sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, with most examples dr...
New Stack Maps for Wasmtime and Cranelift
As part of implementing the WebAssembly garbage collection proposal in Wasmtime,which is an ongoing process, we’ve overhauled the stack map infrastructure inCranelift. This post will explain what stack maps are, why we needed to changeth...
Joe Duffy - A (brief) retrospective on transactional memory
Joe Duffy's Blog | Adventures in the high-tech underbelly
Union Types in Rust with Type-Level Lists | Shun Kashiwa's Blog
In this article, I will discuss a technique to represent union types in Rust. With type-level lists, we can express a set of types, and through trait resolution, determine if a particular type is part of a set or if one set is a subset of another. The core of this technique is a recursive operation on type-level lists. To avoid conflicting implementations of traits, we will add a marker type that express the depth of recursion.
Beehive lab notebook: Local-first access control
Local-first access control
Programming ZKPs: From Zero to Hero
Learn to write and modify Zero Knowledge Proofs from scratch. You'll build a digital signature scheme using hash-based commitments, gaining practical ZKP programming skills and intuition along the way. By the end, you'll have all the tools you need to implement things like group signatures.
Controlling Queue Delay - ACM Queue
Nearly three decades after it was first diagnosed, the "persistently full buffer problem" recently exposed as part of "bufferbloat", is still with us and made increasingly critical by two trends. First, cheap memory and a "more is better" mentality have led to the inflation and proliferation of buffers. Second, dynamically varying path characteristics are much more common today and are the norm at the consumer Internet edge. Reasonably sized buffers become extremely oversized when link rates and path delays fall below nominal values.
Getting Started with Category Theory - Ryan Brewer
Category theory is a beautiful and powerful field but it can feel impenetrable without the right entry point. This post hopes to serve as a sort of beginner's guide and reference.
Pinned places
The sad state of property-based testing libraries