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 […]
500 billion tokens later: AI agents decompile a first-person shooter to 83 percent byte-exact
Maurice Heumann, better known as momo5502, let autonomous AI coding agents chew on reverse engineering a commercial first-person shooter for about three months, and the write-up of the experiment is one of the most useful agent-project post-mortems published this year. The headline numbers: roughly 600 to 700 billion tokens of inference, 99 percent of the […]
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 […]
Azure App Service drops Java 8, 11 and 17 support in September 2027
Azure App Service will stop supporting Java 8, 11 and 17 on September 1, 2027. Apps keep running after that date, but they stop receiving security updates and Microsoft stops providing customer support for those runtime versions. It is a routine lifecycle notice with a non-routine amount of work hiding behind it, because those 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. […]
SkyCraft puts Minecraft inside Skyrim
SkyCraft is a mod that does something that sounds like a joke until you read the commit log: it runs Minecraft inside Skyrim. An SKSE plugin written in C++ and a Fabric mod written in Java are linked over shared memory, and Minecraft’s physics, inventory, HUD, blocks and combat play out in Skyrim’s world, drawn […]
The lunar terminator paradox, worked out with code
Why the moon points the wrong way at sunset There is an old astronomical puzzle that most people meet while camping: after the sun sets, the lit part of the moon sometimes seems to point up, toward empty sky, instead of down toward where the sun just went. It is called the lunar terminator paradox, […]
unreal-agent brings async-first harness design to coding agents
A harness that never makes the model wait unreal-agent has been climbing GitHub’s trending list all week, at roughly 1.9k stars four days after it appeared, and the pitch behind it is simple enough to repeat in one line: the same model, doing the same work, up to 40 percent cheaper, because the harness never […]
.NET 8, .NET 9, and PowerShell 7.4 hit end of support on the same day
Clear your November calendar. .NET 8 and .NET 9 both reach end of support on November 10, and PowerShell 7.4 dies the same day. After that date there are no more security fixes, no servicing updates, and no support tickets honored for any of the three. Microsoft published the Azure Functions side of the notice […]