ippsav retweeted
“Everything is a file” in Linux, but historically, socket and file IO were treated differently. Prior attempts at fixing this disparity fell short… until @axboe designed the beautiful io_uring interface.
A deep dive into the interface, which collapses disparate IO models into a single completion model.
ippsav retweeted
Ideas like { DST, static allocation, assertions, zero-copy, fully asynchronous I/O } are powerful enough on their own to invest in new critical components…
…together, the effect is potent.
ippsav retweeted
Claude Code is vibecoded and full of spyware, it's possible Anthropic doesn't even know what's in there. After reading this report, we are banning it from our systems and strongly encourage other enterprises to do the same. It is an unacceptable security risk.
ippsav retweeted
Opening Systems Distributed '26:
Andrew Kelley's State of the Tagged Union Address!
Find out what's cooking in Zig land: recent major advancements, demos of what's close to finishing, and roadmap for the next several years.
#systemsdistributed
ippsav retweeted
Our internal data shows Claude is accelerating AI development—a possible path to recursive self-improvement, or AI autonomously building a more capable successor.
It’s happening faster than we thought, and the implications deserve greater attention. anthropic.com/institute/recu…
ippsav retweeted
Sometimes I run out of steam, sometimes I go down the wrong path, and some other times I deliberately take detours, but nobody can trick me into mistaking lesser stars for my true destination.
kristoff.it/blog/north-star/
ippsav retweeted
TigerBeetle 0.17.5 is out!
- Refactor the grid to own all blocks through reference counting.
- Better heuristic for commit stalls, improving multi-region performance.
- Improve SSD performance by running DISCARD when formatting a block device.
github.com/tigerbeetle/tiger…
ippsav retweeted
I've got an agent in a loop optimizing a renderer with the goal to minimize frame times (and tests to measure). It got times down from 88ms to 2ms and allocations down from ~150K to 500. Sounds good, right? Wrong. This is exactly why agent psychosis is a big fucking problem.
As an experiment, I rewrote the Ghostty core render state in Go, with access to identically laid out data structures as Ghostty and the exact same validation tests. I made a purposely naive renderer (simple, correct, but slow). 88ms per frame with 150,000 allocations (horrendous, lol)!
I then kickstarted a Ralph loop to bring the frame times down. I told it it can't modify input data structures or the public API or tests (they're correct), but it can do anything else it wants. It got to work.
It has worked for about 4 hours. I've spent around $350 on this experiment so far. The results?
88ms => 1.5ms
150K allocs => ~500 allocs
Incredible right? Nope.
My hand-written renderer I ported has frame times (same benchmark) of ~20us (0.020ms) and 0 allocations in the update path.
This is the problem with psychosis and lacking systems understanding. If you don't understand the system, you're going to accept that this is an incredible result. If you understand the system, you'll see better solutions immediately and can do roughly 75x better on throughput.
The people who blindly trust agent output are in the former camp. They're sheeple, overdrinking from a fountain of mediocrity.
Standard disclaimer: I use AI all the time. I like AI. The point I'm making is to not blindly accept results. Think. Analyze. Learn.
ippsav retweeted
Andrew's interview with JetBrains
youtube.com/watch?v=iqddnwKF…
ippsav retweeted
Status update: I've been on/off AI agents in the last few days and it is a verifiable truth that every day I didn't use agents, I was more productive. I still attribute that to how slow they are, and my own inability to multi-task efficiently. The magic is there but the slowness doesn't let it cross the threshold where they actually make me faster, and I still dislike the whole thinking paradigm.
About Bend2: honestly, the C/Metal compiler codebase is a clusterfuck right now. I regret letting AI agents write it. All tests pass, and GPU performance is mind-blowing, so the core architecture works. Yet, it has a LOT of bugs. Anything not covered by the tests is a coin toss. This is actually impressive, because, in many parts of the codebase, the right solution was actually the simplest one, yet, the agents STILL managed to find a way to make it work just for the tests. The level of reward hack these agents output is actually impressive I can't even be mad.
It is also ironical because that's the very problem that Bend's proof system was supposed to solve, but Bend is in TypeScript, not in Bend. I'm disappointed I didn't write Bend in itself, and now I feel an immense urge to do so. But the clock is ticking . . .
Still, I do not think Bend is worth launching without the GPU compiler being solid, because the closest competitor, Lean, is actually extremely good, so we need a big differential. Yet, due to the very nature of the project, it would be embarrassing to have bugs at launch.
Regarding AI, I now believe using current gen AI agents in production codebase is harmful and a massive mistake. That doesn't mean no agents at all, but agents work best when they don't touch critical code. Debugging, researching, providing insights, scripts / tools, or anything that doesn't touch code you will maintain in the long term. But if you merge AI code without reading, you're going to have a bad time. Speaking from experience
I'm working 10h/day on SupGen and the remaining time on Bend2
ippsav retweeted
Optimizing for token output is not the right path IMO. Tokens will get cheaper, human attention will not.
Optimize for diff readability.
ippsav retweeted
The Eternal Sloptember geohot.github.io//blog/jekyl…
ippsav retweeted
I strongly believe there are entire companies right now under heavy AI psychosis and its impossible to have rational conversations about it with them. I can't name any specific people because they include personal friends I deeply respect, but I worry about how this plays out.
I lived through the great MTBF vs MTTR (mean-time-between-failure vs. mean-time-to-recovery) reckoning of infrastructure during the transition to cloud and cloud automation. All those arguments are rearing their ugly heads again but now its... the whole software development industry (maybe the whole world, really).
It's frightening, because the psychosis folks operate under an almost absolute "MTTR is all you need" mentality: "its fine to ship bugs because the agents will fix them so quickly and at a scale humans can't do!" We learned in infrastructure that MTTR is great but you can't yeet resilient systems entirely.
The main issue is I don't even know how to bring this up to people I know personally, because bringing this topic up leads to immediately dismissals like "no no, it has full test coverage" or "bug reports are going down" or something, which just don't paint the whole picture.
We already learned this lesson once in infrastructure: you can automate yourself into a very resilient catastrophe machine. Systems can appear healthy by local metrics while globally becoming incomprehensible. Bug reports can go down while latent risk explodes. Test coverage can rise while semantic understanding falls. Changes happens so fast that nobody notices the underlying architecture decaying.
I worry.
ippsav retweeted
It isn't unexpected that the focus of the Bun Rust rewrite is on the anti-Zig side more than anything, since the internet loves to hate. What is unexpected and unfortunate is that leadership within Bun hasn't tried to steer the conversation away from that at all.
There are so many positive and interesting takeaways from this and I'm not really seeing any of them pushed as the primary message.
A positive thing that hasn't been talked about at all is how far Bun came thanks to Zig. And even if you dump it now, its meaningful for how good Zig was to even build a product to this point and impact by any metric. I would've loved to see anyone in leadership say this.
On the interesting side is how fungible programming languages are nowadays. Programming languages used to be LOCK IN, and they're increasingly not so. You think the Bun rewrite in Rust is good for Rust? Bun has shown they can be in probably any language they want in roughly a week or two. Rust is expendable. Its useful until its not then it can be thrown out. That's interesting!
There's been a lot of talk about memory safety and no doubt Rust provides more guarantees than Zig. But I'd love to see a better analysis of why Bun in particular suffered so much rather than take the language-blame path. How could engineering as a practice been more rigorous to prevent this? What were the largest sources of crashes other programs should watch out for? How does Rust prevent them? How could Zig theoretically prevent them? That's interesting.
I know the official blog post hasn't come out yet from Bun. But they're smart enough to know that that PR would stir up controversy the moment it opened, or they should've been. And plenty in the company have been tweeting and writing about it. Its somewhat telling to me in various dimensions what they chose to talk about first.
I tend to think I'm pretty good at corporate PR/comms (especially when it comes to developer audiences) and I think appealing to the negative is never the right long term strategy; it does work to get short term eyes though.
ippsav retweeted
Zig is, and remains, the perfect language for high quality projects that want the most powerful systems language (and the most powerful toolchain).
Why go out for hamburger when you can have steak at home?
ippsav retweeted
making a port is easy, that's not the hard part
the hard part is knowing that the tests won't cover every edges cases and failure modes that the porting process will introduce, given how reward hacking and lazy agents and models are
if we look at the official response from zig's team the same kind of oversight could happen, where you need clear epistemic responsibility and engineering principle
ippsav retweeted
We’ve had on the order of 3 memory bugs in 6 years of TigerBeetle. None RCEs.
On the other hand, our own simulators have proactively found hundreds of (devastatingly catastrophic) distributed systems correctness bugs per year.
Given how hard TigerBeetle’s domain is, in terms of mission critical financial transaction processing, I’ve never for one minute believed that writing TB in a memory safe language such as say TypeScript would somehow magically (!) make any material impact compared to the 100x correctness multiplier of TigerStyle.
That’s because—rather than fall for the fallacy of composition, i.e. to see distributed correctness as a language problem—TigerStyle instead takes ultimate responsibility for the “end to end” correctness of the distributed system as a whole.
Per systems engineering, correctness is always a systems design problem. For example, how to build a reliable whole, (especially) out of unreliable parts, such as broken firmware, bitrot, programmer error etc. In other words, application of the end to end principle.
But when you TigerStyle the design in this way, the world of systems engineering also completely opens up to you and changes how you evaluate systems languages (now things like “power to grammar ratio”, or explicitness, checked arithmetic and precision become more critical and valuable to you).
Of course, it is harder to care about correctness, to take responsibility for correctness end to end.
Yes, you’re forced to begin to worry about the more serious concerns, starting with the basics of static allocation, explicit limits, assertions, deterministic simulation testing and moving to more advanced topics like protocol-awareness and storage fault-tolerance.
But then again, TigerStyle is such a force multiplier, that you achieve mission critical quality, and in less time and with greater velocity.
If you’re tired of production issues, and if you want to “engineer your engineering”, I would encourage you to lift up your thinking to the level of systems design and end to end correctness.
Start thinking about your methodology and begin embracing TigerStyle.
tigerstyle.dev
