Kris 🧙‍♂️ Kowal

We might be obliged to leave some glory for Erlang.

Around 2008, I ran an event called “War of the Worlds 2” on the Site of Erstwhile Enjoyment, which I pitched at a BarCampLA, and that got the attention of one the writers on Hanna Montana, who immediately quit his job to run “Trans-media Fiction Events”. Anyhow, I think it was around that time.

I’m not sure how many times I’ve done a Uint1Array, but it’s been more than once. One of the interesting things is byte alignment, where u1a.bitLength * 8 !== b.byteLength or if u1a.bitOffset isn’t aligned, for that matter. Meanwhile, Uint2Array is handy for genomes.

there's a great quote from Ursula Le Guin about books at the point of reading becoming a collaboration between the author and the reader like music is between the composer and the musician; the story is created somewhere in the middle even though it's all written down already

We are thrilled to announce that our NEW Large Language Model will be released on 11.18.25.

Squee. Bringing new meaning to “character development”. I’m going to be anxious until I find out what happens to U-psilon, who could never do enough, and X, who has had a rough journey.

Where does the alphabet come from? And why does English use it so strangely? A new book takes us on a linguistic odyssey through the history of the alphabet

Where did we get the letters of the alphabet from?

And why does English use them so strangely?

Here’s an excerpt from the new book, “Why Q needs U: A history of our letters and how we use them”, which takes you on a linguistic odyssey through the history of the alphabet:

@andreubotella.com
Ben Allen
@softwarechris.com
@legendecas.bsky.social
@jessealama.net
@jasnell.me
@bakkot.com
@nicr.dev
@bridgear.bsky.social
@naugtur.pl

ECMAScript Excitement 🎉

This week, at its 110th meeting, TC39 advanced these proposals:

3️⃣ Non-extensible applies to Private
2️⃣.7️⃣ Import Bytes
2️⃣.7️⃣ Iterator Chunking
2️⃣ Native Promise Predicate
1️⃣ Array.prototype.pushAll
1️⃣ Native Promise Adoption

Neurodivergent conditions are only disabilities because we live in a world not designed for us. Easy to imagine a flipped narrative in a world run by neurodivergents,eg “Patient insists others decode hidden meanings behind their words and compulsively makes eye contact for excessive amounts of time“

AuDHD (Autism + ADHD together) in particular bring a host of superpowers when it comes to entrepreneurship & innovation, and many of the greats are speculated to have been AuDHD by today’s diagnostic criteria: Leonardo da Vinci, Newton, Einstein, Tesla to name a few.

Second, neurodivergence is simply a different way that some brains are wired, and comes with strengths and weaknesses. Many (most?) great innovations of our time came from brilliant neurodivergents who happened to hyperfocus on the right thing.

First, neurodivergent conditions have a very strong genetic component and are highly hereditary. It’s just as unlikely a medication could give you autism as it would be to give you green eyes.

The recent commotion around Tylenol and autism reminded me how many neurotypicals are so uninformed about neurodivergence they think neurodivergent conditions (autism, ADHD, OCD etc) are some sort of plague that you can catch if you’re not careful enough.

Or: if society were to demand that software engineers be certified by our professional organization, could we revoke licenses for using React?

They should have sent a “poet”.

ECMAScript excitement 😉

This week TC39 advanced these proposals 🎉

3️⃣ Non-extensible applies to Private
2️⃣.7️⃣ Import Bytes
2️⃣.7️⃣ Iterator Chunking
2️⃣ Native Promise Predicate
1️⃣ Array.prototype.pushAll
1️⃣ Native Promise Adoption

A witch of the desert.

The Cheese Wiz and the Sand Witch strike again.

ECMAScript excitement 😉

Congrats to @styfle.dev on advancing the Import Bytes proposal to Stage 2.7 today at TC39 🎉

It lets you import raw bytes as a readonly Uint8Array 👍

import bytes from "./photo.png" with { type: "bytes" }

Similar APIs are already available in Deno, Bun, & bundlers.

An image of a circular fabric patch showing some sort of superhero in a nautical hat? Cap'n Web: Protect & Connect, it says. Looks like AI slop.

I don't have a problem with making new RPC systems! I can stop any time I want! But I don't want to. So I made a new one for you. It's called Cap'n Web. It's like Cap'n Proto RPC, except focused on working great in browsers and JavaScript/TypeScript servers. blog.cloudflare.com/capnweb-java...

One time, it was Jay Leno. Personally. Inviting us to check out his garage.

One time, it was Jay Leno. Personally. Inviting us to check out his garage.

Wasm 3.0 Completed - WebAssembly WebAssembly (abbreviated Wasm) is a binary instruction format for a stack-based virtual machine. Wasm is designed as a portable compilation target for programming languages, enabling deployment on the...

WASM 3.0 is released! And guess what gets a mention? @spritelyinst.bsky.social's Hoot! webassembly.org/news/2025-09...

Mitigating Postinstall Attacks like the Shai‐Hulud Worm Endo is a distributed secure JavaScript sandbox, based on SES - endojs/endo

As of today, you should have npm and yarn ignore-scripts configured globally. This may break your binary dependencies that do not provide precompiled variants on npm, as esbuild does for example. It is fair to file an issue and ask your employer to fund the work.
sentry.engineering/blog/publish...

“Don’t put in place foundational elements that inherently shut you off from brilliant, brilliant talent going forward.”

Mitigating Postinstall Attacks like the Shai‐Hulud Worm Endo is a distributed secure JavaScript sandbox, based on SES - endojs/endo

I’m gathering notes on how to protect yourself and others in the npm ecosystem from postinstall attacks like the Shai-Hulud worm wending its way around at the moment. github.com/endojs/endo/...

@lavamoat/allow-scripts A tool for running only the dependency lifecycle hooks specified in an allowlist.. Latest version: 3.3.5, last published: 22 days ago. Start using @lavamoat/allow-scripts in your project by running `n...

Due to the npm postinstall script worm that’s working through our ecosystem, you absolutely must not install any packages until you’ve integrated @lavamoat/allow-scripts in your workflow and opt-in scripting needs to become default behavior for all package managers. www.npmjs.com/package/@lav...

On 9/16/25, celebrate a date of mathematical beauty Pythagorean Triple Square Day, as one man affectionately calls 9/16/25, is a day like no other this century.

Pythagorean Triple Square Day, as one man affectionately calls 9/16/25, is a day like no other this century.

If you do use spaces around them — as is my wont — you might need to be prepared to manually type non-breaking spaces (⌥⎵) around them — as I most certainly am. I agree with you wholeheartedly, though. They are superfluous. It is a shame that the “Chicago” comma has fallen under the same specter.

Terry Goodkind’s “wizard’s first rule” is that people will believe what they want to believe and what they are afraid might be true. This is ostensibly a manual for manipulation, but it is much more importantly an inoculation against manipulation.