pbrowne011

For a broader look on scaling other parts of software development outside of source control, Adam Bender's talk from earlier this year ("Software engineering at the tipping point") has some good ideas: https://youtu.be/2n41YjR5QfU

Feels like this would be a good candidate for Pike's programming rules (https://www.cs.unc.edu/~stotts/COMP590-059-f24/robsrules.htm...):

"Rule 1. You can't tell where a program is going to spend its time. Bottlenecks occur in surprising places, so don't try to second guess and put in a speed hack until you've proven that's where the bottleneck is.

Rule 2. Measure. Don't tune for speed until you've measured, and even then don't unless one part of the code overwhelms the rest."

Very cool! TIL about Ghostscript: https://ghostscript.com/about/index.html

Awesome to see someone continuing in the tradition of free/libre OSS: https://linuxclass.heinz.cmu.edu/doc/Open-Source-books/Free-...

Interesting to see how their CLI compares with GitLab's CLI interface for stacked diffs (the only support they offer at the moment): https://docs.gitlab.com/user/project/merge_requests/stacked_.... Most things are the same (up/down/top/bottom vs. next/prev/first/last, init vs. create), but both feel quite limiting. I've heard of other systems such as Gerrit that offer better native support, but have not tried out any for myself.

If you'd like to read something that is less detailed, I4R (Institute for Replication) posted threads on X (formerly known as Twitter) and Bluesky about their investigation into this paper.

X (Twitter): https://x.com/I4Replication/status/1893842119594258913

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/i4replication.bsky.social/post/3liv...

It seems crazy to me that vulnerabilities like this still exist today. I understand that not everything will be written in Rust, but this could have been caught by basic testing and/or fuzzing, as Nick (the person who found the vulnerability) points out: https://www.openwall.com/lists/musl/2025/02/14/1. So far, this earned an 8.1 from MITRE: https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2025-26519, although I'm not sure if that's just a function of it being a bug in a library that so many applications use.

This also goes to show how every line matters. The one line change was from

    if (c >= 93 || c>=0xc6-0x81 && d>0x52)

to

    if (c > 0xc6-0x81 || c==0xc6-0x81 && d>0x52)

Link to relevant source code: https://git.musl-libc.org/cgit/musl/tree/src/locale/iconv.c (bug fix is line 505).

To explain the bug, EUC_KR is Extended Unicode - Korean. After ASCII characters (0-127), each character is multiple bytes. The logic adjusts to look up from a base-0 index, then checks that both bytes (variables c and d) are in the normalized range. If not, the code adjusts the characters and checks the bounds again. This second check is what contained the bug.

0xc6 - 0x81 is the upper bound of this check (69), not 93. The irony is that the second part of the check gets this correct. I wonder what a `git blame` would reveal about this particular line.

Fun to see someone decide to just write a faster JSON parser because they believed it was possible. They mentioned last year that libjansson had some intermediate layer with Emacs, which led to too many memory allocations: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2024-03/msg00...

Also, the developer who wrote the parser (Géza Herman) was able to pass all of the tests with strange edge cases from https://seriot.ch/projects/parsing_json.html very quickly: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2024-03/msg00...

True, I was trying to find the variable storage requirements in the UEFI specification but couldn't (is it Section 3? 8?), so I resorted to linking to the struct definition in the EFI shell package that the author used.

Very interesting. I wonder if this a result of some "swiss cheese" effect due to constraints around UEFI and NVRAM themselves, when updating EFI variables.

NVRAM must maintain atomicity of memory transactions for power failures. Its whole purpose is to store data when you turn your computer off. As a result, when deleteing an EFI variable, you can't manage the individual bytes - you have to delete a whole entry (which can be rather large - based on the EFI specification and the code used for edk2, e.g. https://github.com/tianocore/edk2/blob/83a86f465ccb1a792f5c5...). Deleting these entries might become a problem when you start running against memory constraints and what slots in memory are actually available; hence a possible fragmentation issue.

Additionally, I appreciated how short and specific this blog post was. I enjoy this style of post of someone encountering a problem and solving it.

While this didn't get much attention on History Stack Exchange, see ConeOfArc's YouTube video (which has 963k views as of today): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaRO_dTqO1E

See also ConeOfArc's video from a month later, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RO58B6LcTfM (1M views). The video above is about the initial search and problem, this video is after many Internet strangers worked together to solve it.

"The more skilled you are, the less you need advanced tools..."

I wonder how well this claim holds up under strict scrutiny. At a high level, it makes sense: someone who is a master of their craft will understand their tools and how to use them much better than a beginner starting out. However, I think this is a different claim than the one Paolini makes.

One concrete argument against this is the history of technological progress. With each improvement came a step function in the tools available to builders, creators, etc., and those able to master them achieved a new level of ability and progress not seen before.

There is evidence for this everywhere. In sports, athletes today use modern technologies and knowledge to push their bodies and abilites to new levels (low-oxygen training, equipment specialized in each sport, etc.). If you didn't upgrade your golf clubs from wood to titanium, you are going to be left far behind. In other industries, this applies: a specific example might be in welding, where using a multi-process welder will significantly improve your productivity as well as the quality of your work. [1]

In tech, this distinction is also apparent. There are the dual cases of a programmer being completely ineffective with a modern IDE versus Jeff Dean (or insert your favorite programming legend here) with Emacs (or another text editor). However, this does not mean that a great programmer does not require advanced tools. Great toolchains (compilers, linkers, interpreters, debuggers, etc.), advanced computing capabilities (GPUs for LLMs), and high-speed Internet access will dramatically change the quality of your work.

I think that Paolini is more focused on the idea that a master craftsmen, when compared with a beginner, can still handily defeat the beginner using simple tools, as they understand both the tools and what they are trying to accomplish better. I agree with this point, but think that this relative comparison is distinct from the absolute comparison of a master using simple tools vs. the same master using advanced tools.

I appreicate his larger point that you want high-quality (even if simple) tools that you understand and that will last you a lifetime. This is one of the main benefits of mastering free/open source software [2]: freedom 0 of free software is to run a program as you wish, for any purpose, which is not guaranteed when using proprietary software.

[1] https://www.constructionequipment.com/light-equipment/weldin...

[2] https://gwern.net/choosing-software

Is the main idea to convert the model implementation from Python into C, then hardcode all possible values? Do you do this yourself in the generator code, or could you let the C preprocessor/compiler handle something like this by using macros? (might help with compile time/memory)

"NOTE: Ensure the device you are running on has no form of hardware acceleration like GPU or the results will be skewed"

How much does adding GPUs affect your performance improvement gains? I understand that the point of this optimization is for CPU-only machines, but it would be interesting to consider the affect your optimizations have when running on GPUs as well.

From The Register, with more comments by Filip ("Phil") Pizlo (the author): https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/16/rusthaters_unite_filc....

Other memory safe implementations for C and C++ mentioned/proposed are TrapC (https://vimeo.com/1028578347) and Safe C++ (https://safecpp.org/draft.html).

Fil-C adds capabilities and garbage, though it mentions performace costs of 1.5x - 5x. I would think the capabilties aspect of this language extension would be better addressed by hardware proposals (like CHERI) to prevent adding too much overhead to systems that are performance-critical.

Edit: It also looks like the author could use help porting C programs to Fil-C, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42158296.