This resonates with how compiler work looks outside textbooks. Most of the hard problems aren’t about inventing new optimizations, but about making existing ones interact safely, predictably, and debuggably. Engineering effort often goes into tooling, invariants, and diagnostics rather than the optimizations themselves.
As sports betting became mainstream in the US, it was only a matter of time before major news networks joined the orbit. The problem is that betting partnerships pull journalism away from public-interest reporting and toward a monetized probability show. When information is framed as odds rather than insight, trust erodes. It’s one more step in turning newsrooms into promotional surfaces instead of watchdogs
This is a new issue for sure, but what trust is left to erode in the first place?
We already are regularly asked to accept mere emotionally motivated opinion as information. Of course its relayed as "fact-based reporting", wrapped in mostly tidy narratives which wear the makeup of a journalistic endeavor. But look at which facts are amplified, suppressed, or omitted; or the adjectives used around the facts or which facts are only ever spoken by the journalists and which facts are allowed to be conveyed directly by the participants. Even the choice of which stories are newsworthy and which aren't plays a role.
Modern journalism is already largely a call to action for adopting a particular worldview rather than an effort to ensure that you have the best information in formulating opinions. The press, the government, and activists already have taken the stand that you are a fool that is better manipulated into "correct thinking" by your betters than left to your own devices.
Given all that, I would contend that most reporting is not there to inform you in the first place: its there to manipulate your emotions on a subject while convincing you that somehow you are now "informed". I would say under those circumstances that any trust that still exists in the media is already misplaced. The betting question is just another avenue exacerbating an already unreliable journalistic landscape.
the hidden text about financial markets is doubly so. Hate every time i open the news and its "$COMPANY stock falls after $EVENT happens" when often the event probably had no bearing on the stock price of multi-trillion dollar companies at all. It just happened at the same time and the news networks want to construct a narrative.
Rust adoption in privacy tooling always feels like watching an old fortress quietly replace its wooden beams with steel ones. Tor’s codebase has carried decades of security assumptions, C-era tradeoffs and performance scars, so a gradual Rustification seems like the most sensible way to buy safety without breaking the ecosystem.
The real win isn’t “rewrite everything” but reducing the surface area where memory-unsafety bugs can even exist. If the team can shift the high-risk subsystems (parsing, crypto glue, protocol edges) into Rust while keeping well-tested C where it’s stable, Tor ends up with a sturdier core without a multi-year rewrite freeze.
The interesting question is how far they’ll push it:
Will future pluggable transports be Rust-first?
Will relay operators eventually run a hybrid runtime?
Or does this turn into a long coexistence phase like Firefox?
Either way, a safer Tor is a good Tor.
The interesting part isn’t the if-statement count but how quickly the compiler and branch predictor erase the differences. It’s a nice demo of why “manual cleverness” rarely beats modern toolchains.
For SMEs, clarity and actionable output are the most important signals. Having a simple CLI that emits SARIF/JUnit for automated pipelines is great, but adding a minimal “human readable summary” with clear pass/fail thresholds and context for compliance checks can make a huge difference in adoption.
Curious if you’ve considered automated mapping of dependencies to NIS2/DORA clauses, or if you leave that for post-scan review.
The Zelda example is a good reminder that emotion in software often comes from consistency and responsiveness. Those games feel immersive because the underlying systems behave predictably, inputs map cleanly to actions, and the world reacts without friction. That same principle applies to non-game software too: tight feedback loops and coherent internal rules make tools feel “alive” in a way users notice even if they can’t articulate it.
Observability that can produce causal explanations rather than just timelines. We have great tooling for logs/metrics/traces, but very little that helps engineers understand why a distributed system behaved the way it did. Automated causal graphs for incidents still feel like an open problem.
In distributed systems, at least we have the variables, functions, pods, log traces, spans etc some pre defined structure, and some level of determinism. I would say Causality is still not fully explored territory when it comes to human brain.
When I think of human brain or may be to some extent LLMs, it's difficult to understand what is invisible. For distributed systems we will build tools, there is ongoing research in LLM Observability, but I wonder what about human brain
The experience feels fragmented because Google has multiple overlapping developer consoles and product boundaries. Gemini just exposes that underlying fragmentation more clearly than other APIs.
When my daughter is old enough, I'm definitely going to show her a bunch of visualizations on Neal's site as supplementary education. I learned so much from these visualizations as an adult, and even without being able to read you can get a sense of scale.
Fwiw, I've done a pinch-nail-hand-arms 1-10-100-1000 mm "body as size reference" a couple of times around 5ish. And a 1000x "micro view" "pinch is zoomed to arms size" "it's like a scale model or doll playset - everything zoomed together" world of "bacteria sprinkles, red blood cell candies (M&M minis or concave Smarties minis or Sweetarts - there's lots of cell candy analogs), hair poles, salt/sugar boxes". Stories of sitting on a grain of salt and eating... etc; pet eyelash mites. No idea if it actually worked.
I did some user-test videos, now only on archive.org.[1] Hmm... the "Arms, hands" video there now doesn't seem to play inline? - but does wget'ed and browsered. :/
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