The important parts of Open Source

Amazing story of how a math teacher got involved into an open source project.

PARC

I came across this blog post from PARC on their 40th anniversary in 2010, and realised I still have a bit of a blind spot in access to information around cleantech and biotech. These fields are undoubtedly going to have an amazing decade, but it’s not clear that stories will appear on the front page of  Hacker News/Techmeme as much as I’d like. I’ll have to come up with a way of aggregating news stories from these spaces, some combination of futurism meets research?

I wonder how I’d re-rank their list today. I noticed how AI is on #10, but I'm loving there’s someone at PARC who actually thinks they’ll look at teleportation over the next 40 years.

GitLab Online Product Marketing discussion

People use GitLab’s transparent online culture which posts meetings to YouTube to pretend they’re in Zoom meetings.

Paul Graham on Addiction

I realised Paul Graham’s essay on Addiction has parallels to Naval’s Modern Struggle

Zuck calls out T Cook

Antithesis Discussion

During discussion on what Antithesis is (I'd been keenly interested ever since seeing their testing setup of FoundationDB) they replied in the comments:

There's a thing, called fuzzing, invented by security researchers. There's a thing, called property-based testing, invented by functional programmers. There's a thing, called network simulation, invented by distributed systems people. There's a thing, called rare-event simulation, invented by physicists (!). But if you squint, all of these things are really the same kind of thing, which we call "autonomous testing". It's where you express high-level properties of your system, and have the computer do the grunt work to see if they're true. Antithesis is our attempt to take the best ideas from each of these fields, and turn them into something really usable for the vast majority of software.

We believe the two fundamental problems preventing widespread adoption of autonomous testing are: (1) most software is non-deterministic, but non-determinism breaks the core feedback loop that guides things like coverage-guided fuzzing. (2) the state space you're searching is inconceivably vast, and the search problem in full generality is insolubly hard. Antithesis tries to address both of these problems.

So... is it fuzzing? Sort of, except you can apply it to whole interacting networked systems, not just standalone parsers and libraries. Is it property-based testing? Sort of, except you can express properties that require a "global" view of the entire state space traversed by the system, which could never be locally asserted in code. Is it fault injection or chaos testing? Sort of, except that it can use the techniques of coverage guided fuzzing to get deep into the nooks and crannies of your software, and determinism to ensure that every bug is replayable, no matter how weird it is.

It's hard to explain, because it's hard to wrap your arms around the whole thing. But our other big goal is to make all of this easy to understand and easy to use. In some ways, that's proved to be even harder than the very hard technological problems we've faced. But we're excited and up for it, and we think the payoff could be big for our whole industry!”

10M Context Window - Gemini 1.5 Report

"Studying the limits of Gemini 1.5 Pro's long-context ability, we find continued improvement in next-token prediction and near-perfect retrieval (>99%) up to at least 10M tokens"

Report

Code is a better form of leverage than media

I listened to Cyrus Yari on the Brick By Brick podcast.

I came for Cyrus' thinking on the future of software engineering:

but his "thought boi" knowledge is strong:

Three Virtues

It was kind of a thing at the time. In the Afterword of Æleen Frisch's Essential System Administration (also 1991) subtitled "Don't Forget to Have Fun", there are listed seven virtues of a system administrator:

The concept of fun keeps coming up again and again.

Tweet

Sora

https://openai.com/sora

Spotted this comment about Sora:

We are all standing on the shoulders of giants, whose existence and names we will never know or acknowledge.

The way these models are creative is the same way humans are.

The artist that painted Mona Lisa didn't credit any of the influences and inspirations that they had.

Just as cameras made many artists redundant, so too will every other new tool, and not just artist but pretty much every job.

But there are still people that weave baskets, and people are prepared to pay the premium to get a product that was 'hand-made'.

While receiving the credit that you are deserved is nice and fair. The world doesn't work that way.

Automated Testing Analysis at Meta

“We believe this is the first report on industrial scale deployment of LLM-generated code backed by such assurances of code improvement.”

Paper

From Atom to Zed - We have to start over

"So at that point it was: okay, what should we do? And I'd been watching Rust, I'd seen some of Raph Levien's writing about Rust. And at the time this seemed like the only viable path to kind of overcome some of these obstacles. And it started as: what if we just write the core of this thing in Rust and we keep Electron as the presentation layer?"

I've previously written about the importance of speed, and Atom was one of my first coding editors so it's great to see this come out. I wonder with so much going on in the IDE wars for AI if there's enough mindshare that cares about raw latency anymore.

Link

Science: Canary Island history

How did the first human settlers of the Canary Islands survive a millennium of isolation?

Long-read