Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Bram Geron

@bram.xyz

Just learned about price discipline — “use the cheapest supplier when it doesn’t matter anyway”.

Is there an analogous concept in product? “Don’t spend effort on tech that affects MAU only marginally”?

“Effort discipline”? “Be careful what you care about”?

November 11, 2025 at 2:32 PM

Bram Geron

@bram.xyz

Sounds plausible. And reposted by @medcrisis.bsky.social who I trust.

In Stanford, does "contrarianism" mean truth doesn't matter, only popularity? Because that's how Huberman's behavior looks to me.

Mallory Harris, PhD @malar0ne.bsky.social · 2d

I spoke to CNN about how demoralizing it was to watch Stanford leadership stay silent while contrarians on campus launched unscientific attacks to stifle Stanford researchers. Now, those attacks have gone nationwide and much of MAHA leadership have ties to Stanford.

www.cnn.com/2025/11/08/p...

The Trump-MAHA-Stanford nexus of US health policy | CNN Politics

In early 2022, Stanford medical student Santiago Sanchez set out to organize a campus debate with Jay Bhattacharya — a professor at the university whose outspoken denunciations of pandemic lockdowns m...

www.cnn.com

November 10, 2025 at 7:24 PM

Bram Geron

@bram.xyz

FutureLock TL;DR: select! has a nasty interaction with async locks. When one future becomes ready, select suspends the other future, but that future may be holding a lock. So tasks can deadlock with themselves. 1/3

Adam Leventhal @ahl.bsky.social · 12d

My colleague Dave Pacheco wrote up a great description of a new (to us?) Rust async pathology--"futurelock"--another extremely sharp edge to watch out for, with no particular guardrails. Of course, we'll be talking about it with @bcantrill.bsky.social on Monday's Oxide and Friends

609 - Futurelock / RFD / Oxide

rfd.shared.oxide.computer

November 9, 2025 at 10:47 PM

Bram Geron

@bram.xyz

Against overmedicalization youtu.be/OQ7g1lQ26s0 @medcrisis.bsky.social

Screening Saves Lives! Right??

YouTube video by Medlife Crisis

youtu.be

November 9, 2025 at 6:20 AM

Reposted by Bram Geron

Ranjit Mathew

@rmathew4bs.bsky.social

“Fil-C: A Memory-Safe C Implementation”, LWN (lwn.net/SubscriberLi...).

On HN: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4573...

On Lobsters: lobste.rs/s/mg0aur/fil...

#FilC #MemorySafety #CHERI #C #Programming #Clang #LLVM

Fil-C: A memory-safe C implementation

Fil-C is a memory-safe implementation of C and C++ that aims to let C code — complete with po [...]

lwn.net

October 29, 2025 at 1:30 PM

Bram Geron

@bram.xyz

Great podcast, very real

Adam Leventhal @ahl.bsky.social · Aug 14

Scott Hanselman gave a terrific talk about the promises of tech: connection, convenience and creativity. Did it deliver? On Monday, @scott.hanselman.com joined me and @bcantrill.bsky.social to discuss... and also wander around as one expects from an Oxide and Friends episode. youtu.be/Clk_3Ihy4BA

Oxide and Friends 8/11/2025 -- The Promises of Tech with Scott Hanselman

YouTube video by Oxide Computer Company

youtu.be

November 6, 2025 at 11:09 PM

Reposted by Bram Geron

goingforbrooke 🦀

@goingforbrooke.bsky.social

ooooooo rusty burn

November 6, 2025 at 6:30 AM

Bram Geron

@bram.xyz

the spirit of Erlang is evolving

Armin Ronacher @mitsuhiko.at · 9d

I wrote a bit about my sidequest at Earendil: Building Absurd which implements durable execution (𝚞𝚜𝚎 𝚠𝚘𝚛𝚔𝚏𝚕𝚘𝚠, Temporal, Inngest, etc.) on just Postgres. How it works and why I like it. lucumr.pocoo.org/2025/11/3/ab...

Absurd Workflows: Durable Execution With Just Postgres

Durable execution with just postgres.

lucumr.pocoo.org

November 4, 2025 at 12:48 PM

Bram Geron

@bram.xyz

Looks like it’ll be a beautiful documentary. A story that needs to be told

www.kickstarter.com/projects/163...

Documentary: No, I'm Not the Mother

Sana travels from Germany to Canada to donate her eggs to a gay couple - an act of solidarity illegal in her home country.

www.kickstarter.com

October 28, 2025 at 11:44 AM

Reposted by Bram Geron

Ian Coldwater 📦💥

@lookitup.baby

Proud of the Python Software Foundation for doing the right thing and standing up for their people, even when it’s hard. Especially when it’s hard.

Python Software Foundation @python.org · 16d

TLDR; The PSF has made the decision to put our community and our shared diversity, equity, and inclusion values ahead of seeking $1.5M in new revenue. Please read and share. pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/10/NSF-...
🧵

The official home of the Python Programming Language

www.python.org

October 27, 2025 at 5:19 PM

Bram Geron

@bram.xyz

“Are you in favor of the constitution, or not?” Seems very simple the way he puts it.

PRÜF @pruef-de.bsky.social · 19d

In Deutschland wird Ordnung großgeschrieben, daher prüfen wir grundsätzlich alles, auch Parteien. Wenn eine Partei als rechtsextremer Verdachtsfall oder gesichert rechtsextrem eingestuft wird, sollte sie geprüft werden. Das ist der nächste logische Schritt.
youtu.be/eSgFEpI9ZDQ?...

Diese Strategie ist der Gamechanger: PRÜF!

YouTube video by Nico Semsrott

youtu.be

October 27, 2025 at 8:28 PM

Reposted by Bram Geron

tbabb

@tbabb.bsky.social

people who think their LLM chats are basically a conversation make me feel like "oh, wow, you're fooled by the puppet bird"

the truth is there is an arm inside that bird and it belongs to a much stranger creature just out of your view

October 17, 2025 at 6:52 PM

Bram Geron

@bram.xyz

They let you translate from/to Gen Z 😭

Kagi Translate offering multiple GenZ translations for “I’m going to the shop, can I get something for you?”, including “Boutta hit up the store, u need anything?”

October 17, 2025 at 9:47 AM

Reposted by Bram Geron

rain 🌦️

@sunshowers.io

Why I like and keep working on Rust

Thank you for the kind words and the thoughtful response.
I'm deeply sympathetic to your viewpoint, and some days I certainly feel like Rust is creaking under its own weight. Why does your typical backend web service need all this complexity with borrows and lifetimes and manual memory management?

But allow me to present the other side of the argument. My background is in systems-level developer tools, and Rust has a combination of things that no other programming environment has:

* & and &mut, which enforce a rigorous separation between mutable and immutable state. I think this is the single most important feature of Rust, and the closest analog to this in other environments is purely functional languages like Haskell

* enums with data + exhaustive pattern matching; the latter is something even Haskell lacks

* high-level idiomatic code that performs like low-level code (e.g. iterators): Rust achieves this through an extraordinary combination of monomorphizing and inlining

* working in memory-constrained environments: tracing GC tends to have significant memory overhead, and I've worked in server environments where a big limiting factor was the amount of DRAM being produced globally

* good polymorphism: I think OOP is a suboptimal paradigm that breaks under day-to-day development stress. I've written about it at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42512629

* fast startup times: this is a requirement for command-line tools people use hundreds of times a day—I spent many years working on Mercurial where Python's slow startup time was a very common complaint

* first-class support for using native OS calls directly; many higher-level languages like Java abstract away the details, so things like signal handling are hard to hook into

* first-class Windows support: again, non-negotiable for many developer tools, since the plurality of developers are on Windows

(cont)

* and last but not least, a great dependency ecosystem, which ties into all of the above points: & and &mut mean that some transitive dependency three levels down won't suddenly alter the list you pass in, idiomatic performance means that perf regressions are rare, first-class Windows support means most dependencies just work on Windows, and so on

Is it possible to have an application-level/GCd/managed language that meets most or all of these requirements? Certainly. Does such an application-level language exist today? No, and there's nothing on the horizon either (Haskell has its heart in the right place, but is missing many of the more practical features here).

Rust isn't a great application-level language, but it's the best application-level language. And given how high the barrier tends to be for a new language to reach adoption, I'll probably be retired long before something like that shows up.

And yeah, async really is quite confusing in so many ways, and it's really unfortunate that this situation has seen no improvements in so many years. And yet, through its characteristics combined with the other things listed here, it enables developers to solve real problems that are completely infeasible in any other language.

So I keep trying to make Rust better :)

October 16, 2025 at 11:52 PM

Reposted by Bram Geron

rain 🌦️

@sunshowers.io

Been meaning to put this somewhere for a while — a real, solid technical reason linear VCS history is better than one full of merges, going beyond taste and subjective preference

lobste.rs/c/cix1sm

> git works best when it has the full merge history available

I used to work on source control. This is actually not true, because (among other things) having a full merge history leads to the likelihood of what are known as criss-cross merges: situations where there isn't a single nearest common ancestor/merge base between two commits. (Merge bases are a crucial piece of information for many source control algorithms.) Criss-cross merges are a pain to deal with, both within the version control system itself and within tools written on top of the VCS. As a result, many tools simply consider criss-cross merges to be outside of their design parameters.

In contrast, a linear history can never have criss-cross merges, greatly simplifying many algorithms.

In general, linear history is friendlier for both tools and humans.

edit: to give an example, a tool I helped build for work needs to load files from the merge base of a commit so it can ensure that "blessed" files don't change in nontrivial ways. The tool simply (and correctly) considers criss-cross merges to be out of scope: https://github.com/oxidecomputer/dropshot-api-manager/blob/bb71488cfa2f642b232ef619bbb3d2c287c8e336/crates/dropshot-api-manager/src/git.rs#L22

Opting into a history full of merges means imposing a burden on the entire ecosystem.

October 13, 2025 at 5:36 PM

Bram Geron

@bram.xyz

news.kagi.com is kinda nice, and pretty calm 🩵

October 13, 2025 at 7:55 PM

Bram Geron

@bram.xyz

If you have the PayPal app on your phone, you have Honey inactive but loaded on your phone 🤮 Let's see what life is like without the PayPal app

The Honey Scam: Explained

YouTube video by Marques Brownlee

www.youtube.com

October 13, 2025 at 6:57 PM

Reposted by Bram Geron

Amy Hoy

@amyhoy.bsky.social

wake up babe, a new (old) paper on "artificial intelligence" just dropped!

it's got that extra tasty vintage typography too (1976)

fulltext: dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE MEETS NATURAL STUPIDITY
Drew McDermoH
MIT At Lab Cambridge, Mass 02139
As a field, artificial intelligence has always been on the border
of respectability, and therefore on the border of crackpottery.
Many critics <Dreyfus, 1972>, <Lighthill, 1973> have urged that we
are over the border. We have been very defensive toward this
charge, drawing ourselves up with dignity when it is made and
folding the cloak of Science about us. On the other hand, in private,
we have been justifiably proud of our wil#ingness to explore weird
ideas, because pursuing them is the only way to make progress.
Unfortunately, the necessity for speculation has combined with
the culture of the hacker in computer science <Weizenbaum, 1975>
to cripple our self-discipline. In a young field, ,~elf-discipline is not
necessarily a virtue, but we are not getting any younger. In the
past few years, our tolerance of sloppy thinking has led us to
repeat many mistakes over and over. If we are to retain any
credibility, this should stop.
This paper is an effort to ridicule some of these mistakes.
Almost everyone I know should find himself the target at some
point or other; if you don't, you are encouraged to write up your
own favorite fault. The three described here I suffer from myself.
I hope self-ridicule will be a complete catharsis, but t doubt it. Bad
tendencies can be very deep-rooted. Remember, though, if we can't
criticize ourselves, someone else will save us the trouble.
Acknow~dEmer~t-- I thank the AI Lab Playroom crowd for
constructive play.
Wishful Mnemonics
A major source of simple-mindedness in AI programs is the use
of mnemonics like "UNDERSTAND" or "GOAL" to refer to programs
and data structures. This practice has been inherited from more

October 4, 2025 at 2:45 AM

Bram Geron

@bram.xyz

“On building systems for futures we don’t know”

-> extensive architecture/business premortems typically lead to architecture/business that’s resilient against things that never came up in the premortem

Eberhard Wolff @ewolff.com · Sep 27

Architect's Secret: Solve Problems and Build Unbreakable Designs!
with Barry O'Reilly @technologytulip.bsky.social
Full episode: software-architektur.tv/2025/09/19/e...
Barry at @sagconference.bsky.social conferences.isaqb.org/software-arc...

September 27, 2025 at 9:50 AM

Bram Geron

@bram.xyz

That website :o posthog.com

PostHog is for product engineers

We’re building every tool for product engineers to build successful products.

posthog.com

September 26, 2025 at 9:05 AM

Bram Geron

@bram.xyz

I can never sleep again thanks to @stanzipotenza.bsky.social youtube.com/shorts/EQFgb...

Conservative haunted house #shorts

YouTube video by Stanzi

youtube.com

September 22, 2025 at 10:36 PM

Bram Geron

@bram.xyz

Liquid Glass tap areas are huge. What a relief — to not have to meticulously position my finger!

In contrast, I’m hugely frustrated at the mental effort I put into the YouTube app, and even with that effort, it does entirely unwanted things on the daily

Bram Geron @bram.xyz · Sep 19

Fascinating how divisive Liquid Glass is — even on iOS.

September 22, 2025 at 9:10 AM

Reposted by Bram Geron

Martin Fowler

@martinfowler.com

I really resonated with: "I think I’m less interested in my own happiness (whatever that means) than I am interested in doing work that feels worth doing" - @charity.wtf reflects on her career

charity.wtf/2025/07/09/t...