Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 24, 2026

• Raphael Amorim ☛ No, AI is not making software worse, people are

  So when people point at AI-generated code and say “look, software is getting worse,” I want to ask: worse compared to what? Compared to the 10GB text editor? Compared to the chat app that needs a gigabyte of memory to show you messages? Compared to the desktop apps that are just websites wearing a window? We accepted all of that. We applauded a lot of it. Let’s not suddenly grow a conscience the moment a model writes the bad code instead of a person.

  That would be hypocrisy, plain and simple.

• Daniel Lemire ☛ Parsing IPv6 Addresses Crazily Fast with AVX-512

  Every machine connected to the Internet has an address called an IP address. Originally, these addresses were 32-bit integers (IPv4), giving a theoretical maximum of about four billion distinct addresses. We are all familiar with these addresses (e.g., 192.168.0.0). There was a big fuss about how we would run out of addresses. It never happened because we don’t actually need every device to have its own unique address. Your home router needs an address, but every device in your home does not need a worldwide unique address.

• University of Toronto ☛ My views on Flymake and Flycheck in GNU Emacs (as of mid 2026)

  One of the divisions in GNU Emacs people is between using Flymake, which is built into GNU Emacs and is well supported by other standard GNU Emacs packages such as Eglot, and using Flycheck. I've used Flycheck for a long time (cf) and recently tried using Flymake, which has given me some pragmatic opinions for my own usage.

  (For non GNU Emacs people, Flymake and Flycheck both exist to present (and to some extent detect) 'diagnostics' about your code or whatever file you're editing.)

• Farid Zakaria ☛ Leaving performance on the table

  Compilers work under the assumption that every branch is is equally taken, unless you are hints like [[likely]] (ref). If we can feed the compilers more information about the likely path that our workloads often take, then they can produce much more performant code.

• Joseph Lorenzo Hall ☛ Squeezing the Balloon: Why Securing the Open Source Build Process is Only the Beginning

  Over the last couple of years, the open-source software community successfully squeezed a massive, highly vulnerable end of the balloon. We fundamentally changed how software is uploaded to the Internet's major package registries (like npm for JavaScript or PyPI for Python).

  But as two recent security talks—William Enck’s NDSS keynote and Zach Steindler’s presentation at the USENIX Security Enigma Track—clearly demonstrate, the attackers didn't pack up and go home. They just moved to the parts of the balloon that are currently bulging out: the automated assembly lines (CI/CD pipelines) that build our code, and the massive data files (SBOMs and VEX) we use to track vulnerabilities.

  Let's break down exactly what we solved, how the threat shifted, and what the security research community must do to keep the Internet's infrastructure from collapsing under its own weight.

• Undeadly ☛ Game of Trees 0.126 released

  Version 0.126 of Game of Trees has been released (and the port updated). Complete release notes are as follows: [...]

• SusamPal ☛ Don't Roll Your Own ...

  Fortunately, most of the industry does take the 'don't roll your own crypto' advice quite seriously. No major e-commerce site or bank uses home-grown cryptography for its web services. In fact, in regulated domains such as payments, healthcare, government systems and personal data processing, doing so could violate requirements for strong cryptography, possibly leading to hefty financial penalties.

  I wish there were such a maxim for website design as well. There are many aspects of websites where I think developers should not be rolling their own X, where X is something that matters to users, and yet many developers decide to implement X themselves. Here I present a list of such X.

• Perl / Raku

  • Arne Sommer ☛ Largest Vowel with Raku

    This is my response to The Weekly Challenge #374.

  • Perl ☛ 2026-05-14 [Older] My Journey with Devel::ptkdb - Origins

  • Perl ☛ 2026-05-12 [Older] This week in PSC (224) | 2026-05-11

• Python

  • Naty S ☛ url2md: A URL to Markdown Link Converter using Python Script

    I have written nearly 30 weeknotes so far and a recurring section in all weeknotes is the “Link Roundup” where I share interesting links I came across that week (aka Link Dumps).

    The process of manually fetching the title and author/site name for each link and typing the Markdown link syntax [Title | Author or Publisher](url) got tedious—so I decided to automate it with a Python script. (This would be an example of “Manual until it hurts”.)

    While the script is not fool-proof and the output requires some tidying; to me, it is a much improved workflow. Maybe you will find some use it in if you do something similar with wrangling URLs and Markdown! Feedback or suggestions for improvement are welcome.