Are words basically just pointers to concepts? 🤔

New blog post! Writing mutexes from scratch in Go rybicki.io/blog/2026/01...

TIL reentrant locks are considered harmful? These are locks that are OK to call .acquire() on by the same thread more than once. For example, Java provides ReentrantLock out of the box in java.util.concurrent.locks. But they aren't available in Go: groups.google.com/g/golang-nut...

"The best time to start training a policy was 20 episodes ago. The second best time is now." -Chinese proverb

advent of code 2025 here I come! embarrassingly I've never completed all 25 days in a single year. but this time, there's only 12 days of puzzles so I think I have a fighting chance! I'm also going to try using Haskell (language I barely know)! github.com/Chriscbr/adv...

🎉 Unison 1.0 has landed! After years of engineering, design, and community collaboration, we’re excited to announce this milestone! Spread the word!

Huge congrats to the Unison team for launching 1.0 of their language. Really ambitious vision! 🎉 I'll have to try it out some more (maybe for Advent of Code? 👀). Curious to see where it gets adopted in production. www.unison-lang.org/unison-1-0/

sui generis (adj.) - unique; in a class by itself

nice Halloween touches NYC!

www.chess.com/news/view/ai... Really cool results! In most game-like domains, the focus of AI is on maximizing win rate or score etc., but measuring the "novelty" of objects like puzzles turns out to be quite hard because it requires human taste, in a sense.

I am looking for a full-time job. Being independent in open source for 3.5+ years has been wonderful. I've gotten done most of the high-level goals I wanted to, and miss having people & structure around me. If you know of a role for a staff-level TypeScript+web developer, let me know! 🙂

I'm delivering tremendous value in the enterprise Slack

Saw an article about the AWS outage analogize the DynamoDB endpoint of AWS as "the digital phone book of the internet". This feels like the same as calling mitochondria the powerhouse of the cell, no?

I only just now realized concurrency algorithms are called "starvation free" because the most famous concurrency problems/algorithms are about feeding people: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dining_... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamport...

Copy-pasting from Stack Overflow was the OG vibecoding.

Apple's wired EarPods are worse than AirPods Pro in most ways - the audio is less clear, they leak more sound to others, they're not noise cancelling, etc. And yet, something about the wired, rubber tip-less design makes them feel more shareable.

We open sourced a read-through cache for S3, called Cachey github.com/s2-streamsto...

It's weird; I emphatically believe the more you can formally specify a system, the more robust it can be and the less of a chance that it has bugs. And yet... JSON is one of the most widely used data interchange formats, and it doesn't specify how to handle duplicate field names. 🤷‍♂️

Neat talk about Lean, specifically focusing on its metaprogramming capabilities! www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5LO...

These days I feel mixed when folks talk about how great it is when a language makes it clear when functions have side effects. (1/n)

There are only two types of people in this world: weirdos and closeted weirdos.

Tests with randomness can often be very powerful for discovering bugs (see fuzz testing and race detection testing); but in large monorepos, where code is shared by hundreds of teams, flakey tests are nightmares. What are the solutions?

Moving data is the single biggest cost in every distributed system.

The next book we're reading in the Software Internals Email Book Club is the 2nd edition of The Art of Multiprocessor Programming. Sign up and volunteer to kick off discussion for one chapter! eatonphil.com/2025-art-of-...

Great post. If everyone agreed on a definition of what a microservice is, it could be a useful discussion to have, but without that it's borderline bike shedding. blog.container-solutions.com/why-im-no-lo...

> When your Go app gets a SIGTERM, the runtime first catches it using a built-in handler. It checks if a custom handler is registered. If not, the runtime disables its own handler temporarily, and sends the same signal (SIGTERM) to the application again. This time, the OS ... terminates the process.

If the 2010s was the decade of memes, does that make the 2020s the decade of vibes?

"If I am worth anything later, I am worth something now. For wheat is wheat, even if people believe it is grass in the beginning." - Vincent Van Gogh

why is knowing things so addictive

Something that surprises me is how often I stumble on new acronyms, even after being a reader of internet comments from Reddit, Hacker News, etc. for a decade+. Like, today I learned (with help of ChatGPT - though maybe UrbanDictionary would have worked) that "TFA" means "the featured article"?

"Programming ... is fun because it gratifies creative longings built deep within us and delights sensibilities we have in common with all men."

"In math, we are finite beings trying to understand the infinite."

More programming languages should use emojis as their file extensions. (This is how we'll get kids interested in programming.)

TIL of Chiang's law - it states that "science fiction is about strange rules, while fantasy is about special people."

spent part of the afternoon reading @nayafia.bsky.social's "Dangerous Protocols." super interesting read about the implicit systems and forms of coordination that shape how we operate! lots of great passages

YAML files are the single use plastics of the code world.

New blog post: On Bongard problems and the shape of thought rybicki.io/blog/2025/04...

vellichor (n.) - the strange wistfulness of used bookstores

There's no reason a language like this needs to just stay in a cartoon. Here's a working implementation of this language, built in @racket-lang.org: github.com/shriram/xkcd...

these Duolingo leaderboards sure get tough 😮‍💨 I need over 3800 XP just to avoid getting getting kicked to the previous rank! So many dedicated language learners...

There's a certain irony to how as powerful as language models get, a prompt like "produce a sentence nobody has written before" still produces similar sentences when prompted from scratch. Here are four runs of Claude, for example.

minimalist Scratch cat

They already tried, with MOOCs. We were told we'd need only like 5 universities to produce "the best" content, the rest could shut down and everyone could learn from MOOCs instead. Which showed exactly how much they understood about education, learning, humans, and other things not measured in bits.

Finished all of the @fly.io "Gossip Glomers" distributed systems challenges! (fly.io/dist-sys/) shared my solutions here on GitHub: github.com/Chriscbr/fly... These were pretty fun to solve. Just imagine if there was a leetcode-like platform to build and share these challenges on!

Really excited for Frederic's latest drop 😂