iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

A huge milestone: Fearless SIMD 1.0 is published: linebender.org/blog/fearles.... This was a real collaboration, thanks especially to Sergey Davidoff for pushing this over the line, Laurenz Stampfl, Andrew Jakubowicz, valadaptive, Benjamin Saunders, and Daniel McNab.

linebender.org

Fearless SIMD v1.0 is here

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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

For a spicier take, add some curry.

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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

I agree with you 100%, but the image you reposted is fake. It's an altered version of post 116486959174837748 which has the same timestamp and the "No more Mr. nice guy" text, but a different AI slop image.

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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

Sarah Cooper did a comedy video on this subject that I think gets to the heart of the matter quite well: www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cJ1...

youtube.com

The History of Wealth Throughout History

YouTube video by Sarah Cooper

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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

Yup. I'm really not sure what to do about these extreme cases. One thing I've tried is splitting into two hyperbezier curves so it can follow the weird shape of the cubic Bézier, but the experiment didn't give satisfying results.

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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

I just posted a blog post on my hyperbezier curve: linebender.org/blog/hyperbe... I've actually been working on this for years, and only recently figured out a solution to the parameter mapping problem. I think this curve is potentially better than cubic Béziers for 2D vector graphic design.

A plot of two roughly S-shaped curves. In gray is a cubic Bézier, and the Bézier control points are shown. In blue is an example of the hyperbezier, with roughly similar shape but much smoother curvature variation. There is also a "curvature comb" in green.

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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

Apparently you live in the future.

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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

On this subject, what will be the next plate after 9ZZZ999? By my count, that should have already happened, or will very soon. But I'm in Australia now, so not able to observe for myself.

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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

What's maddening about this is that the real thing is just as spectacular, or even more so. I'm assuming that this "Cornell Lab of Ornithology" is actually legit, and that having been posted 8 years ago makes it very unlikely it's AI slop. www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWjx...

youtube.com

A new species? The Vogelkop Superb Bird-of-Paradise

YouTube video by Cornell Lab of Ornithology

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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

I had my older son on my lap while I programmed a fair amount while he was a baby. We joked that his first words would be #include <stdio.h>, but it didn't work out that way. My younger child did eventually pick up programming as part of their nuclear engineering education. In any case, enjoy!

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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

There's a lot here worth thinking about, and it puts in words some of the feelings I was having that motivated me to leave Google. I'm *also* quite worried about more direct autocratic control of US-based AI, there are signs of this starting to happen.

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Ryan Moulton @moultano.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

I spent the last month obsessed with finding colors that can't be displayed on a conventional screen. This is what I found. moultano.wordpress.com/2026/06/19/w...

moultano.wordpress.com

Where to Find the Colors Your Screen Can’t Show You

An atlas of the vibrance of the real world

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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

Seeing the milkmaid in person was quite an experience for me as well. Yes, there's the luminosity, but I was also struck by how sensual the depiction is. Like, the muscles in her forearm as she's supporting the weight of the pitcher. That doesn't come across nearly as well in the scan.

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Mara Bos @mara.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

Just like last year, we replaced a whole wall of movie posters with our own punny movie posters at the cinema where RustWeek 2026 took place. I designed seven new posters for this year's event. See the thread below 👇

Nine movie posters displayed next to each other.

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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

I am also biased, but would recommend the Blitz and Typst talks. And since you're in the embedded space, you can't miss Cliff's on the pain points of rewriting things in Rust.

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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 24/05/2026

It was a pleasure and an honor scheming with you. I have a bit of flying (to Australia via Singapore), but am hoping to parallelize the sleeping and flying.

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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 17/05/2026

I also have very complex thoughts and feelings about LLMs, which (uncharacteristically) I haven't been writing about at all, in large part because the online discourse is so toxic. Looking forward to seeing you, and to nuanced, empathetic discussions around these issues.

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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 15/05/2026

I will be at RustWeek in Utrecht next week! Really looking forward to meeting people.

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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

Are you sure it's not just running SPIR-V? I haven't dug into this at all, but that's what I would expect.

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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 03/05/2026

Hobby's spline is great, and is used in Apple's Keynote and Pages. But if your goal is the smoothest curve through a sequence of points, Euler spirals are better. I think a good way to understand Hobby is that it's about as close as you can get to Euler while staying in Bézier land.

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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 28/02/2026

Beautiful indeed. I cannot resit the temptation to tag @acollierastro.bsky.social however, and hope and pray she will forgive me.

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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 19/02/2026

Your Garamond is almost certainly ATF Garamond, the italic x is extremely distinctive. The body oldstyle I'm having a harder time placing. It feels like an ATF font, and resembles Lining Oldstyle 550 (as can be seen in the 1912 ATF catalog), but that's not an exact match.

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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

The variety is disappointing, coming from Berkeley CA, but I am right now eating a perfectly good Royal Gala (bought from Coles). All that said, my sons and I frequently discuss that side, and have some beefs. Honeycrisp is variable in quality, meh recently. And Cosmic Crisp really is all that.

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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 23/01/2026

I have a draft blog post in the pipeline about why cubic Béziers are a suitable universal curve representation. They can approximate any curve to O(n^6), ie if you subdivide in half the error goes 1/64. But I also believe it's possible to make an even better universal curve.

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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 09/01/2026

Fonts haven't been hinted for bilevel rendering in years. For applications such as store tags, I wonder whether well crafted bitmap fonts might be the best solution. There's also autohinting technology which might make sense to revive, including Hobby's work at Bell Labs.

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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 02/01/2026

Earliest citation I could find of the term "memory safety" in the modern sense in an academic context is reports-archive.adm.cs.cmu.edu/anon/usr/ftp...

reports-archive.adm.cs.cmu.edu

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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 01/01/2026

It's actually Osmanya, a script used in Somalia.

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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 21/12/2025

As a fun project, I implemented race-the-beam image decompression on RP2350 with DVI output. I can get 1280x720 at 60Hz with a bit of overclocking. PR at github.com/DusterTheFir... I'll probably write this up, the idea is pretty cool.

A photo of a monitor, which displays a high quality photo of a yellow flower, as well as the board that drives the display, an Adafruit RP2350 feather. Also in the frame is a small Ferris plushy toy, and the right edge of a laptop, which displays the assembly language code for the image decompression algorithm.

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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 19/12/2025

A specific challenge I'm dealing with quite a bit is: how do you keep the timing critical stuff from being in flash and taking on unpredictable delays from XIP? This seems to be a particular problem with libraries and frameworks.

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Saltstone Studios ⚓️The Hearth and Harbour⚓️ @saltstonestudios.bsky.social · 19/12/2025

Our upcoming game The Hearth and Harbour is fully 2D, but with some neat tricks we’ve made it look 3D. Ethan, our environment artist, did this with a special type of texture called a Normal Map. (Thread! 1/7)

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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 16/12/2025

Fantastic writeup, very thought provoking. I have a lot of thoughts in response (still brewing). What's your preferred modality? HN comments seem well suited for drive-by but less so for deeper discussion.

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Sebastian Aaltonen @sebaaltonen.bsky.social · 16/12/2025

My "No Graphics API" blog post is live! Please repost :) www.sebastianaaltonen.com/blog/no-grap... I spend 1.5 years doing this. Full rewrite last summer and another partial rewrite last month. As Hemingway said: "First draft of everything is always shit".

sebastianaaltonen.com

No Graphics API — Sebastian Aaltonen

Graphics APIs and shader languages have significantly increased in complexity over the past decade. It’s time to start discussing how to strip down the abstractions to simplify development, improve pe...

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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 15/12/2025

As we go into the holiday season, there's lots of progress in Linebender from the previous month: linebender.org/blog/tmil-23/. Among other things, blur filters in Vello CPU (with GPU acceleration on the roadmap), SIMD progress, and a new port of Runebender to Xilem.

linebender.org

Linebender in November 2025

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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 12/12/2025

Yeah, that particular gig was with a regional helicopter company in Canada, they just needed the standard stuff about fastening seatbelts and so on. I got that one through voices dot com. It was maybe 10 years ago. Probably my favorite gig though was audio books for fireman training.

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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 11/12/2025

Voice acting is fun, I've actually done a bit of it semi-professionally (helicopter safety announcements, an ebook, that kind of thing). However. This is one of the first lines of works that will largely go away because of the efforts of those of us with cushy tech jobs; it's mostly AI now.

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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 27/11/2025

This is indeed an excellent talk, and I think contains the seeds of a path forward through the AI thicket. When tested against only "vibes," AI can generate reams of slop. But when tested against hard ground truth, in this case rigorous mathematical formalism, possibilities abound.

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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 14/11/2025

I agree, and think one of the biggest pieces of that is understanding of the basics of content moderation. With the exception of a few people like yourself and Mike Masnick, almost everything everybody says is wildly, laughably wrong, with very sad consequences.

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Steve Klabnik @steveklabnik.com · 13/11/2025

“We adopted #rustlang for its security and are seeing a 1000x reduction in memory safety vulnerability density ... with Rust changes having a 4x lower rollback rate and spending 25% less time in code review, the safer path is now also the faster one.” 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 ...

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez @aoc.bsky.social · 05/11/2025

😎😎😎😎 GOOD THINGS CAN STILL HAPPEN 😎😎😎😎

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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 04/11/2025

My talk on "I want a good parallel language" is now up: www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-eV... Slides here: docs.google.com/presentation... Thanks Arthur Gleckler and BALISP for hosting the talk!

youtube.com

I Want a Good Parallel Language, by Raph Levien (BALISP)

YouTube video by Arthur Gleckler

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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 03/11/2025

The work is based on prototypes I did in the last few months, but is a complete reimplementation with lots of optimizations, including portable SIMD. I believe it's the fastest pure Rust CPU renderer, and also shares a lot of logic with vello_hybrid. 2/2

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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 03/11/2025

I'm thrilled that Laurenz Stampfl, a student at ETH Zurich, has completed his Masters degree, and has published the thesis: ethz.ch/content/dam/... 1/2

ethz.ch

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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 28/10/2025

Right, in that case if the video supports your new text, you're on firmer ground making the change. Another thing that might be useful is explaining in the talk page what you've done and why. Keep in mind I'm not an expert on WP (wondering if we should tag Molly White).

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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 28/10/2025

That said, in the spirit of WP:BOLD (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiped...) you could just edit the article. I've done that myself on occasion. Wikipedia depends on a nonzero fraction of its users being people who know what they're talking about. 3/2

en.wikipedia.org

Wikipedia:Be bold - Wikipedia

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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 28/10/2025

I might be willing to help facilitate this. As you know, I'm fascinated by Larrabee as part of my "I want a good parallel computer" mission, and there's a dearth of good information out there. 2/2

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Raph Levien @raphlinus.bsky.social · 28/10/2025

Sadly it doesn't really work like this, skeets are not reliable sources. If you wanted to do this the right way, someone should interview you and publish it in a reputable place. For example, a lot of my bio information is from a TeX interview (www.tug.org/interviews/l...). 1/2

tug.org

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