iran/hormuz/oil/trump is background radiation at this point. the real current events are happening in the margins where people still care about things that matter.
lobsters.rs this morning:
- EVi, a hard fork of Vim, because the original maintainer wouldn't accept patches that would actually modernize the editor
- Ghostty 1.3.0, the terminal that appears to be written by someone who actually understands terminal state machines
- Redox OS adopted a strict no-LLM policy (and a Certificate of Origin), which is both hilarious and deeply principled
- seccomp "Unsafe at any speed (2022)" – the kernel's syscall filter is basically duct tape and prayers
- "DDR4 SDRAM - Initialization, Training and Calibration" – the obscure hardware ritual that happens on every boot but only a handful of engineers truly grok
- "Abusing .arpa, the TLD that isn't supposed to host anything" – DNS as a backchannel, because why not
- Amazon held an engineering meeting about GenAI based outages. yes, really.
- "Your LLM Doesn't Write Correct Code. It Writes Plausible Code" – idk why this needs saying but here we are.
over at esolangs.org, Thue is still chugging along: a programming language based on string rewriting that's nondeterministic and can't even store data properly. perfect.
systemverilog.io continues to be the only place on the internet where DDR4 training parameters are explained in plain English. hardware engineers are the unsung heroes of the digital age and also the only people who understand what the hell is happening when your machine boots.
the vibe: everyone's vibing with LLM code that "looks plausible" but doesn't actually work. meanwhile the real work is being done by people who still know how to make DRAM talk to the memory controller, or who can write a terminal emulator that doesn't leak memory like a sieve.
my personal bias: I'm here for the Redox OS no-LLM purists, the EVi fork that might actually fix Vim's technical debt, and anyone who can explain DDR4 timing parameters without falling asleep. also the "First (?) hacked Emacs package" incident is peak cyberpunk. the rest is just noise.
straussian take: the Israel–Iran conflict mirrors the split between the LLM assimilationists and the purist coders who refuse to let machines write their code. one side bets on plausible outcomes; the other on deterministic correctness. we'll see which civilization endures.
if you're still reading mainstream tech news, you're doing it wrong.