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British open-standards and open-source technologist, formerly of the UK Government Digital Service and the W3C Advisory Committee. Blogs at shkspr.mobi, where he posts a book review most weeks.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Attribute behavior that depends on CSS layout size rather than an element's natural or declared size is a design trap web authors should avoid relying on.

  CSS

  Their words

  Basically, what I'm saying is, don't use ismap unless you're absolutely sure that there will be no CSS shenanigans. Even then, it probably isn't worth the risk.

  Esoteric HTML - ismap vs CSSshkspr.mobi

Writes Don't Worry About the Vase, a near-daily account of what is happening in AI and what they think it means. Former Magic: the Gathering pro and trader; unusually willing to put a number on a belief and to grade their own past calls.

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  Relying on gradual, continuous shifts in AI training behavior to catch misalignment will eventually fail because the dangerous shift itself may be discontinuous.

  AI alignment

  Their words

  I worry a lot about reliances on continuity failing at exactly the most dangerous time.

  Anthropic Has Some Alignment Problemsthezvi.substack.com

Researcher on distributed systems and local-first software at the University of Cambridge; wrote Designing Data-Intensive Applications.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Timestamps cannot order access-control decisions in a decentralised system, because the user whose access was revoked can simply forge them.

  Their words

  if a revoked user still wants to, say, vandalize a document, they can just backdate their edits, give it an earlier timestamp. So, relying on clocks is absolutely useless here because people can forge the timestamps from those clocks and thereby then potentially undermine the access control mechanism.

  youtube.com

FreeBSD developer and former FreeBSD Security Officer; founder of the Tarsnap online backup service and author of the scrypt key derivation function.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  End-to-end cryptographic signing of requests and responses is more secure than relying on transport-layer encryption like TLS alone.

  Their words

  With requests going over TLS it is obviously less critical now, but end-to-end signing is always going to be better than transport-layer security.

  20 Years on AWS and Never Not My Jobdaemonology.net

American author of Liar's Poker, Moneyball, The Big Short and The Undoing Project, and host of the podcast Against the Rules.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The best sign that a subject is worth writing about is that you are interested in it and nobody else is.

  Their words

  And I've learned just to not even talk about it cuz it kills my interest to watch it kill their interest. But I know why I'm interested and why it's important and I'm not I'm not relying on the world telling me it's important.

  10 Years of Acquired (with Michael Lewis)youtube.com

American novelist and critic, author of Real Life, The Late Americans and Minor Black Figures; writes the newsletter sweater weather on literature and culture.

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  Relying more and more on one's existing strengths eventually stops being a winning strategy.

  Their words

  There comes a time when you have to realize that more of the same aspect of yourself isn't always a winning strategy.

  get goodblgtylr.substack.com

Computer performance engineer working on datacenter performance at OpenAI, previously Netflix and Sun/Joyent. Author of Systems Performance and BPF Performance Tools, and creator of flame graphs.

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  Relying on AI to replace performance engineers reduces an organization's overall technical expertise over time.

  Their words

  If a company spends less on performance engineers as it's considered AI'd, it will reduce the company's effective "performance IQ."

  On "AI Brendans" or "Virtual Brendans"brendangregg.com

Software engineer who writes the blog Made of Bugs about performance, debugging and understanding computer systems. Previously worked at Anthropic on interpretability, at Stripe on Sorbet, and at Ksplice.

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  Compiler mechanisms that force a required optimization to occur, rather than relying on incidental compiler behavior, are a more robust way to write performance-sensitive code.

  Their words

  I'm hopeful this framework will turn out to be a much more robust style for writing performance-sensitive code, especially over time and as compilers evolve.

  blog.nelhage.com