Probabilistic coder of 10 programming languages, but only Rust anymore..
Los Angeles, CA
Joined May 2008
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I have always argued that Joel was wrong. But how sweet it is to see ton of people proving him wrong. This sounds like the obviously right thing to do, and of course file it under #rust is going to eat everything, a prediction I made before GPT dropped.
In the year 2000, Joel Spolsky (founder of Stack Overflow) wrote a famous article titled “Things You Should Never Do, Part I.” In it, he talks about how rewriting your code from scratch is the single worst strategic mistake any software company can make. However, times have changed.
The cost of writing software is dropping exponentially and that has changed the math entirely on if it is worth rewriting your codebase. For instance, this year Anthropic’s Jarred Sumner ( @jarredsumner ) rewrote Bun in Rust in 11 days leading to many performance and correctness benefits.
Likewise, Stephen Toub (Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft, @stephentoub ) rewrote the GitHub Copilot runtime (400,000-line codebase) in Rust by himself. I thought it’d be interesting to lay out everything he learned in the process. So I interviewed him about how and why he did it.
In this episode:
• Why he choose Rust of all languages
• Rollout strategies (incremental vs all at once)
• How he prevented regressions
• Steering agents and which models he used
• Career lessons and engineering advice
Where to watch:
• YouTube - youtube.com/watch?v=PLMOVlZC…
• Spotify - open.spotify.com/episode/4zt…
• Apple Podcasts - podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…
• Transcript - developing.dev/p/e073-stephe…
Thank you to the sponsor of this episode for supporting my work:
• WorkOS: makes your app Enterprise Ready with easy to use APIs to add SSO, SCIM, RBAC, and more in just a few lines of code, check them out at workos.com/
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
01:06 Why the Copilot runtime needed a Rust port
05:38 Why he chose Rust
11:28 Discussing rollout strategies
21:57 How he caught regressions
32:08 Guiding the agents
42:11 Catching regressions before prod
45:16 Which models he used
50:03 The end benefit and costs
01:03:24 When to do a full rewrite
01:06:40 Career learnings on the way to Distinguished
01:16:00 Top technical book recommendation
01:17:49 Advice for young engineers
01:21:00 Outro
Almost 30 years on, if you are on the buy now page on @AmazonHelp and you choose a friend's address to send something to them, it changes the destination for ALL FUTURE ORDERS!
Seriously in KSA MBS would fall in this hole once and have the whole development team executed.
But Jeff is busy having canals deepened to get his yacht further into the hinterlands.
Mentioned MBS cause I am going through Princes and Thieves and as we know, mr. bonesaw's victim worked for Jeff! Who did and said NOTHING of course.
and let's give Cramer another thanks for platforming criminals, please prosecute him as an accomplice...
Rob Williams retweeted
🚨 BREAKING: Donations for Abdul El-Sayed surge as MAGA Haley Stevens’ publicity stunt backfires.
Rob Williams retweeted
Donald Trump's @GOPLosAngeles is campaigning for Karen Bass, spending $130,241.93 to elect her.
I hope they send him to a partner jail in Algeria.
France is showing the world what real accountability looks like. Paris prosecutors have launched a major criminal investigation into Elon Musk’s X, raided its Paris offices and summoned Musk and former CEO Linda Yaccarino for questioning. The allegations are staggering, political manipulation through algorithms, child sexual abuse material, sexually explicit deepfakes generated by Grok without consent, Holocaust denial, unlawful data extraction and election interference. While Musk parades around pretending to be a defender of free speech, his platform faces allegations involving the exploitation of children, the sexual abuse of women through AI-generated imagery, the manipulation of political discourse and threats to democratic elections. Bravo, France! This is what standing up to billionaire arrogance looks like. Democracy is not a billionaire's personal playground, social media platforms are not above the law, and Elon Musk does not get to buy himself immunity from accountability. France is making it clear that the rule of law still matters, and the rest of the democratic world should be paying attention.
Athena is her 💫
@Athena_is_her
This book is wild. Jared is totally cooked. But more broadly this gives a blow-by-blow of the truth of this amazing proverb:
“When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn't become a king. The palace becomes a circus” ~Turkish Proverb.
audible.com/pd/Princes-and-T…
There is no better illustration of the Doctorow Doctrine of Enshittification than the @Meta apps. You cannot see a scrub bar in @instagram. You cannot skip forward or back. Now if a video is playing and you want to stop it? you click once to go full screen then you get the chance to stop it.
When do they announce they've made a new straitjacket and accompanying goggles you have to wear to consume their product? I mean to consume the product they harvest and claim provenance to from their users?
So surprised the surveillers don't want to be surveilled.
🚨#BREAKING: A Georgia mayor suspected his police force wasn't working very hard so he SECRETLY put a TRACKER on his police chief’s truck...
...and the ENTIRE POLICE FORCE QUIT
Yes, the cops found out what it feels like to be tracked and they ALL resigned.
The story is WILD.
According to the city council, sometime in late August Mayor Craig Timmons decided he had a “problem” with the department’s work hours.
So, he bought a tracker with his own money and put it on Chief Bunn’s (chief of police) vehicle.
He also pointed a CAMERA at City Hall to watch employees come and go.
The chief resigned.
Every full-time officer resigned.
Most of the reserves resigned.
The city manager resigned.
...now hold that thought.
Right now, all over America, Flock cameras are going up on poles in towns just like Milner.
They photograph YOUR car, every day, everywhere you drive.
In many places, police can search that data WITHOUT A WARRANT.
And when regular people stand up at council meetings and object?
We’re told, “If you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide.”
...but when the POLICE start to get tracked, they all resign????
Interesting.
30+ years into the web, trillions windmilled into the dump by the VCs who claim to be building the new world.. website won't load in Safari or Chrome..
Let me think, I might hire him to sweep out my garage, but nothing that involved coming inside the gate.
Isn't android closing in on 20 years old??
You literally cannot leave the emulator running. How absolutely pathetic is that?
Had @claudeai dispatch it, with extreme prejudice...
Like the sharks in Welles' Shanghai.
Seriously @Apple is like a demented ruler. When I was trying to use @ScrivenerApp it drove me crazy that I could not just do Learn Spelling on a word. Eventually they admitted it was not their fault, it was Apple's. Now using @iAWriter this idiocy is still there.. 🤡
State-level, institutionalized Dunning-Kruger, brought to you by has been politicians who embraced stupid as their brand.
but obviously they undershot the hole.. xitter.gq/JeremyTate41/status/21…
I am speechless. Thomas Aquinas College just dropped a study on the rigor of the new SAT.
It compares the 1980/87 test with 2026. The findings should terrify every parent and teacher...
Vocabulary has collapsed.
Old SAT: 70.6% of questions tested vocab.
New SAT: 15%.
The old test forced students to know a wide range of words through analogies, antonyms, and sentence completions. The new test abandoned that. Most vocab questions now just ask students to fill in one blank from context.
Reading passages also got radically shorter (average ~97 words vs 300–340).
The new test uses short expository passages and hands you the necessary background knowledge inside the text. The older tests leaned much more heavily on argumentative and persuasive writing, assumed far more historical, scientific, and cultural knowledge, and penalized students who lacked it.
This is a redefinition of what "college readiness" means.
If you believe that kids should develop rigorous vocabulary, be capable of sustained reading, and possess background knowledge, I have bad news for you. The SAT no longer measures these.
If you want a future where children can actually read difficult texts and construct complex arguments, the SAT must be replaced now.
This cannot go on.
Was wincing thinking I would see he used C. There is hope folks, no, it was Rust.
The creator of CentOS and Rocky Linux built a new OS kernel with AI in just 11 days.
It’s called Ginux, and it can already run selected Linux programs without the Linux kernel underneath.
Gregory Kurtzer guided the design while Codex wrote and tested around 139,000 lines of code.
Written mainly in Rust, Ginux has its own memory management, scheduler and networking. It even boots Rocky Linux 10 with systemd in a virtual machine.
It’s still an experimental prototype, with incomplete compatibility and hardware support. The code is open source under Apache 2.0.
Eleven days to get this far. Now comes the harder part of making it reliable.
Source: github.com/gmkurtzer/ginux
