Andrew Lilley Brinker

@alilleybrinker

Memory safety / Rust 🦀, Dodger baseball ⚾️ ...also #jj-vcs, urbanism, and more. Helping you assess OSS risks with @hipcheck.mitre.org. Principal Engineer at MITRE (opinions are mine) blogs: alilleybrinker.com / possiblerust.com

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Andrew Lilley Brinker@alilleybrinker· 16d

Here’s what Claude says. Probably best to validate with a Slovak or Czech speaker

Origin: Slovak/Czech — likely derived from “pšenica” (wheat), so probably an occupational or descriptive surname related to wheat/grain.

Pronunciation: roughly “psheh-NEETS-kah” (PSH-eh-NITS-kah) — the “ps” is pronounced together as in “Pshenitska,” not like a silent P.

Andrew Lilley Brinker@alilleybrinker· 18d

Wow he's just like me (@davidcrespo.bsky.social)

One of my co-memeticists, @davidcrespo.bsky.social, with two shared memes: "long industrial revolution" and "jj new main".

Andrew Lilley Brinker@alilleybrinker· 18d

I *will* make "self-managing types" happen (as a replacement term for "RAII")

My top repeated trigram, "self managing types," repeated three times by me and no one else on Bluesky has ever said it.

Andrew Lilley Brinker@alilleybrinker· 20d

I don't love being pessimistic about Rust's ability to deliver large-scale improvements, but the project has a long track record of approved-but-half-completed features. I hope this improves over time, but I do not want to bet on it.

Comment chain 1

nrc (@ncameron.org):
I think you wouldn’t have to tweak rust too much to get there. It would be backwards incompatible, but not too much. Plus of course a total rewrite of the compiler and cargo, but with the help of llms, both issues are probably solvable now.

Andrew Lilley Brinker (@alilleybrinker.com):
I am pretty pessimistic about Rust’s cultural and organizational ability to do that, even if it’s technically feasible.

Comment chain 2

huevosabio.bsky.social (@huevosabio.bsky.social):
Or another way to see it, would it be possible to make Rust compile much faster?

Andrew Lilley Brinker (@alilleybrinker.com):
It would require large breaking changes and a degree of coordination, product direction, and follow-through which I don’t believe Rust could organizationally muster.

Andrew Lilley Brinker@alilleybrinker· 20d

I don't know if I'd pick out a standout chapter (each chapters' methods are good for different things), but I like this bit in the intro explaining a core thorny challenge with causal inference:

Economic theory tells us we should be suspicious of correlations found in observational data. In observational data, correlations are almost certainly not reflecting a causal relationship because the variables were endogenously chosen by people who were making decisions they thought were best. In pursuing some goal while facing constraints, they chose certain things that created a spurious correlation with other things. And we see this problem reflected in the potential outcomes model itself: a correlation, in order to be a measure of a causal effect, must be based on a choice that was made independent of the potential outcomes under consideration. Yet if the person is making some choice based on what she thinks is best, then it necessarily is based on potential outcomes, and the correlation does not remotely satisfy the conditions we need in order to say it is causal. To put it as bluntly as I can, economic theory says choices are endogenous, and therefore since they are, the correlations between those choices and outcomes in the aggregate will rarely, if ever, represent a causal effect.

Andrew Lilley Brinker@alilleybrinker· 22d

I don't even know what to say at this point

Image of the Revzani Tank, which looks like a Jeep Wrangler that really wants to be a Halo Warthog when it grows up

Andrew Lilley Brinker@alilleybrinker· 22d

Not to always be the "read Societies of Control" guy, but uh, read Deleuze's "Postscript on the Societies of Control" theanarchistlibrary.org/library/gill...

In the societies of control, on the other hand, what is important is no longer either a signature or a number, but a code: the code is a password, while on the other hand the disciplinary societies are regulated by watchwords (as much from the point of view of integration as from that of resistance). The numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to information, or reject it. We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair.

Andrew Lilley Brinker@alilleybrinker· 22d

The secret is to get a hex wrench set. I have this one and it's paid enormous dividends. www.homedepot.com/p/Husky-Long...

Hex wrench set product picture, showing many different sizes of hex wrench in two different scales.

Andrew Lilley Brinker@alilleybrinker· 24d

Seeing England win

Andrew Lilley Brinker@alilleybrinker· 28d

theportalwiki.com/wiki/Moralit...

Andrew Lilley Brinker@alilleybrinker· Jul 10

Here's a map of all the stuff the New Deal built or conserved. livingnewdeal.org/map/

A map of the United States from "The New Deal Map" site, with an enormous number of dots indicating distinct New Deal-funded works programs and conservation programs. There are particular concentrations in the Bay Area, Los Angeles area, and around New York City, but dots truly cover the entire country.

Andrew Lilley Brinker@alilleybrinker· Jul 9

Oh yeah, for sure. From me in "Memory Safety for Skeptics":

"‘Get good’ is not a strategy. There is a common reply in conversations about memory safety, coming from the most hardcore skeptics: Programmers should just write better code. They argue, explicitly or implicitly, that programmers who benefit from the guardrails of memory safety are bad programmers, and that real programmers are sufficiently skilled that they do not need a machine double-checking their work.

Let’s be clear: This is anti-intellectual nonsense—macho self-aggrandizement masquerading as a serious technical argument. You should not take it seriously and should consider someone advancing this argument as fundamentally unserious and to be ignored."

Andrew Lilley Brinker@alilleybrinker· Jul 9

TIL about Social Cognitive Career Theory

Diagram from "Student Motivations and Expectations for an Introductory
Programming Course in Biology" by Zuckerman, Vo, and Juavinett, explaining the career choice to enroll in "Introduction to Python for Biologists" as being influenced by prior experiences (prior exposure to coding, mathematics experience and gatekeeping), self-efficacy (belief in possible success, strongly informed by support, course description, and prior experiences), and social support (direct connections such as family, secondary connections, and societal figures).

Andrew Lilley Brinker@alilleybrinker· Jul 9

When TigerBeetle, another flagship product for your language that you hold up as a paragon of "doing Zig right," says this, it's an indictment of your language github.com/tigerbeetle/...

From the TigerBeetle issue tracker's list of problems they have with Zig:

"Language features around pinned structs, result location semantics aliasing and implicit pass by reference. We currently avoid pass by value syntax altogether, and always use *const T or *T."

Andrew Lilley Brinker@alilleybrinker· Jul 9

Here's Jarred, showing much more class in his response than Andrew did in his post

Jarred posting on Hacker News about Andrew's blog post.

"
Jarred 3 hours ago | next [–]

I have learned so much reading Andrew’s code and as I said in the original post: Bun would never have happened without Zig.

> The post claims they were fuzzing their Zig code, while during our calls the whole Bun team told us that they were not fuzzing anything. This appears to be an outright fabrication.

Fuzzilli integration: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/24826

Merged PRs fixing issues Fuzzilli found in Bun’s Zig code:

- https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/28926

- https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/28934

- https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/29255

- https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/29210

- https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/29199

Searching “Fuzzilli” shows more PRs: https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Aoven-sh%2Fbun+is%3Apr+Fuz..."

Andrew Lilley Brinker@alilleybrinker· Jul 2

Yes I do, a Breville barista express. It's a solid machine, though I separately weigh my beans per-drink, pre-start the grinder, and then pour them in to get more precise grinds.

A Breville Barista Express, with the portafilter in, pulling an espresso shot.

Andrew Lilley Brinker@alilleybrinker· Jul 1

Good morning from Microsoft Teams. Can I interest you in some tag mentions?

Menu from Microsoft Teams, where "Tag mentions" is listed twice.

Andrew Lilley Brinker@alilleybrinker· Jun 28

Brian David Gilbert won an invitational tournament of Pokémon Champions today, dressed in all gold, with Goldengho taking the final opponent out using Make It Rain.

BDG, sunglasses on indoors, dressed entirely in gold, immediately after his win.

Andrew Lilley Brinker@alilleybrinker· Jun 25

SoftBank said “get in the car, we’re doing Goose Math”

Slide deck from the same presentation saying “market capitalization equals egg value plus goose value, and also equals JPY 74t plus alpha”

Andrew Lilley Brinker@alilleybrinker· Jun 24

Yeah it's basically this! Alternatively: "oh you own an iPhone, so you approve of child labor at rare earth mineral mines" or "you keep your money at a bank that also offered loans to a corporation that does <insert horrible thing>."

Andrew Lilley Brinker@alilleybrinker· Jun 24

I feel this in my bones

Quote from Charity's post:

"Some technologies are more damaging than others — knives are less damaging than guns, Facebook for colleges was less damaging than Facebook for Myanmar — but we always discover risks before we know how to govern them.2 There is always a gap while we try to catch up.

That gap is not proof that AI is evil. It is proof that we have work to do.

The fact that we have not solved the problems yet is not an argument to disconnect. It is an argument to engage, especially if you work in technology and already have an arsenal of relevant skills.

You do not learn to govern a tool by refusing to touch it. You learn by using it and understanding well enough to critique it, shape it, contribute to it, and set boundaries around it. You learn how to make it boring.

“Learn AI so you can complain about AI better.” I said it and I meant it. I still do."

Andrew Lilley Brinker@alilleybrinker· Jun 23

Computers want to be cubes

Andrew Lilley Brinker@alilleybrinker· Jun 23

CISA recently issued BOD 26-04, directing affected agencies to meet tighter remediation timelines for some vulnerabilities, with the most serious giving 3 days with a required forensic triage included. Source: www.cisa.gov/news-events/...

Table from the linked CISA article showing timelines for remediation based on whether a vulnerability is 1) publicly exposed, 2) in the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) list, 3) automatable by an adversary, and offers total or partial control to an attacker. In some cases the remediation timeline is 3 days with a mandatory forensic triage.

Andrew Lilley Brinker@alilleybrinker· Jun 6

Huh, imagine that

"The outrage selected on a single tail event and narrativized it"
A Mastodon user noticed a regression in v3.4.3, saw Claude commits, and concluded causation. But v3.4.3 at 3.29 sev/10c is at the 77th percentile — elevated but not extreme. 8 historical releases scored higher. The correlation is noise.

Andrew Lilley Brinker@alilleybrinker· Jun 3

*This* is exactly the kind of "legitimate target" garbage I find unconscionable. This was in a quote-post of me, which I've now detached. Harassment isn't justified by someone using an LLM.

"If you buy into vibe coding you shouldn't be given the same grace; like somebody who can't make straight rip cuts on a table saw."

Andrew Lilley Brinker@alilleybrinker· Jun 3

Andrew Lilley Brinker@alilleybrinker· Jun 2

This write-up on levels of validation is *chef's kiss*

"Because iddqd is such a foundational data structure at Oxide, we go through great lengths to validate its correctness, including the soundness of its abstractions. There is a great deal of analytical reasoning performed by experienced Rust authors and reviewers, as described in the section above. But we also empirically validate iddqd along several different dimensions. None of the layers is sufficient by itself, but by rigorously doing all of them we can be more confident that iddqd is correct.

The layers of validation we apply are:

(The following is in a table)

Technique: Analytical; Catches: reasoning Soundness errors

Technique: Example-based tests (including doctests); Catches: Regressions, broken examples

Technique: Pathological tests with Miri; Catches: Adversarial trait impls causing UB

Technique: Model-based tests (PBT with NaiveMap oracle); Catches: Divergence from oracle over random operation sequences

Technique: Panic safety fault injection; Catches: Invariant violations on mid-operation panics

LLM adversarial review; Catches: Blind spots in adversarial user code

Andrew Lilley Brinker@alilleybrinker· Jun 1

dril tweet: "drunk driving may kill a lot of people, but it also helps a lot of people get to work on time, so, it;s impossible to say if its bad or not,"

Andrew Lilley Brinker@alilleybrinker· Jun 1

The first paragraph of the conclusion ought to be at the top of the article IMO