180 million lines of proof: Claude verified 123 open-source libraries at the assembly level
Formal verification has always been the thing everyone agrees is worthwhile and nobody can afford. Anthropic and a startup called Theorem just made a serious dent in that, and the numbers are absurd in the best way: Claude wrote and proved formal guarantees for 239 fuzz-test entry points across 123 open-source libraries from OSS-Fuzz, at […]
DuckDB 2.0 goes client-server: Quack, CONNECT and the biggest release yet
DuckDB 2.0 shipped on October 21, and it is the release that ends the database’s most familiar limitation. The engine that has spent a decade running inside your process, no server required, now speaks a native network protocol called Quack, and it ships a CONNECT statement that points a session at a remote database in […]
An 11-year-old Rust borrow checker bug let safe code touch freed memory
Safe Rust is supposed to make use-after-free impossible. A soundness report filed on October 13 shows one way that promise currently fails, and the twist is that the compiler has been accepting the bad code for over a decade. The bug lives in a GitHub issue against the Rust compiler, rust-lang/rust#164250, and it lets a […]
Dynamic shredding: how Logfire made some queries 1000x faster
The Pydantic team published an engineering writeup on how Logfire, their observability platform, sped up some queries by a factor of 1000 or more. The technique is called dynamic shredding, and the headline number deserves a closer look, both because it is real and because the interesting part is not the trick itself but the […]
Database DevOps in SSMS hits GA: SQL projects come to the DBA’s tool
Database DevOps in SQL Server Management Studio is now generally available. The feature landed in SSMS 22.10.2, released September 28, 2026, and it means something specific: SSMS finally supports SDK-style SQL database projects built on the Microsoft.Build.Sql SDK, so schema changes can live in source control and flow through CI/CD like any other code. If […]
Someone Ported the TypeScript Compiler to Rust Without Reading It
When Microsoft announced its native TypeScript compiler rewrite, the team explained why they picked Go over Rust: garbage collection made the port tractable, and a Rust rewrite would need years and risk producing an incompatible language. This week a developer called that answer with an experiment. ts-rust is an experimental Rust port of the TypeScript […]
The C Standard Is Quietly Deleting Its Undefined Behavior
Martin Uecker stood up at Kernel Recipes 2026 and defended C, then immediately admitted the language’s biggest liability. The liability is undefined behavior, and the committee that owns the standard is now actively deleting it. Jonathan Corbet’s writeup of the talk, Reducing undefined behavior in the C language, is worth your time if you maintain […]
JPEG XL ships in Chrome 155, three years after Google deleted it
The Chrome team has shipped decoding support for JPEG XL in Chrome 155, enabled by default, which would be routine news except for the history. Google removed JPEG XL from Chromium back in 2023, targeting M110, with stated reasons that included insufficient ecosystem interest and the maintenance burden of keeping an experimental decoder around. Three […]
Python 3.15 benchmarks show small gains, but the JIT finally pays off
Every October, Miguel Grinberg runs his informal performance benchmark against the newest Python 3.15 release, and this year’s results are a split decision: the standard interpreter is barely faster than 3.14, but the experimental JIT compiler has its best showing yet. Grinberg tested the 3.15.0rc3 release candidate, since the official release was still days away. […]
VB6 Studio Web: A Classic Visual Basic IDE Rebuilt for the Browser
Visual Basic 6 shipped in 1998, and Microsoft stopped supporting the IDE in April 2008. Eighteen years later, VB6 Studio Web puts a working recreation of that IDE in a browser tab, form designer and all. No install, no Windows VM, no license key. The project, from Wieslaw Soltes on GitHub, is built from plain […]
The 40ms Go GC Pause That Came From Swap
A Go service on a Hetzner box was showing stop-the-world GC pauses of about 51 microseconds at the median. Then, a few times per hour, one pause hit 40 milliseconds. Same code, same heap, nothing in the application changed. The culprit was not the Go runtime at all. It was the Linux kernel deciding that […]
What Backblaze’s Q2 2026 drive stats say about buying big hard drives
The quarter in numbers Backblaze published its Q2 2026 Drive Stats report on September 29, and the headline number moved the wrong way. The quarterly annualized failure rate hit 1.73%, up from 1.24% in Q1 and the highest the report has shown in a while. The lifetime figure barely budged, ticking up to 1.41% across […]