Andrew Johnston

an image of a table showing results of benchmarks with the best model (GPT 5.1 High) scoring 23.7%.

"Even with increasingly sophisticated context engineering, models often fail in subtle but consequential ways. Providing context is not enough if the model cannot truly learn from it"
hy.tencent.com/research/100...

an O'Rly book cover with a picture of a sloth and the title "Copying and Pasting from ChatGPT" and the subtitle "Deploying untested code at breakneck speeds"

can't wait to read this. 🥸🤖

How London finally cracked mobile phone coverage on the Underground Dotted around London, there are a number of private hotels that aren’t the sort of hotel you might expect – they’re needed to make mobile phones work on the London Underground.

"Incidentally, if you read a tabloid headline about the NHS wasting money on old pagers when doctors could use smartphones, it means the person writing it doesn’t understand radio technology" www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/how...

a screenshot of a demo video of the cursor browser

"all they've proved so far, is that agents can output millions of tokens and still not end up with something that actually works" 🤪
embedding-shapes.github.io/cursor-impli...

where good ideas come from (for coding agents) (and the part where users have to level up)

"agents make code cheaper. they do not make judgment cheap"
sunilpai.dev/posts/seven-...

Software taketh away faster than hardware giveth: Why C++ programmers keep growing fast despite competition, safety, and AI 2025 was another great year for C++. It shows in the numbers Before we dive into the data below, let’s put the most important question up front: Why have C++ and Rust been the fastest-growing major…

"the future is enduringly bright for general-purpose languages that are efficient in “performance per watt” and “performance per transistor.”"
herbsutter.com/2025/12/30/s...

Meta Is Using The Linux Scheduler Designed For Valve's Steam Deck On Its Servers An interesting anecdote from this month's Linux Plumbers Conference in Tokyo is that Meta (Facebook) is using the Linux scheduler originally designed for the needs of Valve's Steam Deck..

"Meta has found that the scheduler can actually adapt and work very well on the hyperscaler's large servers" www.phoronix.com/news/Meta-SC...

GitHub - bellard/mquickjs: Public repository of the Micro QuickJS Javascript Engine Public repository of the Micro QuickJS Javascript Engine - bellard/mquickjs

Micro QuickJS is a new JavaScript engine by the famous Fabrice Bellard 🎉

📖 Written in C
🗜️ Uses 100 kB ROM
⚠️ Supports a subset of JS close to ES5
🐏 Runs programs in as little as 10 kB of RAM
🔥 Speed is comparable to the full QuickJS engine

github.com/bellard/mqui...

"If formal verification becomes vastly cheaper, then we can afford to verify much more software. But on top of that, AI also creates a need to formally verify more software"
martin.kleppmann.com/2025/12/08/a...

No AI* Here - A Response to Mozilla's Next Chapter - Waterfox Blog Mozilla's pivot to AI first browsing raises fundamental questions about what a browser should be.

"The core browsing experience should be one that fully puts the user in control, not one where you’re constantly monitoring an inscrutable system that claims to be helping you"
www.waterfox.com/blog/no-ai-h...

Hardened Images for Everyone | Docker Security for everyone. Docker Hardened Images are now free to use, share, and build on with no licensing surprises.

"we will extend this hardened foundation across the entire software stack with hardened libraries, hardened system packages, and other secure components everyone depends on. The goal is simple: be able to secure your application from main() down." www.docker.com/blog/docker-...

My gift to the rustdoc team About two weeks ago I entered a discussion with the docs.rs team about, basically, why we have to look at this: When we could be looking at this: And of course, as always, there are reasons why thi...

My gift to the rustdoc team: fasterthanli.me/articles/my-...

Merry syntaxmas, everyone!

ES2026 Solves JavaScript Headaches With Dates, Math and Modules With ECMAScript 2026, JavaScript will get more precise about sums, errors, international dates and times — and it may finally be time for Temporal.

it's the time of the year when thoughts turn not just to how soon we can stop for the holidays but also what we'll be coming back to, which makes it a good time for me to take a look ahead at ECMAScript 2026 and all the features that we already know will become part of JavaScript then

a screen grab of the related youtube video, with the "grim reaper" as "RAM Prices" meme showing Lenovo, Raspberry Pi and Samsung already dead.

"those companies all realized they can make billions more dollars making RAM just for AI datacenter products, and neglect the rest of the market"
www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/ra...

Bun is joining Anthropic Bun has been acquired by Anthropic. Anthropic is betting on Bun as the infrastructure powering Claude Code, Claude Agent SDK, and future AI coding products & tools.

"Bun's single-file executables turned out to be perfect for distributing CLI tools." 💯
bun.com/blog/bun-joi...

"the security issues in the XSLT library used in Chrome were nothing more than excuses to give the final blow to RSS and any other XML format that is still the backbone of an independent web" wok.oblomov.eu/tecnologia/g...

looks nice from an initial glance. very few dependencies. very small binary size - ~2x QuickJS. builds fast for a Rust project. process cycle time on par with QuickJS. not so great on the language benchmarks, but early days.
zoo.js.org

GitHub - Hans-Halverson/brimstone: New JavaScript engine written in Rust New JavaScript engine written in Rust. Contribute to Hans-Halverson/brimstone development by creating an account on GitHub.

"Brimstone chooses to implement almost all components of the engine from scratch with minimal dependencies"👀
github.com/Hans-Halvers...

Rust in Android: move fast and fix things Posted by Jeff Vander Stoep, Android Last year, we wrote about why a memory safety strategy that focuses on vulnerability prevention in ...

"For medium and large changes, the rollback rate of Rust changes in Android is ~4x lower than C++" security.googleblog.com/2025/11/rust...

GitHub - Snapchat/Valdi: Valdi is a cross-platform UI framework that delivers native performance without sacrificing developer velocity. Valdi is a cross-platform UI framework that delivers native performance without sacrificing developer velocity. - Snapchat/Valdi

github.com/Snapchat/Valdi
HN: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4585...

ChkTag: x86 Memory Safety ChkTag: x86 Memory Safety   Memory safety violations due to programming errors have long afflicted software. Industry and academia have been searching for solutions to this problem. As first noted in ...

"It is clear from the performance of software-based schemes, such as address sanitizers, that hardware acceleration will be needed for enabling memory safety checking in production code." community.intel.com/t5/Blogs/Tec...

Europe's plan to ditch US tech giants is built on open source - and it's gaining steam One topic dominated the recent 2025 OpenInfra Summit Europe, and it wasn't AI.

"The sovereignty issue is not going to go away. As Carrez said in a press conference: "It's extremely top of mind in the EU right now, it's what everyone is just talking about, and it's what everybody is doing.""
www.zdnet.com/article/euro...

a graph showing the proposed alternative scheduler massively outperforming stock kubernetes scheduler

"The result is raw hardware capable of millions of writes per second, but etcd delivering orders of magnitude less due to the interfaces and guarantees it must uphold" bchess.github.io/k8s-1m/

a screen grab from the youtube video displaying a smiling 1950's woman from an ad and the message CORE = small + stable

nice summary of why vite is... good? #smallcore ftw! 💪
www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_H1...

Move over, Alan Turing: meet the working-class hero of Bletchley Park you didn’t see in the movies The Oxbridge-educated boffin is feted as the codebreaking genius who helped Britain win the war. But should a little-known Post Office engineer named Tommy Flowers be seen as the real father of comput...

"He should be up there with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and all the rest of them, one of the great figures of the history of computing" www.theguardian.com/world/2025/o...

Strengthening npm security: Important changes to authentication and token management - GitHub Changelog As part of our ongoing commitment to securing the npm ecosystem, we’re implementing the first phase of security improvements outlined in our recent announcement. These changes will roll out over…

"These changes may cause temporary friction, but they’re essential for protecting our ecosystem from increasingly sophisticated attacks."
github.blog/changelog/20...

Bun 1.3 Bun 1.3 introduces zero-config frontend development, unified SQL API, built-in Redis client, security enhancements, package catalogs, async stack traces, VS Code test integration, and Node.js compatib...

there's a *lot* of nice things in this latest @bun.sh release. 💪🚀
bun.com/blog/bun-v1.3

I spent the day trying to teach seniors how to use an iPhone and it was a nightmare. Honestly, I think Apple really needs to simplify the iPhone for the elderly. I know there are accessibility modes, but you don’t want to have to go through all that and spend hours trying to customize...

"The phones are too fiddly now, and pressing random things as they try to hold the phone meant the phone got lost in a sea of opening stuff up" 💯
forums.macrumors.com/threads/i-sp...

ECMAScript excitement 😉

@jason-williams.co.uk from TechAtBloomberg announces the release of Boa's Rust-based implementation of TC39 Stage 3 Temporal 🎉

Chrome estimates this will ship in Chromium 143 🎉🎉

Temporal is the shiny replacement for the broken JS Date API ✨

Framework’s New GPU Module Changes Laptop Upgrades Forever Upgrade your laptop's graphics with ease: Framework's new module brings Nvidia RTX 5070 power to your fingertips.

"Upgradable graphics in a laptop is basically the holy grail" 🏆
spectrum.ieee.org/upgrade-lapt...