Sign in

Andrew Johnston

@billywhizz.bsky.social
371 followers 1.1K following 229 posts

billywhizz.io pushing bits @bloomberg.com hacking on a js runtime at github.com/just-js opinions are my own

PostsRepliesMedia
Andrew Johnston @billywhizz.bsky.social · 13/07/2026
"the parser does not build objects across the boundary at all. It copies its arrays into one contiguous binary buffer and lets the consumer decode lazily on its own side. The serialization is close to a memory copy." www.arshad.fyi/writings/eng...
arshad.fyi
Engineering High-Performance Parsers with Data-Oriented Design
How designing the data structure first (flat arrays of indices instead of a pointer tree) makes a parser fast and collapses memory layout, allocation, and serialization into one decision.
130
Andrew Johnston @billywhizz.bsky.social · 02/05/2026
"The last framework standing is the one a VB6 developer would recognise on sight, painted over an OS API that Microsoft can't afford to break" evilgeniuslabs.ca/blog/winform...
evilgeniuslabs.ca
Visual Studio 2026 still ships the form designer Alan Cooper drew in 1987
Every UI framework Microsoft has shipped since WinForms (2002) was sold as its successor. WPF, Silverlight, UWP, MAUI, Blazor desktop. Twenty-four years on, WinForms is still there, on modern .NET, wi...
000
Andrew Johnston @billywhizz.bsky.social · 31/03/2026
"There is no approval process and no allowlist. If your project is on GitHub, you can start using RISC-V runners today" riseproject.dev/2026/03/24/a...
riseproject.dev
Announcing the RISE RISC-V Runners: free, native RISC-V CI on GitHub – Rise: RISC-V Software Ecosystem
000
Andrew Johnston @billywhizz.bsky.social · 31/03/2026
"Here, physicist culture meets coder culture. “Move fast and break things” doesn’t work when your papers need to be reliable, not slop" superposer.substack.com/p/teaching-a...
superposer.substack.com
Teaching an AI to Do Physics by Wiping Its Memory
“Good luck to future me.”
011
Andrew Johnston @billywhizz.bsky.social · 31/03/2026
"Stappers and Claude solved an open problem in combinatorics in an hour. Knuth proved why it works. That’s not AI replacing mathematicians. It’s a remarkably productive division of labor, and a template for what comes next" medium.com/@vishalmisra...
medium.com
Knuth just showed us where to put the human
Don Knuth recently posted a note called “Claude’s Cycles.” Claude Opus 4.6, coached by Filip Stappers, solved an open problem Knuth had…
020
Andrew Johnston @billywhizz.bsky.social · 28/03/2026
"While the wider artificial intelligence industry continues to pursue ever-larger language models that demand massive computational resources and energy, CERN is deliberately moving in the opposite direction" theopenreader.org/Journalism:C...
theopenreader.org
CERN Uses Tiny AI Models Burned into Silicon for Real-Time LHC Data Filtering
CERN has developed ultra-small AI models embedded directly into custom chips to filter massive data streams from the Large Hadron Collider in real time, addressing the enormous data challenge of the w...
000
Reposted by Andrew Johnston
Jason Williams @jason-williams.co.uk · 11/03/2026
Temporal is now Stage 4 at TC39 🎂🎂🎂 Thanks to all the other champions of JavaScript's new date-time API. It has been a wild ride over many years! I wrote a blog post explaining how we got here 📜 bloomberg.github.io/js-blog/post...
Code example showing the usage of Temporal.ZoneddateTime

```js
// London DST starts: 2026-03-29 01:00 -> 02:00
const zdt = Temporal.ZonedDateTime.from(
  "2026-03-29T00:30:00+00:00[Europe/London]",
);

console.log(zdt.toString());
// → "2026-03-29T00:30:00+00:00[Europe/London]"

const plus1h = zdt.add({ hours: 1 });

console.log(plus1h.toString());
// "2026-03-29T02:30:00+01:00[Europe/London]" (01:30 doesn't exist)
```
2034782
Reposted by Andrew Johnston
Rob Palmer @robpalmer.bsky.social · 10/03/2026
📮 In the first feature-length article on the Bloomberg JS Blog... @jonkuperman.com explains: 🗺️ what are source maps ✅ how he worked with others to standardize them in TC39 ✨ the new debugging features this unlocks
0328
Reposted by Andrew Johnston
Rob Palmer @robpalmer.bsky.social · 09/03/2026
Some time ago, @jonkuperman.com & @tchetwin.bsky.social had a dream for the JS engineers at Bloomberg to be more public about the cool JS work we have going on. That dream has come true - now we have a blog platform 🎉 (You'll see more articles over the next few days) bloomberg.github.io/js-blog/
bloomberg.github.io
Bloomberg JS Blog
The official Bloomberg JavaScript blog - insights, tutorials, and best practices from Bloomberg's JavaScript engineering team.
47214
Andrew Johnston @billywhizz.bsky.social · 08/03/2026
"The system is optimizing correctly for what it measures. What it measures no longer captures what matters" www.rockoder.com/beyondthecod...
rockoder.com
Cognitive Debt: When Velocity Exceeds Comprehension | rockoder
A systems analysis of how AI-assisted development creates a gap between output speed and understanding, and why organizations cannot see it happening.
000
Andrew Johnston @billywhizz.bsky.social · 06/03/2026
"By harnessing a particle accelerator to generate extraordinarily bright, coherent X-rays, the team was able to capture high-res internal anatomy in seconds, without the lengthy... steps often required for soft-tissue contrast in standard lab scanners." spectrum.ieee.org/3d-scanning-...
spectrum.ieee.org
Antscan’s 3D Atlas Reveals Ant Anatomy Like Never Before
How does a particle accelerator help us understand ants like never before?
010
Andrew Johnston @billywhizz.bsky.social · 05/03/2026
"The interesting part is not the payload. It is how the attacker got the npm token in the first place: by injecting a prompt into a GitHub issue title, which an AI triage bot read, interpreted as an instruction, and executed" grith.ai/blog/clineje...
grith.ai
A GitHub Issue Title Compromised 4,000 Developer Machines
A prompt injection in a GitHub issue triggered a chain reaction that ended with 4,000 developers getting OpenClaw installed without consent. The attack composes well-understood vulnerabilities into so...
020
Andrew Johnston @billywhizz.bsky.social · 19/02/2026
"the entire concept of all RAM is equal is dying, and that is not because it is wrong, it's just because it's too expensive" www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnX5...
youtube.com
Your RAM Is Fake. The Moon Broke Timezones. And Your Compiler Is Guessing.
YouTube video by LaurieWired
010
Andrew Johnston @billywhizz.bsky.social · 14/02/2026
"Even with increasingly sophisticated context engineering, models often fail in subtle but consequential ways. Providing context is not enough if the model cannot truly learn from it" hy.tencent.com/research/100...
an image of a table showing results of benchmarks with the best model (GPT 5.1 High) scoring 23.7%.
030
Andrew Johnston @billywhizz.bsky.social · 13/02/2026
can't wait to read this. 🥸🤖
an O'Rly book cover with a picture of a sloth and the title "Copying and Pasting from ChatGPT" and the subtitle "Deploying untested code at breakneck speeds"
050
Andrew Johnston @billywhizz.bsky.social · 18/01/2026
"Incidentally, if you read a tabloid headline about the NHS wasting money on old pagers when doctors could use smartphones, it means the person writing it doesn’t understand radio technology" www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/how...
ianvisits.co.uk
How London finally cracked mobile phone coverage on the Underground
Dotted around London, there are a number of private hotels that aren’t the sort of hotel you might expect – they’re needed to make mobile phones work on the London Underground.
010
Andrew Johnston @billywhizz.bsky.social · 16/01/2026
"all they've proved so far, is that agents can output millions of tokens and still not end up with something that actually works" 🤪 embedding-shapes.github.io/cursor-impli...
a screenshot of a demo video of the cursor browser
050
Andrew Johnston @billywhizz.bsky.social · 11/01/2026
"agents make code cheaper. they do not make judgment cheap" sunilpai.dev/posts/seven-...
sunilpai.dev
where good ideas come from (for coding agents)
(and the part where users have to level up)
030
Andrew Johnston @billywhizz.bsky.social · 01/01/2026
"the future is enduringly bright for general-purpose languages that are efficient in “performance per watt” and “performance per transistor.”" herbsutter.com/2025/12/30/s...
herbsutter.com
Software taketh away faster than hardware giveth: Why C++ programmers keep growing fast despite competition, safety, and AI
2025 was another great year for C++. It shows in the numbers Before we dive into the data below, let’s put the most important question up front: Why have C++ and Rust been the fastest-growing major…
020
Andrew Johnston @billywhizz.bsky.social · 23/12/2025
"Meta has found that the scheduler can actually adapt and work very well on the hyperscaler's large servers" www.phoronix.com/news/Meta-SC...
phoronix.com
Meta Is Using The Linux Scheduler Designed For Valve's Steam Deck On Its Servers
An interesting anecdote from this month's Linux Plumbers Conference in Tokyo is that Meta (Facebook) is using the Linux scheduler originally designed for the needs of Valve's Steam Deck..
010
Reposted by Andrew Johnston
Rob Palmer @robpalmer.bsky.social · 23/12/2025
Micro QuickJS is a new JavaScript engine by the famous Fabrice Bellard 🎉 📖 Written in C 🗜️ Uses 100 kB ROM ⚠️ Supports a subset of JS close to ES5 🐏 Runs programs in as little as 10 kB of RAM 🔥 Speed is comparable to the full QuickJS engine github.com/bellard/mqui...
github.com
GitHub - bellard/mquickjs: Public repository of the Micro QuickJS Javascript Engine
Public repository of the Micro QuickJS Javascript Engine - bellard/mquickjs
3458
Andrew Johnston @billywhizz.bsky.social · 17/12/2025
"If formal verification becomes vastly cheaper, then we can afford to verify much more software. But on top of that, AI also creates a need to formally verify more software" martin.kleppmann.com/2025/12/08/a...
martin.kleppmann.com
Prediction: AI will make formal verification go mainstream — Martin Kleppmann’s blog
000
Andrew Johnston @billywhizz.bsky.social · 17/12/2025
"The core browsing experience should be one that fully puts the user in control, not one where you’re constantly monitoring an inscrutable system that claims to be helping you" www.waterfox.com/blog/no-ai-h...
waterfox.com
No AI* Here - A Response to Mozilla's Next Chapter - Waterfox Blog
Mozilla's pivot to AI first browsing raises fundamental questions about what a browser should be.
010
Andrew Johnston @billywhizz.bsky.social · 17/12/2025
"we will extend this hardened foundation across the entire software stack with hardened libraries, hardened system packages, and other secure components everyone depends on. The goal is simple: be able to secure your application from main() down." www.docker.com/blog/docker-...
docker.com
Hardened Images for Everyone | Docker
Security for everyone. Docker Hardened Images are now free to use, share, and build on with no licensing surprises.
010
Reposted by Andrew Johnston
amos @fasterthanli.me · 14/12/2025
My gift to the rustdoc team: fasterthanli.me/articles/my-... Merry syntaxmas, everyone!
fasterthanli.me
My gift to the rustdoc team
About two weeks ago I entered a discussion with the docs.rs team about, basically, why we have to look at this: When we could be looking at this: And of course, as always, there are reasons why thi...
1214418
Reposted by Andrew Johnston
Mary Branscombe @marypcbuk.bsky.social · 12/12/2025
it's the time of the year when thoughts turn not just to how soon we can stop for the holidays but also what we'll be coming back to, which makes it a good time for me to take a look ahead at ECMAScript 2026 and all the features that we already know will become part of JavaScript then
thenewstack.io
ES2026 Solves JavaScript Headaches With Dates, Math and Modules
With ECMAScript 2026, JavaScript will get more precise about sums, errors, international dates and times — and it may finally be time for Temporal.
1165
Andrew Johnston @billywhizz.bsky.social · 04/12/2025
"those companies all realized they can make billions more dollars making RAM just for AI datacenter products, and neglect the rest of the market" www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/ra...
a screen grab of the related youtube video, with the "grim reaper" as "RAM Prices" meme showing Lenovo, Raspberry Pi and Samsung already dead.
030
Andrew Johnston @billywhizz.bsky.social · 02/12/2025
"Bun's single-file executables turned out to be perfect for distributing CLI tools." 💯 bun.com/blog/bun-joi...
bun.com
Bun is joining Anthropic
Bun has been acquired by Anthropic. Anthropic is betting on Bun as the infrastructure powering Claude Code, Claude Agent SDK, and future AI coding products & tools.
030
Andrew Johnston @billywhizz.bsky.social · 17/11/2025
"the security issues in the XSLT library used in Chrome were nothing more than excuses to give the final blow to RSS and any other XML format that is still the backbone of an independent web" wok.oblomov.eu/tecnologia/g...
wok.oblomov.eu
Google is killing the open web, part 2
Do not comply in advance.
000
Andrew Johnston @billywhizz.bsky.social · 16/11/2025
"Brimstone chooses to implement almost all components of the engine from scratch with minimal dependencies"👀 github.com/Hans-Halvers...
github.com
GitHub - Hans-Halverson/brimstone: New JavaScript engine written in Rust
New JavaScript engine written in Rust. Contribute to Hans-Halverson/brimstone development by creating an account on GitHub.
180
Andrew Johnston @billywhizz.bsky.social · 13/11/2025
"For medium and large changes, the rollback rate of Rust changes in Android is ~4x lower than C++" security.googleblog.com/2025/11/rust...
security.googleblog.com
Rust in Android: move fast and fix things
Posted by Jeff Vander Stoep, Android Last year, we wrote about why a memory safety strategy that focuses on vulnerability prevention in ...
070
Andrew Johnston @billywhizz.bsky.social · 08/11/2025
github.com/Snapchat/Valdi HN: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4585...
github.com
GitHub - Snapchat/Valdi: Valdi is a cross-platform UI framework that delivers native performance without sacrificing developer velocity.
Valdi is a cross-platform UI framework that delivers native performance without sacrificing developer velocity. - Snapchat/Valdi
130
Andrew Johnston @billywhizz.bsky.social · 20/10/2025
"It is clear from the performance of software-based schemes, such as address sanitizers, that hardware acceleration will be needed for enabling memory safety checking in production code." community.intel.com/t5/Blogs/Tec...
community.intel.com
ChkTag: x86 Memory Safety
ChkTag: x86 Memory Safety   Memory safety violations due to programming errors have long afflicted software. Industry and academia have been searching for solutions to this problem. As first noted in ...
001
Andrew Johnston @billywhizz.bsky.social · 20/10/2025
"The sovereignty issue is not going to go away. As Carrez said in a press conference: "It's extremely top of mind in the EU right now, it's what everyone is just talking about, and it's what everybody is doing."" www.zdnet.com/article/euro...
zdnet.com
Europe's plan to ditch US tech giants is built on open source - and it's gaining steam
One topic dominated the recent 2025 OpenInfra Summit Europe, and it wasn't AI.
000
Andrew Johnston @billywhizz.bsky.social · 19/10/2025
"The result is raw hardware capable of millions of writes per second, but etcd delivering orders of magnitude less due to the interfaces and guarantees it must uphold" bchess.github.io/k8s-1m/
a graph showing the proposed alternative scheduler massively outperforming stock kubernetes scheduler
010
Andrew Johnston @billywhizz.bsky.social · 15/10/2025
nice summary of why vite is... good? #smallcore ftw! 💪 www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_H1...
a screen grab from the youtube video displaying a smiling 1950's woman from an ad and the message CORE = small + stable
000
Andrew Johnston @billywhizz.bsky.social · 12/10/2025
"He should be up there with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and all the rest of them, one of the great figures of the history of computing" www.theguardian.com/world/2025/o...
theguardian.com
Move over, Alan Turing: meet the working-class hero of Bletchley Park you didn’t see in the movies
The Oxbridge-educated boffin is feted as the codebreaking genius who helped Britain win the war. But should a little-known Post Office engineer named Tommy Flowers be seen as the real father of comput...
041
Andrew Johnston @billywhizz.bsky.social · 12/10/2025
"These changes may cause temporary friction, but they’re essential for protecting our ecosystem from increasingly sophisticated attacks." github.blog/changelog/20...
github.blog
Strengthening npm security: Important changes to authentication and token management - GitHub Changelog
As part of our ongoing commitment to securing the npm ecosystem, we’re implementing the first phase of security improvements outlined in our recent announcement. These changes will roll out over…
220
Andrew Johnston @billywhizz.bsky.social · 11/10/2025
there's a *lot* of nice things in this latest @bun.sh release. 💪🚀 bun.com/blog/bun-v1.3
bun.com
Bun 1.3
Bun 1.3 introduces zero-config frontend development, unified SQL API, built-in Redis client, security enhancements, package catalogs, async stack traces, VS Code test integration, and Node.js compatib...
030
Andrew Johnston @billywhizz.bsky.social · 04/10/2025
"The phones are too fiddly now, and pressing random things as they try to hold the phone meant the phone got lost in a sea of opening stuff up" 💯 forums.macrumors.com/threads/i-sp...
forums.macrumors.com
I spent the day trying to teach seniors how to use an iPhone and it was a nightmare.
Honestly, I think Apple really needs to simplify the iPhone for the elderly. I know there are accessibility modes, but you don’t want to have to go through all that and spend hours trying to customize...
000
Reposted by Andrew Johnston
Rob Palmer @robpalmer.bsky.social · 24/09/2025
ECMAScript excitement 😉 @jason-williams.co.uk from TechAtBloomberg announces the release of Boa's Rust-based implementation of TC39 Stage 3 Temporal 🎉 Chrome estimates this will ship in Chromium 143 🎉🎉 Temporal is the shiny replacement for the broken JS Date API ✨
55813
Andrew Johnston @billywhizz.bsky.social · 25/09/2025
"Upgradable graphics in a laptop is basically the holy grail" 🏆 spectrum.ieee.org/upgrade-lapt...
spectrum.ieee.org
Framework’s New GPU Module Changes Laptop Upgrades Forever
Upgrade your laptop's graphics with ease: Framework's new module brings Nvidia RTX 5070 power to your fingertips.
031
Andrew Johnston @billywhizz.bsky.social · 22/09/2025
"Since Cap'n Web is a symmetric protocol, there is no well-defined "client" or "server" at the protocol level. There are just two parties exchanging messages across a connection. Every kind of interaction can happen in either direction" blog.cloudflare.com/capnweb-java...
blog.cloudflare.com
Cap'n Web: A new RPC system for browsers and web servers
Cap'n Web is a new open source, JavaScript-native RPC protocol for use in browsers and web servers. It provides the expressive power of Cap'n Proto, but with no schemas and no boilerplate.
020
Reposted by Andrew Johnston
Rob Palmer @robpalmer.bsky.social · 21/09/2025
I'm grateful that TechAtBloomberg folk get to meet in-person whilst living around the globe. Travel is a privilege. We just wrapped up a week in London that brought together our JS Infra & Performance/Observability teams who power the Terminal. Day 1 was at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.
Bloomberg folk in front of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich on a day with fine weather.

The group are potentially straddling the invisible Prime Meridian line that runs through it.
1342
Andrew Johnston @billywhizz.bsky.social · 21/09/2025
"CRAN’s approach clearly puts a burden on package developers... But it results in an excellent workflow for R’s central user base: the researchers and data scientists who want to spend as much time as possible on the details of data analysis" jtibs.substack.com/p/if-all-the...
jtibs.substack.com
If all the world were a monorepo
The R ecosystem and the case for extreme empathy in software maintenance
000
Andrew Johnston @billywhizz.bsky.social · 18/09/2025
why is there no marketplace for "killer" "AI" prompts? i.e. ones people have developed that work well repeatedly in a range of specific contexts. does such a thing already exist? or is it just not possible with the current state of the tech?
010
Andrew Johnston @billywhizz.bsky.social · 17/09/2025
"That expands the available address space of Wasm applications from 4 gigabytes to (theoretically) 16 exabytes" that should be enough i reckon. webassembly.org/news/2025-09...
webassembly.org
Wasm 3.0 Completed - WebAssembly
WebAssembly (abbreviated Wasm) is a binary instruction format for a stack-based virtual machine. Wasm is designed as a portable compilation target for programming languages, enabling deployment on the...
000
Andrew Johnston @billywhizz.bsky.social · 17/09/2025
"GitHub Environments — or equivalent workflow protections — should be available without a Pro subscription, or else integrated directly into Trusted Publishing so that security doesn’t depend on the pricing tier" sigh.dev/posts/ctrl-t...
sigh.dev
@ctrl/tinycolor Supply Chain Attack Post-mortem
Lessons learned from becoming the unexpected face of a npm supply-chain attack.
000
Andrew Johnston @billywhizz.bsky.social · 10/09/2025
"Hey there (maybe again)! In this book, you'll learn how to build a minimal RISC-V hypervisor which can boot Linux-based operating systems." 1000hv.seiya.me/en/
1000hv.seiya.me
Hypervisor in 1,000 Lines
Write your first hypervisor from scratch, in 1K LoC.
020
Andrew Johnston @billywhizz.bsky.social · 10/09/2025
"bake is a Linux CLI tool that can embed microVM resources into itself. It also implements bidirectional communication between VM and host - including networking and directory sharing - entirely in userspace, without requiring root privilege." 🔥 github.com/losfair/bake
github.com
GitHub - losfair/bake: Bake microVMs into standalone executables
Bake microVMs into standalone executables. Contribute to losfair/bake development by creating an account on GitHub.
110