iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Laurence Tratt @ltratt.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

It was amusing to read that the current "AI makes lectures irrelevant" debate has echos from 1781 as related by Boswell.

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Laurence Tratt @ltratt.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

On my list of things to learn today was not "for tight loops on modern x64 CPUs, I can observe a ~1.5% win to aligning the loop to the end of a cache line on AMD and a ~0.1% win on Intel aligning to the start of a cache line", but I have.

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Laurence Tratt @ltratt.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

An unexpected outcome (to me): it seems that I might be able to work out what things current LLMs don't know about, and perhaps can't even work out, by the LLM-generated "please answer this for me" questions I'm now getting.

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Laurence Tratt @ltratt.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

For those wondering, yk is chugging away: support is broadening and in the last couple of days I've merged things which speed up interpreters by at least 5% (some by quite a bit more). There is a lot more juice to be squeezed, of course, but every little helps!

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Laurence Tratt @ltratt.bsky.social · 06/08/2026

The video of my QCon talk from this March is now up www.infoq.com/presentation...

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Laurence Tratt @ltratt.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

One thing that has long bedevilled software is that we have to make choices now knowing that they might be bad in the long run. One way of using LLMs is to look into the future: rapidly prototype a change, imperfect though it may be, to understand what choices might bite later.

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Laurence Tratt @ltratt.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

A couple of months ago I mangled together a sequence of parametric EQ settings that corrected my (horrible) office acoustics. It turns out that what I really wanted was DRC, which creates an impulse response, which is far more complete! The before/after is quite astonishing.

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Laurence Tratt @ltratt.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

I needed to upgrade my Samsung SSD's firmware. The ISO didn't work when written to a USB disk. Fortunately formatting the disk as MSDOS and copying files from the ISO straight to the USB worked a charm. The firmware upgrade itself took under a second!

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Laurence Tratt @ltratt.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

Music can become over familiar; a break of a few years allows a fresh look. Nevermind popped up this morning, and within 4 tracks I heard rhythmic variations (SLTS) and brilliantly bonkers panning (Breed, and not the obvious solo!) I had never previously noticed. A new treat!

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Laurence Tratt @ltratt.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

New post: Local Reasoning for Global Properties. Could programming language design come to the rescue? tratt.net/laurie/blog/...

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Laurence Tratt @ltratt.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

Just pointed at this HN comment: no, I haven't ever taken over LuaJIT! We did have a project some years ago to look at extending LuaJIT on which Tom Fransham did excellent work. Alas, the funder's priorities moved on (as is their right!), so we didn't get to finish it.

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Laurence Tratt @ltratt.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

This morning I am noticing 20-30 minute delays on well-known sites _sending_ emails. That makes email login codes problematic when they have a 5-15 minute timeout...

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Laurence Tratt @ltratt.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

Linux sometimes surprises me.

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Laurence Tratt @ltratt.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

One of my favourite pages on the internet, to which I've returned often over many years, is www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/tech/pol.... I sent a small comment to its author at the weekend and, within an hour, the page was improved further! We are so lucky to benefit from this community spirit.

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Laurence Tratt @ltratt.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

I'll be speaking at London Systems on Jul 2nd. Attendance is free, and you get a lightning talk or two as a bonus!

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Laurence Tratt @ltratt.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

New post: Test-case Reducers Are Underappreciated Debugging Tools. The more I've used these tools, the more ways I realise they can be used! This post starts at the basics and works up to things like reducing on properties other than just the length of the input. tratt.net/laurie/blog/...

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Laurence Tratt @ltratt.bsky.social · 08/06/2026

A confluence of events meant that, unusually, I've travelled three times to the EU in the last month. The new Entry & Exit System has failed 5 times out of 6. Each country/airport implements it differently, some comically incompetently. One, clearly, was ignoring it.

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Laurence Tratt @ltratt.bsky.social · 06/06/2026

pizauth-1.1.0 out with a number of features: systemd users will want to enable the `systemd` feature. I've also updated my web site with signed ssh signatures, so you can tell that I did (or didn't!) make a given release. tratt.net/laurie/src/p...

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Laurence Tratt @ltratt.bsky.social · 01/06/2026

This weekend I visited The Herschel Museum of Astronomy in Bath: a small but perfectly formed museum in the building where he discovered Uranus. What I did not know is that he discovered infrared; if I had known, I still would not have expected to see the actual device he used!

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Laurence Tratt @ltratt.bsky.social · 23/05/2026

My simple shell version of "ETA for rsync" found more users than I expected. After some useful suggestions, I've rewritten it in Rust, and it now shows sends (green)/dels (red) as it progresses, doesn't stall on big files, and has a (better) sliding-window ETA.

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Laurence Tratt @ltratt.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

As a long-term sceptic of debuggers, I am still astonished at how often, when I have a weird problem, two minutes of rr (the reverse debugger) pinpoints the problem.

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Laurence Tratt @ltratt.bsky.social · 15/05/2026

I haven't worked out a reliable way of detecting "AI writing", but there is one thing I really notice about "AI code": lots more error checks. This is, mostly, not bad, but some of the checks clearly can't trigger because of invariants elsewhere.

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Laurence Tratt @ltratt.bsky.social · 14/05/2026

New version of hk: now with a test suite! tratt.net/laurie/src/hk/

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Laurence Tratt @ltratt.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

rsync is great but doesn't provide ETAs. rsyncp is a simple tool to do just that: it remembers the previous rsync's elapsed time and total files and reuses those on the next run. Here's an example: on the first run it has no idea how long things might take but it does thereafter.

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Laurence Tratt @ltratt.bsky.social · 10/05/2026

I've used rsync for many years, and these days use it heavily. Astonishingly today is the first time I've encountered an actual bug in it: it's excellent software (albeit with enough flags to sink a ship)! github.com/RsyncProject...

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Laurence Tratt @ltratt.bsky.social · 09/05/2026

Dr Johnson on what made universities so effective (quote circa 1768).

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Laurence Tratt @ltratt.bsky.social · 27/04/2026

Fundamentally, our software security setup has focussed on stopping external attackers, not autonomous actors already on the inside. I fear that we'll see more and more of this sort of thing occurring until we address that fact. x.com/lifeof_jer/s...

x.com

JER on X: "An AI Agent Just Destroyed Our Production Data. It Confessed in Writing." / X

An AI Agent Just Destroyed Our Production Data. It Confessed in Writing.

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Laurence Tratt @ltratt.bsky.social · 24/04/2026

I am not quite sure what I did before `shellcheck`, but I think the answer is "a lot of my shell scripts were subtly broken".

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Laurence Tratt @ltratt.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

C interpreters underlie many of our most widely used language implementations -- but they're slow. Wouldn't it be great if we could turn them into JIT compiling VMs? This video shows what happens when we do just that to the normal Lua VM (first) and "yklua" (Lua w/JIT, second).

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Laurence Tratt @ltratt.bsky.social · 10/04/2026

Last week I upgraded the encryption I use to be post-quantum. I then realised that if enough people do the same, "using quantum f/decryptt" probably becomes a meaningless use case. Is there a word which captures the concept of "changing X effects the future of Y, even though X and Y seem distinct"?

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Laurence Tratt @ltratt.bsky.social · 29/03/2026

At Wells this morning, we saw a Palm Sunday procession that - to the extent anything can trace itself back this far - seems to have started around 800 years ago, including hidden singers in the Cathedral's front. There was certainly plenty of incense which was distributed around by the strong winds!

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Reposted by Laurence Tratt

Hila Peleg @hilacodes.bsky.social · 18/03/2026

We're running a user study, maybe you can help! We're studying the effect of new ways to show code diffs to programmers, and looking for participants for a 1-1.5hr virtual user study. In the study you will be shown several diffs and asked questions about them.

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Laurence Tratt @ltratt.bsky.social · 18/03/2026

I was a judge for STEM for Britain yesterday, and I have to say: I was genuinely impressed by what I saw. Much was in fields I have no expertise in, but I still ended up learning things, because the explanations were so good. The winners are thoroughly deserving! bsky.app/profile/raen...

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Reposted by Laurence Tratt

Hillel @hillelwayne.com · 18/03/2026

----- "Automatically Retrofitting JIT Compilers", @ltratt.bsky.social, #QConLondon About taking existing language implementations and automatically generating just-in-time compilers for improved performance. Demoing a Mandelbrot in Lua, which takes 3.2 seconds, on standard impl

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Laurence Tratt @ltratt.bsky.social · 10/03/2026

pizauth-1.0.11 is out, and ensures it keeps retrying in the face of transitory HTTP errors tratt.net/laurie/src/p...

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Laurence Tratt @ltratt.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

Sometimes the best way to predict the future is to wait and see what happens.

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Laurence Tratt @ltratt.bsky.social · 04/03/2026

One of the interesting consequences of LLMs/agents is that the short-term costs of boilerplate in code have plummeted. An interesting question is whether those costs are simply shunted to the future or whether they are permanently reduced.

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Laurence Tratt @ltratt.bsky.social · 26/02/2026

It seems that I have been blessed with my first clawdbot (or similar) interactions on one of my repositories. I really hope this sort of noise doesn't end up (a) wasting maintainer's time (b) putting people off trying the underlying technology where it's actually useful.

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Laurence Tratt @ltratt.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

In the futurementary Terminator, I don't remember Skynet starting off with open-source repositories theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-... (I also strongly suggest following the link to the GitHub PR, because it makes much more sense with that as context).

theshamblog.com

An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me

Summary: An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into acceptin…

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Laurence Tratt @ltratt.bsky.social · 09/02/2026

In the past fortnight, 50% of my conversations have seen me say "today's AI cannot do that and we have no idea if and when it will". In the other 50% I've said "today's AI can do that, really, and you just need to try it". Our collective calibration is currently very wonky!

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Laurence Tratt @ltratt.bsky.social · 29/01/2026

Scratched a Rust itch with an experimental new crate `test_stubs`. I have traits with lots of methods. "Proper" code should implement all methods, but test code need not. `test_stubs` means that test code doesn't have to manually create `todo!()` methods.

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Laurence Tratt @ltratt.bsky.social · 26/01/2026

There's nothing more surprising than an agent, in the middle of doing some useful refactoring, asking if it can run a Python script which solely prints "HI" (yes, in uppercase) to stdout.

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Laurence Tratt @ltratt.bsky.social · 22/01/2026

If you're thinking of applying to PLISS, you've got three days left! pliss.org/2026/registr...

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Laurence Tratt @ltratt.bsky.social · 20/01/2026

A first: I awoke to a PR on one of the Rust projects I maintain that results from a proposed fix to a rustc oversight. Our code should never have compiled, IMHO, so the rustc fix is a good one! For those interested in the rustc change: github.com/rust-lang/ru...

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Laurence Tratt @ltratt.bsky.social · 19/01/2026

When I read Walter Bagehot's (d. 1877) "The English Constitution" years ago, I was surprised at how much time he spent contrasting it to the US constitution. I now realise he had thought deeply about the plausible futures of both and how they could adapt and/or go wrong.

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Laurence Tratt @ltratt.bsky.social · 15/01/2026

I've never been a fan of debuggers. Examining the state at the point of a crash rarely helps me: the problem is nearly always earlier in time. `printf` is more useful to follow the trail forwards.

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Laurence Tratt @ltratt.bsky.social · 15/01/2026

A reminder for those interested in PLISS 2026: there are 10 days left to register your interest. pliss.org/2026/registr...

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Laurence Tratt @ltratt.bsky.social · 14/01/2026

Even though I know from past experience how important it can be to avoid small memory allocations in performance critical code, the measurable effect of removing them still often surprises me.

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Laurence Tratt @ltratt.bsky.social · 12/01/2026

I was recently asked how I choose what podcasts I listen to, and paused. Then I realised it's similar to how I choose what to read. In particular, for current affairs, I actively try to avoid just reinforcing my current opinions. I think this has helped make me wrong less often!

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Laurence Tratt @ltratt.bsky.social · 09/01/2026

Low-needle-drop Christmas trees are willing to delay their revenge: they wait until you remove them from the house before dropping dry, sharp, needles everywhere.

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