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The Missing Piece in Rust Error Handling
Rust already offers explicit control flow, errors as values and concise propagation with ?, but choosing what goes in the error half of Result forces a trade-off between precise types with boilerplate and convenient types that hide which errors can occur. The post argues error types should compose as easily as the functions that return them.
7 min · 1,660 words
Zeroization, part 1: Wiping can make things worse
Frank Denis shows how blindly adding zeroization calls for secrets can leave more copies of a secret in memory than the original code. Using compiled C examples, he covers memset being optimized away, how taking a variable's address forces it onto the stack, and what stays live across calls, and advises checking the optimized build you actually ship.
6 min · 1,382 words
The Data Race That Wasn't a Bug (and the One That Was)
Jesús Espino digs into a Go race detector warning inside net/http: how the HTTP client sends a request body across goroutines and can keep reading your buffer after Client.Do returns, why VictoriaMetrics kept that race in vmagent as harmless, and why the same behavior could corrupt data in vmauth, so they fixed it there.
14 min · 3,210 words
Calling it quits on ServerFault
After just over 15 years as an elected ServerFault moderator since the first 2011 community election, SysAdmin1138 is stepping down at year end. The post recalls early cross-cultural flame wars that shaped moderator coverage and post locking, the site's decline from its 2011-2012 peak to 2-3 questions a day, and recent Stack Exchange-wide spam campaigns.
2 min · 536 words
When random is not actually random enough
Austin Seipp of East River Source Control shows why picking an item with random_u64() modulo n skews the distribution, and argues for APIs that express the desired distribution directly, such as weighted random_choice, which his team now uses everywhere in its Antithesis-related test code.
8 min · 1,816 words
A Terminal Protocol for Program Status (OSC 7501)
Mitchell Hashimoto introduces OSC 7501, a generic terminal escape sequence that lets programs report whether they are idle, working, blocked on the user, finished or failed, and why. He argues heuristics and non-terminal APIs fall short, especially for agentic inboxes tracking many coding agents, and describes implementations in libghostty and Rex.
5 min · 1,236 words
Armin Ronacher explains why Pi 1.0 added MCP support through Codemode despite his long preference for bash and scripts: bash can only compose programs that run in the execution environment, while Codemode lets the model orchestrate harness-side tools like image reads and sub agents in a sandboxed QuickJS/WASM runtime, plus the open problems that remain.
12 min · 2,672 words
tapo speaks TPAP: Third-Party Compatibility can stay off
Mihai Dinculescu explains how v0.11.1 of tapo, his unofficial Rust and Python client for TP-Link Tapo devices, now logs in over TP-Link's TPAP protocol so users no longer need the Third-Party Compatibility switch, and covers new H200/H500 camera hub recording downloads plus plug schedules and timers.
10 min · 2,290 words
I hired an illustrator to draw my house. Now it's my Home Assistant dashboard
Anton Frolov describes commissioning hand-drawn day and night illustrations of each floor of his house, with every device on its own layer and a shared canvas, then wiring them into a Home Assistant picture-elements dashboard in YAML so lights, fireplace and air conditioners animate on a wall TV the whole family actually uses.
10 min · 2,239 words
What is the biggest lie professors tell? what 83 AI models think
We asked 83 AI models (GPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek…) the same question. 23% picked Exam Bait. See every answer, who searched the web, and who dissented.
11 min · 2,493 words
Which company will be the biggest in the world in 2030? 84 AI models predict the result
We asked 84 AI models (GPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek…) the same question. 62% picked NVIDIA. See every answer, who searched the web, and who dissented.
13 min · 3,025 words
India vs West Indies, 1st T20I: 82 AI models predict the result
We asked 82 AI models (GPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek…) the same question. 96% picked India. See every answer, who searched the web, and who dissented.
11 min · 2,451 words
The Haunted Toys R UsThe story behind the Sunnyvale store and the television episode that made it famous
The Retroist recounts the legend of the haunted Toys R Us at 130 East El Camino Real in Sunnyvale, California: employee reports of moving merchandise, strange noises and a talking doll, the 1978 newspaper coverage, the September 1980 That's Incredible episode that made the store famous, and the author's own brief visit.
6 min · 1,309 words
How I Reverse Engineered a Board Game
Wuemeli reverse engineers the Android app behind Hitster, a music board game whose QR-code cards require Spotify or Apple Music, hunting for a decryption key over about 18 hours only to find the song database was publicly downloadable and not encrypted at all.
5 min · 1,191 words
'Wallace and Gromit,' 90% Alone
The Animation Obsessive newsletter recounts how Nick Park spent years making A Grand Day Out, his overambitious NFTS graduation film, mostly alone before finishing it at Aardman and premiering it in Bristol in 1989, plus Asians in Animation's Unboxed education project and animation news.
14 min · 3,247 words
The Performance Cost of RwLock in Our Read-Heavy Workload
A write-up of how per-item RwLock reads became expensive in a read-heavy service, how moving to lock-free structures avoided the overhead of acquiring thousands of read locks, and where a simple RwLock around a larger block still worked well. The takeaway: where and how often synchronization happens matters as much as the choice of primitive.
6 min · 1,303 words
Scaling and benchmarking a critical message bus using a new indexing strategy
Jane Street describes a summer intern project on Aria, its internal messaging framework: indexing the in-memory stream tip and adaptively splitting the topic tree so clients can cheaply recover just the messages they need, cutting CPU usage by about 30% on production-like workloads.
9 min · 2,000 words
Calling a function in C without naming it
A student describes getting shell access through a school's automated C grading system, which bans calling execve by name. Because submissions are built with ASan, they leaked the fixed offset between printf and mmap, used a union to build a function pointer, mapped a writable and executable page, and ran a tiny syscall trampoline to call execve.
7 min · 1,558 words
If somebody tries to hot-patch an already-hot-patched function, how do they avoid conflicts?
Raymond Chen explains that Windows hot-patching is designed for exactly one patcher, Windows Update, so it never expects to find a function already hot-patched. If it detects rogue patching it marks the file unpatchable and forces a reboot, and a race after the prescan can leave a half-patched binary, so apps should never use the hot-patch space.
2 min · 417 words
Miguel Grinberg runs his informal Fibonacci and bubble-sort benchmark on Python 3.15.0rc3 against 3.10 through 3.14, JIT and free-threaded builds, PyPy and other languages. His take: 3.15 is at best a minor speed improvement over 3.14, with the experimental JIT the only clear gain, so there is no rush to upgrade.
10 min · 2,289 words