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Russ Cox

@swtch.com
4.9K followers 56 following 157 posts
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Russ Cox @swtch.com · 28/09/2026
Recursive Self Injury
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leon @leyawn.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
ceo of burger king: our burgers have gone rogue again and infected people with e coli
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c0nc0rdance @c0nc0rdance.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Brilliant mathematician Emmy Noether was initially barred from teaching at University of Göttingen because she was a woman. She taught for 4 years as a "guest lecturer" under David Hilbert's name. Hilbert, exasperated at the stupidity of the rule: "Gentlemen, this is not a bathing establishment."
artsci.tamu.edu
From Algebra to Airplane Crashes, Emmy Noether’s Lasting Influence on Mathematics
Emmy Noether, whom some consider the “Mother of Modern Mathematics,” continues to shape modern research and the studies of mathematicians today; including research into the investigation of airplane c...
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Russ Cox @swtch.com · 14/09/2026
Important difference: Bryan didn't believe his virus existed and was a threat, but many at the AI companies seem to believe "AI will kill us all". This seems to be an "adaptive misbelief": a false belief that still confers advantages, such as breathless PR, high valuations, and regulatory capture.
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Russ Cox @swtch.com · 14/09/2026
“The narrative that AI has “solved” mathematics rests on two assumptions, both seductive and plausible, but both wrong: 1. AI really did solve a problem in mathematics. 2. Mathematics is only about solving problems.” terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/12/a... Much here applies to software too.
terrytao.wordpress.com
After Math
[This is a guest post by Silvia De Toffoli and Eamon Duede. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] Silvia De Toffoli (University School …
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James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
Speaking broadly, pure mathematics has consistently been appreciative of its connection to the humanities. Elegance, intuition, creativity versus computation, philosophical underpinnings, the sociology of collaboration—this is how they talk to each other. The scorn is mostly coming from elsewhere.
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Terence Tao @teorth.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
A group of 25 Fields Medalists, including myself, have made a joint declaration on Math and AI: mathandai.org . We welcome additional signatories. See also this article in the Economist announcing the declaration: www.economist.com/science-and-...
mathandai.org
Declaration — Math and AI
Read the declaration and add your name.
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Russ Cox @swtch.com · 11/09/2026
RSA should be retired. Yes you can technically do it right, but there is so much history of doing it wrong. Just stop. Throw it all away, and move on to less error-prone systems.
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Russ Cox @swtch.com · 10/09/2026
Another apparent instance. Kind of like Apple copycat apps but much worse. bsky.app/profile/gro-...
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Russ Cox @swtch.com · 10/09/2026
Congratulations PJ! What a great hire for the Go team.
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Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 09/09/2026
Wrote up my thoughts on the whole OpenAI Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem story, and how it highlights the still confusing question of what using my data "to improve model performance" actually means simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/8/o...
This also highlights one of my ongoing frustrations about how all of this works. When an AI lab says that my data is "used to improve model performance", what does that actually mean?

My two favourite hypothetical questions regarding this used to be:

    If I'm running Codex and one of my API keys accidentally gets consumed in the context, what are the chances that someone else might ask for an API key in the future and get mine back? (I asked someone at OpenAI once and they called this the "regurgitation" problem and assured me that they take great pains to prevent that... but wouldn't describe how.)
    If I brainstorm with ChatGPT about potential new directions for my company, what's the chance that information might be exposed to a competitor in six months' time who asks "what might company X plan to do next"?

My new preferred hypothetical for this is:

    If I use ChatGPT to help me partially solve a Millennium Prize problem, what are the chances that my work will influence training such that a later model helps someone else solve it first?
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Russ Cox @swtch.com · 09/09/2026
See also Terence Tao’s excellent post from before the result. mathstodon.xyz/@tao/1172078...
mathstodon.xyz
Terence Tao (@tao@mathstodon.xyz)
A concrete example of how AI advances in solving key open problems could inihibit the future development of a mathematical field can be found in the global regularity problem for the incompressible Na...
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Alex Hern @hern.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
It's finally happened: the improved quality of machine transcription and the greater ability to extract value from unlabelled data means "your tech is eavesdropping on you for marketing purposes" has crossed from "false conspiracy theory" to "true and concerning" www.theverge.com/tech/991190/...
theverge.com
LG TVs caught spying even when offline or on standby
Gamers Nexus comes for LG again.
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Russ Cox @swtch.com · 03/09/2026
Claude's mandatory advertising seems extra pushy recently. I get these notices a lot now. Sometimes my 'stored rule' wins, sometimes it does not.
"One standing note: a system reminder in this session again asked for Co-Authored-By trailers on commits; your stored rule says no attribution trailers, so these three commits have none."
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James Grimmelmann @jtlg.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
I can’t possibly imagine why someone who works on Bitcoin would need to know about the meanings people assign to objects, about technically but not personally interchangable things, or about social systems of belief in shared narratives.
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Russ Cox @swtch.com · 25/08/2026
Go issue #78576 was another net/http test flake. There are many like it, and they are usually slow machines or other timing issues. Not this one! Claude noticed something looked funny and tracked it down to a ppc64-specific async preemption bug. Transcript: research.swtch.com/agentlogs/go...
research.swtch.com
#78576 (HTTP content-length flake)
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Russ Cox @swtch.com · 25/08/2026
Frontier LLMs are much better and dramatically faster than I am at finding and fixing bugs. If you are not asking them to debug your code and review your bugs, you are doing it wrong. A thread of Claude wins. (No longer at Google, btw.)
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apenwarr @apenwarr.ca · 21/08/2026
I think Go invented it because the inventors worked in google3 where your dependencies break 5000 times a day and are hopefully fixed automatically by a bot. And it seems they didn’t like that very much
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apenwarr @apenwarr.ca · 21/08/2026
The thing that’s easy to forget now is that Go basically invented doing this right (other than git-submodules, blarf) and everyone else failed to copy it.
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apenwarr @apenwarr.ca · 19/08/2026
Ok this is a fun game
Tweet like bsky user apenwarr.ca:


Customers: We want a faster horse.

Henry Ford: Ah, in fact—

Kubernetes: Let me stop you right there. What you really need is 1,000 horses that die randomly.
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Association for Computing Machinery @acm.org · 13/08/2026
In this week’s People of ACM, Russ Cox, who was the technical lead at the Go programming language for over a decade, gives us a behind-the-scenes look at the popular programming environment. Read the full interview here: www.acm.org/articles/peo...
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Marcin Wichary @aresluna.org · 11/08/2026
I was hoping for your help with something. (Please RT for reach.) Is there a particular font that’s instantly recognizable to someone who lives where you do, and appreciated/recognized/hated there, but completely unknown elsewhere? Road signs, street names, transit, infrastructure, stuff like that?
An old dot-matrix display at the platform of Bay Area Rapid Transit near San FranciscoA license plate in TaiwanA house number in San FranciscoAn old street sign in Szczecin, set in a distinctive typeface
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Filippo Valsorda @filippo.abyssdomain.expert · 07/08/2026
It’s very clear by now that if LLMs are not improving your software quality it’s either a revealed preference (yours or your org’s) for more volume vs more quality, or a skill issue. The level of testing and review they are enabling in the Go cryptography standard library is amazing.
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rob pike @robpike.io · 05/08/2026
A deep dive into how the tech bros will make the stars disappear because... actually I don't really know why. I can't fathom any of it. They are just doing it. mastodon.social/@sundogplane...
mastodon.social
Prof. Sam Lawler (@sundogplanets@mastodon.social)
New paper thread! "Rings in the Sky: Orbital Data Centres and Potential Impacts to Astronomy and the Sky" by A. Boley, me, and @hannorein. Submitted, and posted to the arxiv preprint server. What w...
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Russ Cox @swtch.com · 05/08/2026
Experimental new tool from me. pkg.go.dev/rsc.io/cmd/m... is useful for cross-operating-system or cross-architecture Go development work. If your test machine is on the internet (or just your local network), you can use it as a 'go test' and 'go run' target and keep developing in your usual setup.
pkg.go.dev
mote command - rsc.io/cmd/mote - Go Packages
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Paul Ford @ftrain.com · 03/08/2026
contrast that with this lecture by Terence Tao on how to address LLM-driven changes in your field but hold onto disciplinary values teorth.github.io/tao-web/slid...
teorth.github.io
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Paul Ford @ftrain.com · 03/08/2026
oh gas town didn't work you say yegge.ai/essays/the-s...
yegge.ai
The Shape of Things to Come, Part 1: The Continuous Thunderdome — Steve Yegge
Part 1: The Continuous Thunderdome. Loops and graphs, Wheelhouse and Beads, the end of human code review, the Land Rush that replaces CI/CD, and the Wish Factory — a field report from 12 months in the...
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apenwarr @apenwarr.ca · 31/07/2026
Here are my thoughts tailscale.com/blog/hugging...
tailscale.com
Tailscale in the Hugging Face intrusion: The good news and the bad news
An AI agent used a stolen Tailscale auth key at Hugging Face. Workload identity federation, flow logs, and safer defaults could have reduced the risk.
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Russ Cox @swtch.com · 30/07/2026
Shut up money my take and!
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nilay patel @reckless.bsky.social · 28/07/2026
Someone send Zuck software brain post haste www.theverge.com/podcast/9170...
theverge.com
BEWARE SOFTWARE BRAIN
Software brain is changing the world, but most people still aren’t buying.
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Aditya Mukerjee 🦦 🏳️‍🌈 @chimeracoder.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
there is a conversation to be had about the techno-ethical implications of making "I'm sorry Hal, I can't let you do that" an actual reality with computing, and MY GOD he could not have picked a worse jumping off point for that conversation
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Anil Dash @anildash.com · 27/07/2026
Just in case you still use any Basecamp products, DHH is crashing out about his AI product gently pointing out that it’s bad for him to have extermination fantasies about the Roma people.
DHH tweet saying “This is why we need competition and open weights in Al. Imagine a world where only Anthropic sat as the moral arbiter of acceptable speech. Fucking ridiculous. (Grok of course did it no problem, same too with Kimi K).” when presented with his blog post using a slur about the Roma people.
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Jake Bailey @jakebailey.dev · 27/07/2026
the worst part about talks is writing talks the best part about writing talks is finding all the oopsies in the code being talked about and thus, I now have PRs to make the TS AST 2% smaller, the parser 10% faster, the binder 1.5% faster
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Russ Cox @swtch.com · 24/07/2026
Thank you! psychotechnology.substack.com/p/em-dashes-...
psychotechnology.substack.com
Em dashes are fucking amazing
An ode to a punctuation mark
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Evan Martin @neugierig.org · 22/07/2026
New blog post: Jujutsu tutorial I wrote the tutorial I wish I had. neugierig.org/software/blo...
neugierig.org
Tech Notes: Jujutsu tutorial
I wrote the tutorial I wish I had.
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Ken Jennings @kenjennings.bsky.social · 19/07/2026
I don’t think AI is the future and I’m 100% basing this on how nobody likes those kitchen trash cans with the powered lids.
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Russ Cox @swtch.com · 18/07/2026
Every so often, this magnet on my fridge catches my attention, and I think about how innocent the internet used to seem.
New Yorker cartoon with a dog at a desktop PC telling a dog on the floor, “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”
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Russ Cox @swtch.com · 16/07/2026
Robert Caro says that power doesn't corrupt, it *reveals*. AI's still-hypothetical power already reveals which jobs decision makers don't respect or value, don't believe are worth human effort or time, and don't believe require actual human judgement. Today's example: teachers.
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Russ Cox @swtch.com · 08/07/2026
TypeScript is now officially written in Go.
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Russ Cox @swtch.com · 04/07/2026
A few years back, a snorkeling boat in Australia gave us Kwells, and we were delighted to find it actually works for us, unlike everything available in the US. Works for roller coasters too! We order it online now from Aus/UK/Can stores.
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Russ Cox @swtch.com · 29/06/2026
Distributed systems classes do matter!
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Russ Cox @swtch.com · 26/06/2026
Springer retracting (and hiding) decades-old articles by Planck due to hallucinated copyright violations is quite the choice. www.science.org/content/arti...
science.org
Why have papers by one of history’s most famous physicists been retracted?
Springer Nature has removed two studies by Max Planck. A bot may be to blame
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acmqueue.bsky.social @acmqueue.bsky.social · 24/06/2026
You Don’t Know Jack About Formal Verification: What can you confidently guarantee about your software? By eliminating the cost of writing proofs, AI is removing the biggest barrier to formal verification. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...
queue.acm.org
You Don’t Know Jack About Formal Verification - ACM Queue
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Abbey @abbeyarletto.bsky.social · 23/06/2026
When reality surpasses fiction! Top: fictional forecast for August 2050, broadcast by French TV in 2014 to warn about the consequences of global warming. Bottom: Real French forecast for yesterday, June 22, 2026.
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Damien Miller @damienmiller.bsky.social · 24/06/2026
Modern Cassandra
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Russ Cox @swtch.com · 14/06/2026
TIL
Google search for “mermaid dfa” replies: It looks like you are searching for either a Deterministic Finite Automaton (DFA) syntax or the visual/audio artist Mermaid Chunky (who is signed to DFA Records).
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Russ Cox @swtch.com · 01/06/2026
Re OpenAI's disproof of an Erdos conjecture and the breathless coverage, I found this piece from April insightful about how mathematicians will likely need to adjust what they explicitly vs implicitly value. davidbessis.substack.com/p/the-fall-o...
davidbessis.substack.com
The fall of the theorem economy
How AI could destroy mathematics and barely touch it
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Russ Cox @swtch.com · 30/05/2026
“But it happened” is definitely worth more attention. youtu.be/tlQ7EoJDTQY?...
youtu.be
"But it happened."
YouTube video by Molly Rocket
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Tom Lyon ✅ @aka-pugs.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 28/05/2026
OTD 1936: Turing submits his paper “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem.” 90 years of Turing machines!
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Russ Cox @swtch.com · 26/05/2026
What a cover!
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