Raph Levien

I have a draft blog post in the pipeline about why cubic Béziers are a suitable universal curve representation. They can approximate any curve to O(n^6), ie if you subdivide in half the error goes 1/64. But I also believe it's possible to make an even better universal curve.

Fonts haven't been hinted for bilevel rendering in years. For applications such as store tags, I wonder whether well crafted bitmap fonts might be the best solution. There's also autohinting technology which might make sense to revive, including Hobby's work at Bell Labs.

Earliest citation I could find of the term "memory safety" in the modern sense in an academic context is reports-archive.adm.cs.cmu.edu/anon/usr/ftp...

It's actually Osmanya, a script used in Somalia.

A photo of a monitor, which displays a high quality photo of a yellow flower, as well as the board that drives the display, an Adafruit RP2350 feather. Also in the frame is a small Ferris plushy toy, and the right edge of a laptop, which displays the assembly language code for the image decompression algorithm.

As a fun project, I implemented race-the-beam image decompression on RP2350 with DVI output. I can get 1280x720 at 60Hz with a bit of overclocking.

PR at github.com/DusterTheFir...

I'll probably write this up, the idea is pretty cool.

A specific challenge I'm dealing with quite a bit is: how do you keep the timing critical stuff from being in flash and taking on unpredictable delays from XIP? This seems to be a particular problem with libraries and frameworks.

Our upcoming game The Hearth and Harbour is fully 2D, but with some neat tricks we’ve made it look 3D. Ethan, our environment artist, did this with a special type of texture called a Normal Map. (Thread! 1/7)

Fantastic writeup, very thought provoking. I have a lot of thoughts in response (still brewing). What's your preferred modality? HN comments seem well suited for drive-by but less so for deeper discussion.

No Graphics API — Sebastian Aaltonen Graphics APIs and shader languages have significantly increased in complexity over the past decade. It’s time to start discussing how to strip down the abstractions to simplify development, improve pe...

My "No Graphics API" blog post is live! Please repost :)
www.sebastianaaltonen.com/blog/no-grap...

I spend 1.5 years doing this. Full rewrite last summer and another partial rewrite last month. As Hemingway said: "First draft of everything is always shit".

As we go into the holiday season, there's lots of progress in Linebender from the previous month: linebender.org/blog/tmil-23/. Among other things, blur filters in Vello CPU (with GPU acceleration on the roadmap), SIMD progress, and a new port of Runebender to Xilem.

Yeah, that particular gig was with a regional helicopter company in Canada, they just needed the standard stuff about fastening seatbelts and so on. I got that one through voices dot com. It was maybe 10 years ago. Probably my favorite gig though was audio books for fireman training.

Voice acting is fun, I've actually done a bit of it semi-professionally (helicopter safety announcements, an ebook, that kind of thing). However. This is one of the first lines of works that will largely go away because of the efforts of those of us with cushy tech jobs; it's mostly AI now.

This is indeed an excellent talk, and I think contains the seeds of a path forward through the AI thicket. When tested against only "vibes," AI can generate reams of slop. But when tested against hard ground truth, in this case rigorous mathematical formalism, possibilities abound.

I agree, and think one of the biggest pieces of that is understanding of the basics of content moderation. With the exception of a few people like yourself and Mike Masnick, almost everything everybody says is wildly, laughably wrong, with very sad consequences.

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 ...

“We adopted #rustlang for its security and are seeing a 1000x reduction in memory safety vulnerability density ... with Rust changes having a 4x lower rollback rate and spending 25% less time in code review, the safer path is now also the faster one.”

security.googleblog.com/2025/11/rust...

😎😎😎😎 GOOD THINGS CAN STILL HAPPEN 😎😎😎😎

YouTube video by Arthur Gleckler I Want a Good Parallel Language, by Raph Levien (BALISP)

My talk on "I want a good parallel language" is now up: www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-eV...

Slides here: docs.google.com/presentation...

Thanks Arthur Gleckler and BALISP for hosting the talk!

The work is based on prototypes I did in the last few months, but is a complete reimplementation with lots of optimizations, including portable SIMD. I believe it's the fastest pure Rust CPU renderer, and also shares a lot of logic with vello_hybrid. 2/2

I'm thrilled that Laurenz Stampfl, a student at ETH Zurich, has completed his Masters degree, and has published the thesis: ethz.ch/content/dam/...

1/2

I Want a Good Parallel Language, RetroAI, lightning talks, and socializing, Sat, Nov 1, 2025, 12:00 PM | Meetup Hello, hacker ladies and gentlemen! On Saturday, November 1st, we'll have a talk by [Raph Levien](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raph_Levien), who is an expert in Rust and

I'll be giving at talk tomorrow at the Hacker Dojo in Mountain View, entitled "I want a good parallel language." Meetup link is here: www.meetup.com/balisp/event...

Greg Bovino Emerges as Trump’s Man For Conjuring Up a Blue-City Insurrection Elected officials, activists, and at least one former high-ranking Department of Homeland...

Talking Points Memo published this a few weeks ago: talkingpointsmemo.com/news/greg-bo...

Right, in that case if the video supports your new text, you're on firmer ground making the change. Another thing that might be useful is explaining in the talk page what you've done and why. Keep in mind I'm not an expert on WP (wondering if we should tag Molly White).

That said, in the spirit of WP:BOLD (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikiped...) you could just edit the article. I've done that myself on occasion. Wikipedia depends on a nonzero fraction of its users being people who know what they're talking about. 3/2

I might be willing to help facilitate this. As you know, I'm fascinated by Larrabee as part of my "I want a good parallel computer" mission, and there's a dearth of good information out there. 2/2

Sadly it doesn't really work like this, skeets are not reliable sources. If you wanted to do this the right way, someone should interview you and publish it in a reputable place. For example, a lot of my bio information is from a TeX interview (www.tug.org/interviews/l...). 1/2

Trump Administration's Arrival on Bluesky Highlights Growing Pains for Open Networks | TechPolicy.Press The administration’s antagonistic entry to the platform is best understood as a game of chicken, writes Erin Kissane.

There was already a *lot* going on with Bluesky, and now it's under even more pressure. I wrote about how I think about moderation, affordances, expectations, human needs, and powerful trolls for @techpolicypress.bsky.social

www.techpolicy.press/trump-admini...

Some updates from the Linebender ecosystem: we've published our monthly update blog (linebender.org/blog/tmil-21/), and also released fearless_simd 0.3.0 (github.com/linebender/f...). The train keeps rolling!

YouTube video by Topos Institute [Berkeley Seminar] Raph Levien | How Rust won: the quest for performant, reliable software

I gave a seminar entitled "How Rust won: The quest for performant, reliable software" at the Topos Institute on Jun 3, and the video (youtu.be/k_-6KI3m31M) is now published. I hope people enjoy it!

GitHub - ztanml/fast-hash: Fast hash function learned using genetic programming Fast hash function learned using genetic programming - ztanml/fast-hash

Is this a microcontroller that has a 1-cycle multiply instruction, like RP2040 or better? In that case, FNV might be a good choice. If not, Jenkins is a possibility. You might also take a look at github.com/ztanml/fast-....

I've subscribed. We need more explorations of this space, especially from a human rather than business-centered perspective. I'm eager to see where it goes.