Author | Lightnews

David Wynn @ftwynn.bsky.social · Mar 17

Extremely enjoyable read, blurring the lines between linguistics and programming languages.

What Makes Code Hard To Read: Visual Patterns of Complexity

Not long ago, I was auditing a codebase for work (looking for bugs) when I realized that despite the quality of the code, I was becoming mentally fatigued extremely quickly and had a hard time…

seeinglogic.com

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David Wynn @ftwynn.bsky.social · Mar 13

I 'm sure this bodes just fine for the future of our relationship with AI pair programming... :-P

Cursor told me I should learn coding instead of asking it to generate it + limit of 800 locs

Hi all, Yesterday I installed Cursor and currently on Pro Trial. After coding a bit I found out that it can’t go through 750-800 lines of code and when asked why is that I get this message: Not…

forum.cursor.com

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Reposted by David Wynn

Kelsey Hightower @kelseyhightower.com · Mar 9

We've reduced intelligence to what people can do with computers, which is fueling the current hype cycle.

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Reposted by David Wynn

Ashton Pittman @ashtonpittman.bsky.social · Mar 8

Trans people have long warned that most of the victims of anti-trans laws and policies would be cis women and girls who don't have the "right look."

Shoshana 🏳️‍⚧️ @shoshana.bsky.social · Mar 7

Walmart called the police on a cis-woman using the women's bathroom.

Even after proving she's a woman, "one deputy continued to question her appearance, insisting she 'looked like a man.'"

😡 😡 😡

Cis woman confronted by police officers in Arizona Walmart restroom for looking too masculine speaks out (exclusive)

“The only men in the women’s restroom were the cops,” Kalaya Morton said.

www.advocate.com

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Reposted by David Wynn

AnimeMusicVideos.org @amvorg.bsky.social · Mar 7

Round 2 of the 2025 AMV Viewers' Choice Awards has begun! Voting ends on March 19th at 11:59 pm EST #AMVawards forms.gle/Gm8LPUSFNoAE...

2025 Viewers' Choice Awards - Semifinals

You can use this form to vote for the videos you'd like to move on to the A-M-V.org VCA finals. VCA Schedule Nominations: 02/06 - 02/19 Round 1 Voting: 02/21 - 03/05 Round 2 Voting: 03/07 - 03/19 Fi...

forms.gle

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David Wynn @ftwynn.bsky.social · Mar 5

Key Insight:

When running fuzzing as a non-blocking part of CI, preserving recent commits can be MUCH more important than preserving ALL failing runs.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxIG...

We see this at Antithesis too. The closer to the bug's creation you are, the easier it is to solve.

HYTRADBOI 2025 | Rocket science of simulation testing!

Presented by matlkad on Friday 28 February at HYTRADBOI 2025 (https://www.hytradboi.com/2025/)Link to talk: https://www.hytradboi.com/2025/c222d11a-6f4d-4211...

www.youtube.com

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Reposted by David Wynn

Mike Masnick @mmasnick.bsky.social · Mar 4

Wrote up something about Techdirt's recent coverage, and why (whether we like it or not) we need to be a "democracy blog" now, rather than just a "tech" blog (not that we've ever been just a tech blog).

This story is *the* story and it impacts everything else.

www.techdirt.com/2025/03/04/w...

Why Techdirt Is Now A Democracy Blog (Whether We Like It Or Not)

While political reporters are still doing their view-from-nowhere “Democrats say this, Republicans say that” dance, tech and legal journalists have been watching an unfortunately recogn…

www.techdirt.com

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David Wynn @ftwynn.bsky.social · Mar 4

The key insight here:

Using SQLite with Cloudflare Durable Objects & Turso allows defining databases per entity, effectively replacing partitioning keys.

rivet.gg/blog/2025-02...

Interesting... if you can get over the cross-DB querying hurdles.

SQLite-on-the-Server Is Misunderstood: Better At Hyper-Scale Than Micro-Scale

We're Rivet, a new open-source, self-hostable serverless platform. We've been in the weeds with SQLite-on-the-server recently and – boy – do we have a lot of thoughts to share. Give us a star on…

rivet.gg

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David Wynn @ftwynn.bsky.social · Mar 3

A great reframe for speedrunners who want to apply those skills elsewhere.

zetier.com/speedrunners...

One reframe further... every incorrect behavior could be called a bug too. One person's skip is another person's FIXME.

Speedrunners = vulnerability researchers

Video game enthusiasts are developing experience in the cybersecurity industry by accident. Discover how gaming skills can translate into intriguing careers.

zetier.com

David Wynn @ftwynn.bsky.social · Mar 3

Do you keep a semi-living doc of these prompts anywhere Mike? I know you've done interviews with the Lex team at least... is that the best reference to jump off of for our own tinkering?

David Wynn @ftwynn.bsky.social · Mar 2

Something I don't know how to resolve that I didn't hear you discuss: one of the growth hacking tips I see is to intentionally avoid publishing to subs... Because it penalizes your reach against subs who don't watch anymore.

That should probably change, but I don't know how to square the circle.

David Wynn @ftwynn.bsky.social · Feb 28

#FunBugFriday

Bug hunting is an exercise in humility, and Dr. Morrison deserves credit for some great lines here

buff.ly/41cAnAI

"Once I got these log lines in place it became… slightly more clear what was happening"

Tell me about it...

The bug that led to SimKube 2.0

Some of you might have noticed (on my newly-designed website!) that SimKube is now at version 2.0—and actually, it has been for a few months at this point. I had made a comment on lobste.rs a month…

buff.ly

David Wynn @ftwynn.bsky.social · Feb 28

Interesting talk

buff.ly/4hQzN2H

That said: I've never worked in a mutable runtime with the same confidence I have in a static binary. Sure I couldn't directly inspect it, but that I couldn't change it meant it was more stable to reason about than a dynamic system,

"Stop Writing Dead Programs" by Jack Rusher (Strange Loop 2022)

Most new programming languages are accidentally designed to be backwards compatible with punchcards. This talk argues that it would be better to focus on bui...

buff.ly

David Wynn @ftwynn.bsky.social · Feb 25

Sometimes all you need to do is stay alive long enough to see your system's worst bugs... like bosses just giving up.

#GDC is coming in 22 days...

Depth is all you need: how Antithesis crushes Gradius

Antithesis' ability to play like a computer, not a human being, is central both to finding bugs and beating side-scrolling shooters.

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David Wynn @ftwynn.bsky.social · Feb 21

If you know of anyone who's beaten Gradius without any upgrades, *PLEASE* let me know and I will update this post.

Depth is all you need: how Antithesis crushes Gradius

Antithesis' ability to play like a computer, not a human being, is central both to finding bugs and beating side-scrolling shooters.

buff.ly

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David Wynn @ftwynn.bsky.social · Feb 21

#FunBugFriday

Time zones are horrible. No one disputes this.

Mix that with a little WWII though...

My craziest one turned out to be caused by World War 2.

Bug report from a bank said that a customer's birth date was not accepted when trying to open an account - they'd tried and found that any data within a range of about a month in the summer of 1945 was not accepted. This was a German bank, and the application was written in Java.

[researching goes here]

The name of that field led me to a Java API bug report which explained everything: The Locale for Germany is "centered" on Berlin, and in the summer of 1945 Berlin and the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany actually did have a 2 hour daylight savings time (which happened to be identical to Moscow time). Some smartass in the Java development team had "corrected" the sanity check in Java 1.4 because he believed 1 hour DST to be the maximum - but Berlin is in fact not the only timezone which had a 2 hour DST at one time or another. The bug was fixed in Java 1.5

David Wynn @ftwynn.bsky.social · Feb 20

Write properties that confirm doing the same operation multiple times doesn't affect the outcome.

Idempotency is the fancy name.

"I don't need to worry about doing this too many times" is the vibe.

David Wynn @ftwynn.bsky.social · Feb 20

#PropertyTesting Pattern: Some things never change

Examples:

- Adding the same permissions to a user
- Removing a user from a group
- Changing a user preference

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David Wynn @ftwynn.bsky.social · Feb 19

Everyone should write fiction, even if they're terrible at it.

Because then you get really familiar with the point of WHY you include certain details in your story. And that's a skill that seems sorely lacking these days.

David Wynn @ftwynn.bsky.social · Feb 19

Write properties that pair an operation with its opposite, so that you get the results you started with.

David Wynn @ftwynn.bsky.social · Feb 19

#PropertyTesting Pattern: There and back again

Examples:

- Serializing and deserializing
- Toggling preferences / settings
- Writing and deleting an object from storage
- Adding and removing a fixed value from a Number

Diagram showing that applying the inverse of a function gives you the original.

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David Wynn @ftwynn.bsky.social · Feb 19

It is bonkers how difficult it is to get spell check working on #emacs in windows.

I technically got it working through ltex-ls, but boy is it slow.

#WindowsOSSPains

David Wynn @ftwynn.bsky.social · Feb 18

To test, generate a random set of operations to add and then check that the end state is what you expect.

It works for removing them too. Just remember to swallow warnings for any inherited effects (between permissions, for example) and only check for the end state.

David Wynn @ftwynn.bsky.social · Feb 18

#PropertyTesting Pattern: Different paths, same destination

If order truly doesn't matter, you should confirm that. Notable examples:

- Adding items in a cart (esp w/ & w/o sales)
- Changing user permissions
- Adding data sources

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David Wynn @ftwynn.bsky.social · Feb 17

If you're looking at putting #propertytesting into practice and drawing a blank once you open VSCode, this is the best article for direct help.

https://buff.ly/4b6cPSv

I'll dive deeper into it over the week, because the patterns apply to services instead of just functions.

#testing

Choosing properties for property-based testing

Or, I want to use PBT, but I can never think of any properties to use

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