Sourav retweeted
How on earth did this happen:
The Indian certificate authority (CA) eMudhra had one job (well, two):
1. Create secure, 384-bit private keys
2. Store these securely and do not leak them
Well, eMudhra chose private keys between 1 and 256 (the numbers!!) and called it a day. WTF
Sourav retweeted
Great post by @hezarfendd about using AI for learning new things
ogzhanolguncu.com/blog/how-t…
Sourav retweeted
One of the heaviest rainfall spells of September is possible over Bengaluru during the next 2-3 hours. Please remain watchful and avoid unnecessary travel. A few places may experience significant inundation.
Sourav retweeted
Fool's Expertise
bcantrill.dtrace.org/2026/09…
Sourav retweeted
In my career, compilers have always generated better code that I ever could have. I find this to be increasingly so with contemporary AIs.
But you know what neither can do better than me?
Knowing what software to write, what shape it should take, and what I want it to do.
The entire history of software engineering has been one of rising levels of abstraction.
This is how it was, how it is now, and how it shall be in the fullness of time.
Sourav retweeted
I'm very sensitive to this feeling, cause I've been there.
Someone does something cool, gets a lot of attention, and you're frustrated cause you already did it, a while ago.
It's not enough to do things, you must also tell people.
Maybe it's not fair, but it's true
Sourav retweeted
Will AI replace junior software engineers?
Anders Hejlsberg (Creator of TypeScript, C#): "Well, if it does, then how do we ever get senior software engineers? I don't think so.
Not unless you also believe that you will be able to do your business three years later than that without any senior software engineer.
But to me, I think maybe one thing that to some extent has happened is that for certain classes of programmers, the pyramid has narrowed at the bottom.
There are fewer people coming in, and we are wanting them to advance higher up faster so that they can get to this more supervisory role.
I think the craft of being a software engineer is definitely changing from you're typing in lines of code to you're having agents type in lines of code, and you are reviewing the work of the agents. But it is but a tool, and there are still programmers involved in the process.
That I firmly believe."
For the full conversation, you can search Anders' name on my YouTube, Spotify or Apple Podcasts (link in bio)
Sourav retweeted
Good moment today to remind everyone to stay frosty with AI. I was working on making a server stoppable via the CLI, and Codex decided the best path forward was to implement an unauthenticated network API to every server to shut itself down. Excellent work.
I responded with "I don't know about that." (I usually give more direct feedback but this was so absurd) and it thought for like 20 seconds and responded "Server stopping should not be part of an unauthenticated network API." Yes. lol.
By the way, the result I was looking for was that we automatically start a locally discovery Unix-socket bound server so I wanted it to discover that (using prior mechanisms already made) and gracefully stop that.
The driver is absolutely accountable here (me). My lazy prompting led AI to think I wanted to be able to stop ANY configured server I was talking to. Shame on me for thinking it was obvious here. But, I also reviewed it and found this idiocy, so, that's where good AI drivers come in. Also me.
Sourav retweeted
Announcing Discovery Loop!
I am very excited to announce that, along with my longtime friends and collaborators @Sanjay_Ghemawat, @OriolVinyalsML and @quocleix, we are founding Discovery Loop (@DiscoLoopAI), a Public Benefit Corporation whose mission is to automate machine learning, science, and engineering to accelerate discoveries and progress. The four of us have worked together for 14 to 30 years, and have helped build some of the world’s most used products, infrastructure and AI models, and we’re excited to turn our attention to this ambitious endeavor.
♾
Learn more at: discoveryloop.com
Sourav retweeted
Not sure how helpful this is, but any devs having a problem in the current job market... Do everything you can to deeply learn Database internals. There are so many jobs for DB engineers right now, I swear I get at least 1 email every week or so from some company looking for someone to work on storage engines/query engines/filesystems/search/indexing type of stuff. you will not regret databasemaxxing 🙏 pthorpe92.dev/databasemaxxin…
Sourav retweeted
These are four pieces of building influence without authority, but there are many more tips and tricks that you can use.
In today’s newsletter, Anusha Dasarakothapalli breaks it down for you. Anusha is a Principal Engineer at AWS who has achieved a lot by improving her ability to influence without authority.
You can read her piece here: levelupwithethanevans.substa…
Sourav retweeted
Ever wondered why the founder of @turbopuffer (that is @Sirupsen) was up to 12-16 years ago, when he was getting started in the industry?
He kept a blog, so you can read it! 2010-2014:
One reason to start a blog btw.
sirupsen.com/
Sourav retweeted
I've been writing a whole guide! simonwillison.net/guides/age…
Sourav retweeted
I've got an agent in a loop optimizing a renderer with the goal to minimize frame times (and tests to measure). It got times down from 88ms to 2ms and allocations down from ~150K to 500. Sounds good, right? Wrong. This is exactly why agent psychosis is a big fucking problem.
As an experiment, I rewrote the Ghostty core render state in Go, with access to identically laid out data structures as Ghostty and the exact same validation tests. I made a purposely naive renderer (simple, correct, but slow). 88ms per frame with 150,000 allocations (horrendous, lol)!
I then kickstarted a Ralph loop to bring the frame times down. I told it it can't modify input data structures or the public API or tests (they're correct), but it can do anything else it wants. It got to work.
It has worked for about 4 hours. I've spent around $350 on this experiment so far. The results?
88ms => 1.5ms
150K allocs => ~500 allocs
Incredible right? Nope.
My hand-written renderer I ported has frame times (same benchmark) of ~20us (0.020ms) and 0 allocations in the update path.
This is the problem with psychosis and lacking systems understanding. If you don't understand the system, you're going to accept that this is an incredible result. If you understand the system, you'll see better solutions immediately and can do roughly 75x better on throughput.
The people who blindly trust agent output are in the former camp. They're sheeple, overdrinking from a fountain of mediocrity.
Standard disclaimer: I use AI all the time. I like AI. The point I'm making is to not blindly accept results. Think. Analyze. Learn.