Health insurance in the US is so fucked up. New company has health insurance company from Texas. Will it work for MA doctors or pharmacies? If I call the insurance company the answer is "almost certainly, but you can only check after you sign up." Their software doesn't appear to allow them to […]

monthly routine ^_^

New release of #python library to access perf_event_open() up on PyPI, now lets you know when you get partial reads. github.com/pythonspeed/py-perf-event/ for details cause I haven't gotten around to fixing the README on PyPI and now need to go do something else.

Can't tell if my PR killed GitHub or GitHub killed my PR

What makes one decide to make a parody movie trailer for, of all things, the GNU Image Manipulation Program? I asked the puppeteer behind Pork Johnson, the star of the semi-viral GIMP clip. https://tedium.co/2026/04/07/pork-johnson-gimp-parody-interview/ new @tedium

One issue with my library for estimating computational complexity of Rust functions is that it works by finding the model that best fits from a set of known models. What if the best fit is not the actual complexity model? Let's say that real complexity is 2^N, but fastest growing known model […]

Just realized that the infrastructure for a memory profiler that tracks peak memory (and therefore tracks allocation sites) is really quite similar to the infrastructure for https://llvm.org/docs/GwpAsan.html Which means I could build the equivalent, with the difference that you could […]

This image is a wonderful demonstration of why growing real fast can be a problem: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/03/18/magazine/fastest-growing-companies-new-england/

Need to pick a sample of size K from a stream of events of unknown size? You need reservoir sampling. The article below introduces the basics, and a new (maybe?) variation that's useful when evenly spreading out samples is helpful ---- Alternative intro: The commercial profiler I built is no […]

This is pretty funny: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1s7fcjf/claude_usage_limits_discussion_megathread_ongoing/ I particularly enjoyed this one: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1s7fcjf/comment/odch4cc/

RE: https://mastodon.social/@danluu/116317069604398190 Guess I picked a good week to try out Codeberg.

Is your #rust function O(n), or did you mistakenly make it quadratic? I just released a new crate that lets you unit test your code's scalability, by allowing assertions about the empirical computational complexity of your code: https://docs.rs/bigoish/

Financial Times reporter describing Bloomberg News as "the content generation lab of an American back office IT company" is 🔥

Cursed comment: "`NPY_SIZEOF_LONGDOUBLE` isn't usually equal to sizeof(long double)."

Hey folks, we've had a speaker drop out. If you've got a 10-20 minute talk on tech from a political perspective, and you'd be ready to present it next Monday, please hit us up in the DMs!

Any ideas why perf_event_open() would often return 0 CPU instructions retired when I pin a thread to a particular core?

"memory allocation of 670222633088 bytes failed" computers are so persnickety, what's a few orders of magnitude between friends

🤖 **OpenAI to acquire Astral** Accelerates Codex growth to power the next generation of Python developer tools 📰 Source: OpenAI News 🔗 Link: https://openai.com/index/openai-to-acquire-astral #python #ai #artificialintelligence

Email from Google: "Lawmakers in state capitals across the country are back in session – and they’re already proposing regulations that could make it harder and more expensive for you to reach customers online. You can stay up to date on potential regulatory changes and make your voice heard on […]

As promised: I'm a staff-ish level software engineer, fairly deeply involved in the Python community (see @NorthBayPython which I organise, and @ThePSF where I'm a board Director). Things I like: understanding/taking apart/reassembling systems; open source; technology in service of humans […]

Another company, starting a mental health marketplace. "Next: an AI-powered booking and translation layer with real-time audio translation, making quality care as accessible as ordering dinner. This is a system-level play. When we succeed, access to care becomes normal. Suffering becomes […]

Using braille to render graphs in the terminal is kinda cool, but also pretty bad. In this case you can see how the graph looks quite different in different fonts:

"We believe emotions will become the most natural user interface between humans and computers, unlocking products that make people more empathetic, productive, and kind." WTF does this mean? If I emote sadness the computer will open a browser? If the computer emotes happiness I will know I have […]

More work on the #rust library to empirically determine complexity (big-O, to simplify), so you can assert "this function is O(nlogn)". I now have a much deeper appreciation of how painful heterogeneous collections are in Rust (in my case, a list of complexity models). Also learned that I […]

Back to working on the Cursed Project (Eventlet). Having learned that you can overwrite pretty much any memory via /proc/self/mem (https://offlinemark.com/an-obscure-quirk-of-proc/), I briefly considered using that as a workaround for this bug, turning a C function into a noop. But that's […]

Nerd-sniped myself into implementing empirical big-O analysis in #rust, so you can write a test that asserts "this function is O(logn)". So far I have basic models and basic fitting; need to get those better tested and fleshed out, and then do measurement. It'll probably be CPU instruction […]

I started my programming career in 1995, creating multimedia CD-ROMs (and one interactive museum exhibit) using MacroMedia Director. So it's pretty cool to see someone building a new runtime, 30 years later […]

If you're in NYC, my cousin-in-hyphenation is speaking at a Honeycomb event: https://events.honeycomb.io/o11yDayNYC2026

RE: https://omfg.town/@dansinker/116167095840901199 OK so now I'm wondering, what is the Canadian equivalent of the USian girlfriend-in-Canada?

From https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7434290499089309696/ - "Grammerly is now offering "expert review" of your work by living and dead academics. Yes, dead ones - without anyone's explicit permission it's creating little LLMs based on their scraped work and using their names […]

"I believe the question of how AI systems learn to understand themselves and others is one of the most consequential technical problems of our time. If we get it right, the agents we build today will become our friends and collaborators tomorrow." Men will spend their life searching for theory […]

RE: https://cosocial.ca/@mhoye/116148772813747144 To expand this point: software is composed of code, organizational processes, and people. A surprisingly large number of software developers are narrowly focused on generating code and miss all the surrounding processes and people (skills […]

In fact, I am willing to offer up to five hours of my time — free — to any public sector team or nonprofit anywhere in the world that needs help figuring out what makes sense and how to respond to top down pressure telling you to implement AI. And if they’ve already chosen something for you, I […]

YouTube algorithm has fucked me over and now instead of getting vinyl disco DJ live sets I'm getting "Hillsong Worship Best Praise Songs Collection 2025,Special Worship Songs Playlist,Christian Worship" 🤮

You want your code to be faster, or at least not to get slower. Step 1. Add benchmarks to CI. This will catch accidental regressions. Step 2. You spend a day adding a feature, submit a PR... and discover you accidentally made an important code path slower. You don't know which particular […]

In December 2007, I saw the advertisement in the attached image in an airport; the company was dead soon after. Today, I discovered yet another company that will generate apps for you with AI. It is, to be fair, much better than average, it was built as a […] [Original post on hachyderm.io]

One of the more impressive things about Rust is how much better it is than Docker at filling up your disk.

As a counter to all the utterly stupid useless crap the tech industry is doing at the moment, this is really cool: https://tatumrobotics.com/

This is supposedly what is causing trucking broker stocks to crash today: """ Thursday’s rout was sparked by an update from tiny AI logistics firm Algorhythm Holdings Inc., which said its SemiCab platform in live customer deployments was helping its customers’ internal operations to scale […]

Today in software-is-amazing: https://www.reddit.com/r/boston/comments/1r125k0/time_machine_in_brigham_garage/

"Alphabet Plans Tech’s First 100-Year Bond Since Dot-Com Era" is definitely not foreshadowing

Build fails. Logs are completely empty, no explanation of what happened. The application has "Why did it fail? [AI]" button. I press it. "I cannot diagnose the failure because the provided log excerpt is incomplete (} only). Please rerun the build and share the full log output so the relevant […]

"[our stack] includes over 1500 public npm modules" What

RE: https://toot.kif.rocks/@merlin/116014854605473342 ah yes the three genders

"We're AI marketer that writes LinkedIn content for every employee at your company." 😱

Updated the version of Numba (and therefore LLVM) I use for my book, in preparation for paid Early Access. And now, performance results are different in some cases in ways that impact my explanations. Also I'm starting to think if you use Numba (and maybe LLVM?) you should just disable […]

Song of the day: https://chrisorrickraps.bandcamp.com/track/90s-money-prod-alex-goose-2