Lobsters

B-Trees Are Back: Engineering Fast and Pageable Node Layouts

Rolling the Root Key (Update)

This is an update to an article I posted in May of this year. As I write this, it's now the 8th October, and the Root Key of the DNS is scheduled to roll on the 11th October.

Demoting i686 Windows targets to std-only

Empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.

The history of the Hetzner Cloud network stack

Learn how the Hetzner Cloud network stack has evolved and what role Open vSwitch, Private Networks, and Cloud Firewalls play.

Extending Guix

Guix is all about empowering people, so it should come as no surprise that one can extend it with new guix commands. You can show the commands available in your current Guix through the help command:

Ending the Casuarina Linux Experiment

I didn’t expect this to be the second post after the announcement, but here we are. The short version is that I’ve decided to wind down the Casuarina Linux project. Things will continue as-is until the end of October 2026.

Thinking will become a hobby

These lines are very difficult for me to write because I feel like digging my own grave. AI systems are improving by leaps and bounds. From the early 2022 fumbling release of ChatGPT, which couldn’t correctly count the number of a’s in my name (it claimed two), we reached OpenAI’s release of math…

`specialArgs` considered harmful

Why `specialArgs` in `lib.evalModules` is considered an antipattern.

The Performance Cost of RwLock in Our Read-Heavy Workload

How per-item RwLock reads became expensive in our read-heavy workload, how using lock-free has improved performance, and where a simple RwLock remained a good fit.

Gentoo infrastructure sponsors wanted

Gentoo Linux is made possible by many community donations and sponsors, together with the enthusiastic work of our developers. Unfortunately, this year several long-running sponsors were unable to continue their prior support, and at the moment we are looking for replacements.

The people holding up the internet

Four billion phones ask one text file what time it is, and a lecturer at UCLA keeps it in his spare time. We counted who writes the software under your phone, from the code itself.

Software developers are not okay

You can subscribe to the audio-only podcast feed over on Apple’s Podcast app and other apps if audio is more your speed.

Calling a function in C without naming it

My school has a controlled remote code execution environment to automatically grade the code we submit. The system checks execution, verifies proper formatting and surely has other checks not shown to the user (e.g. a code plagiarism detection tool1).

rat's minimal register allocator

rat is my smallish compiler backend (with a semi-working C99 frontend). Its x86-64 code generator translates the intermediate representation (IR) into x86-64 instructions. These use an unlimited number of virtual registers (vregs).

Introducing mapsnap: Automated Georeferencing for Historic Sanborn Insurance Maps

Over the past few months I’ve been working on mapsnap, a program to automatically georeference old insurance maps. This post explains why these maps are interesting, how mapsnap works, and why this is worth doing.

Faster streaming HTML with batches and aggregates

In this post I'm going to dive into some of the fun emergent properties of server based streaming HTML. In some ways this is a long overdue follow up of this post: Realtime collaborative web apps without ClojureScript.

Burn 0.22.0: Faster Builds, Easier Extensions, and Smarter Autotuning

Burn 0.22.0: Faster builds without backend generics, easier custom operations, adaptive memory management, smarter autotuning, GPU graph replay, and new fine-tuning and deployment workflows.

That Time I Worked With a Laptop Thief (2025)

I used to worked at a place where they had an IT contractor that was stealing laptops and reselling them for over a year. This post is the story of how he got caught. Real names of people and companies will not be used, but the tale and screenshots (with redactions) are all true.