Lobsters

What we ended up doing about alias propagation

A high-performance and high-level purely functional data-parallel array programming language that can execute on the GPU and CPU.

I'm still around.. I'm just not writing here

What's Wrong with GitHub

Software developers, the GNU Project urges you to avoid hosting your repositories on GitHub. This is to avoid being on the receiving end of harmful practices, and avoid leading others to be victims too.

How big is a Git commit? - ratfactor

Short answer: It depends. Git stores "objects" as zlib compressed data. So the exact size of a commit will depend on the compressibility of your files (which is basically a function of the amount of repetition in them).

JSON Tiles: Fast Analytics on Semi-Structured Data (2021)

Developers often prefer flexibility over upfront schema design, making semi-structured data formats such as JSON increasingly popular. Large amounts of JSON data are therefore stored and analyzed by relational database systems.

LineageOS 24.0 released

We’re a bit sentimental about this release, as it precedes a really fun upcoming milestone.

How shredding JSON is giving Logfire 1000x query speedups

How dynamic shredding makes the vast majority of queries in Logfire a thousand times faster, with early adopter customers reporting more than 1000x improvement on query performance.

Consistency is not a localized property

No single component can promise consistency. The Kafka spent years and had rewrite significant parts of their tool proving this point. After all that work, they still say the guarantee is yours to hold.

Making np.searchsorted up to 25× Faster in NumPy 2.5

We explore how to speed up binary search by batching independent searches with NumPy's vectorized operations. We then reformulate the algorithm so all searches progress together with only $O(1)$ additional memory, port it to C++, and achieve up to a 25× speedup over NumPy 2.4's implementation.

Byte Language Models: Scaling, Emergent Abstractions, and Information Allocation

The paper challenges the assumption that language models need explicit tokenizers to be efficient demonstrating that standard flat Transformers can process raw byte sequences and actually outperform traditional subword models as parameter sizes scale.

Inside a 1980s filter chip that uses switched capacitors

Sometimes it's easier to identify an IC with a microscope. While sorting a box of old ICs, CuriousMarc came across some Harris ICs labeled "...

The 2D physics prototype behind GTA’s vehicles

The story of a 2D vehicle physics prototype created in 1996 and later remastered as Motion Lab.

Kiesel Devlog #15: Release 0.4.0

This week I completed the update to Zig 0.17 and released Kiesel 0.4.0! It contains 64 commits across 2.5 months, see the changelog for the full list of user-facing changes.

There's little that's "inevitable" about AI

The glib response here would be to say that no technology is ever inevitable and that everything is contingent. This has the advantages of being technically true and sounding wise, but unfortunately technologies very much exist that a reasonable person might well label that way.

No Man Is an Island

In this post, I argue that individual intellectual activity can only be sustained in an intellectual community of other humans. AI dissolves these communities, which in turn makes private intellectual activity rarer.

Lifeguard: A static analyzer for Python lazy imports compatibility

Lifeguard is a static analyzer to detect Lazy Imports incompatibilities and ease the adoption overhead for Lazy Imports in Python - facebook/Lifeguard

Cloudflare shutting down Deno is news, not just PR

Requesting the currently-removed post for https://deno.com/blog/cloudflare be restored. Thread: https://lobste.rs/s/8hauxs/deno_is_joining_cloudflare My reasoning: It isn't just PR, but significant tech news that Cloudflare is buying up open source teams while dismantling the projects they…

Branches in branch-free code

You can see the output on Compiler Explorer, alongside versions compiled with GCC and with the Zicond extension we’ll look at below.