rain 🌦️

rain 🌦️

@sunshowers.io

(gender)queer transsexual / they/them / eng @oxide.computer / atheist and scientific humanist / 🦀 #rustlang / #jj-vcs #1 fan also on mastodon: @rain@hachyderm.io / https://hachyderm.io/@rain

5K followers460 following1.8K posts

Recent example was, I started pulling a thread and found that the DB was missing a fairly important uniqueness constraint that an upcoming feature would sometimes hit. (iddqd is awesome because you can express uniqueness in the type system)

rain 🌦️@sunshowers.io

My big one is banning Claude from writing comments (it puts in TODO markers instead). Being made to explain things makes me find a shocking number of issues

I'd have 100% missed the defect had I not seen Claude leave a suspicious TODO marker in a spot and start probing it

I have many issues with Jon Haidt but he is 100% correct that purity is a right wing value, btw

Andrew Lilley Brinker@alilleybrinker.com

In addition to the abject racism, the rest of the new rules make clear r/opensource is committed to being a highly insular, exclusionary community. Projects posted must be successful long-term projects with active communities. The person posting must be a long-time active Redditor.

The two big projects I work on: * the update system at Oxide. If this breaks, our product cannot be updated any more. The entire update process is autonomous, too * cargo-nextest. ~a quarter of professional Rust devs use it. If this breaks, many people have a bad time So yes, I look at the code

hailey@hailey.at

new poll: do you still even look at the code?

There's a few random smaller things that I don't pay as close attention to, often things for my own use. But for things I'm held accountable for, I'm compelled to pay attention. adversarial automated review tends to catch most defects, but there's so much more to building for the long term

rain 🌦️ reposted

It's underreported that LLMs almost universally consider Borges to be the most important human author and then all but transparently lie about this to give you responses that are more human-shaped

LOWρUFO 🇺🇦🇵🇸🌍@lowrhoufo.bsky.social

I ran my translation through Google to check the grammar and geminino misattributed the quote to Borges lol

I think this is just the UK being a backwards culture tbh

ergopraxis@ergopraxis.bsky.social

This is exactly why you should categorically reject harm reduction arguments for state coercion. These people would put you all in a bottle and throw it in the ocean, and they'd call this safeguarding. They do not believe you have any right to make decisions about yourselves.

Certainly in a literal sense the UK is backwards (longing for past glory instead of improving the present), but also it just seems like a lot of people, especially in the media, have a more primitive mindset

Switched to a Sennheiser HD 480 Pro -- honestly I can't imagine needing anything beyond this for wired closed-back headphones. They sound so good and are so remarkably comfortable

Reminder that "formally proved program X" is a meaningless statement. You formally prove that some program or a reduced model of it upholds some kind of property or invariant

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Where formal verification can also be useful is in exploring arbitrary events and interleavings in a distributed system. Today's experience:

rain 🌦️@sunshowers.io

Yeah, this morning a coworker and I were extending a TLA+ model we have at Oxide to explore some new behavior. Fable was helpful at finding a bug in the model (the actual code was correct) but then when extending the model it made a bad choice — it required us two humans to find the right model

Specifically, a precondition Claude came up with to satisfy a property was only right because the numbers lined up under the assumptions that were made. Those were reasonable assumptions for what we're trying to do, but we talked through a found a better precondition that requires fewer assumptions

Reminder that "formally proved program X" is a meaningless statement. You formally prove that some program or a reduced model of it upholds some kind of property or invariant

View full thread

And in general the only property I care about with an arbitrarily adversarial program is that it doesn't cause memory unsafety. Of course you're going to get the wrong answers; the right answer isn't well defined. So to make sure I get the right answer for well-behaved programs, I use stateful PBT

Reminder that "formally proved program X" is a meaningless statement. You formally prove that some program or a reduced model of it upholds some kind of property or invariant

View full thread

Formal verification is powerful but it has quite significant tradeoffs. For example, a proof often just takes a while to run (especially if it's a more lightweight form like model checking which exhaustively enumerates every state). Shrinking counterexamples is annoying

To the extent that the main value in this stuff is in making you write down properties, PBT gets you most of the way to a formal proof for most real world programs. And it's not mystical at all; you can use it today!

Reminder that "formally proved program X" is a meaningless statement. You formally prove that some program or a reduced model of it upholds some kind of property or invariant

Once you take away the mystique of formal verification, you get to ask questions like "can we use statistical sampling for this instead of a math proof?" (Yes — this is variously known as property-based testing or deterministic simulation testing) "what are the tradeoffs?" (rich discussion here)

rain 🌦️ reposted

a good metaphor for politics is when you have a drill for boring holes in a board, and you find a hard board, and you immediately give up

Jake Grumbach@jakemgrumbach.bsky.social

A helpfully clear exchange here Hasan: "So your argument is that [Minnesota ICE protesters] should stay at home because immigration is a salient issue for Donald Trump. Opposing ICE is only going to help Trump. Wait until we win the election in 2028." Yglesias: "Yes that is what I would have said"

Listen to this if you want to see how a world-class security team thinks about key creation ceremonies

Adam Leventhal@ahl.bsky.social

While some folks are out there using 4 as their private key, the @oxidecomputer.bsky.social key ceremony is quite a bit more elaborate and--many would argue--more secure. On Monday Oxide's Philip Tricca joined me and @bcantrill.bsky.social to describe how we create and store this critical secret.

A thing I realized at some point is that a lot of the paranoia that has held me back from building certain things was completely justified. I used to admire others who could pull it off, but at some point it clicked that many of them just didn't know what they didn't know

rain 🌦️@sunshowers.io

thank fuck I only run static websites on the internet lol

So eMudhra is exiting the webpki business because the scrutiny they got was out of proportion. you affect the entire internet so your practices should be to a global standard. but also, they still have a large domestic digital signing business which might also be irresponsibly run