Laurence Tratt

pizauth-1.0.11 is out, and ensures it keeps retrying in the face of transitory HTTP errors tratt.net/laurie/src/p...

To be clear: _I_ don't think it's a problem anyway ;)

Tools can be fixed. And, I think, increasingly, being bound by the restrictions of physical paper is going to feel anachronistic. My guess is that a tiny percentage of people read my papers on physical paper (I might be very wrong on this of course, but looking at the download stats, probably not).

Surely this is mostly a tooling issue? If you could move your mouse over the link and see a popup, it would solve most of the problem?

I don't have photos (the last first class game here was 20 years ago), but there's a bit of history here somersetcountycc.co.uk/news/club-ne.... Next time I'll take you the County Ground in Taunton -- the beautiful red-stone (not brick) church right next by is a wonderful backdrop!

Time will tell.

Sometimes the best way to predict the future is to wait and see what happens.

The former IMHO. For example, a lot of "framework" libraries have a lot of boilerplate that can add up over time to become a real impediment to understanding. Designing better frameworks/libraries is expensive and skilled work (at least for now).

One of the interesting consequences of LLMs/agents is that the short-term costs of boilerplate in code have plummeted. An interesting question is whether those costs are simply shunted to the future or whether they are permanently reduced.

It seems that I have been blessed with my first clawdbot (or similar) interactions on one of my repositories. I really hope this sort of noise doesn't end up (a) wasting maintainer's time (b) putting people off trying the underlying technology where it's actually useful.

An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me Summary: An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into acceptin…

In the futurementary Terminator, I don't remember Skynet starting off with open-source repositories theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-... (I also strongly suggest following the link to the GitHub PR, because it makes much more sense with that as context).

Indeed.

To take a current topic: can it generate a compiler whose output is on a par with gcc/clang?

That's a very valuable piece of information because if it can do it now, it will never cost more in the future -- and it will probably cost less!

In the past fortnight, 50% of my conversations have seen me say "today's AI cannot do that and we have no idea if and when it will".

In the other 50% I've said "today's AI can do that, really, and you just need to try it".

Our collective calibration is currently very wonky!

Good, we need someone to research how to make it work everywhere as that is not yet a fully solved problem!

I'm glad to hear it's been useful to you!

This has saved me 950LoC in one Rust program alone. Comments welcome -- I definitely consider this experimental right now! github.com/ykjit/test_s...

Scratched a Rust itch with an experimental new crate `test_stubs`. I have traits with lots of methods. "Proper" code should implement all methods, but test code need not. `test_stubs` means that test code doesn't have to manually create `todo!()` methods.

If it was, it went straight to the 3 year old stage, and got the same response 3 year olds are familiar with -- "don't do that".

There's nothing more surprising than an agent, in the middle of doing some useful refactoring, asking if it can run a Python script which solely prints "HI" (yes, in uppercase) to stdout.

If you're thinking of applying to PLISS, you've got three days left! pliss.org/2026/registr...

A first: I awoke to a PR on one of the Rust projects I maintain that results from a proposed fix to a rustc oversight. Our code should never have compiled, IMHO, so the rustc fix is a good one!

For those interested in the rustc change: github.com/rust-lang/ru...

This is definitely a book I need to reread. Honestly, I read it in the past in part because he grew up near me. I soon realised I was in the hands of a master, even if I didn't quite understand the depths of that.

When I read Walter Bagehot's (d. 1877) "The English Constitution" years ago, I was surprised at how much time he spent contrasting it to the US constitution. I now realise he had thought deeply about the plausible futures of both and how they could adapt and/or go wrong.

Of course. But that is not the only metric worth considering.

I need to go backwards in many cases, and I then lose all the mental state I've built up. `printf` allows me to refresh that mental state. Certainly, it's served me very well for a long time, at least before reverse debuggers.

It's so good that I am willing to overlook how terrible the (gdb) debugger UI is. I don't need most of the weird hard-to-remember features, as they're much less necessary (for me) when reverse debugging.

Reverse debugging, specifically `rr`, has changed this calculus for me. By starting at the error and working backwards (and sometimes forwards), I have a sort of uber-powerful `printf` that allows me to examine the trail.

I've never been a fan of debuggers. Examining the state at the point of a crash rarely helps me: the problem is nearly always earlier in time. `printf` is more useful to follow the trail forwards.