Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jun 18, 2025

• Julia Programming Language ☛ Dyad: Making Hardware as Easy as Software

  Engineering is at a crossroads. The traditional ways of engineering and using expert knowledge look like they will be subsumed by an onslaught of new tools. Today’s software workflows are agile with pervasive DevOps at every level, continuous deployment and testing, all wrapped with elements of generative AI accelerating the development. However, we do not believe that all of the past techniques will be discarded because engineering expertise plays a crucial role. While AI tools have well-known problems with hallucination, many software engineering domains are still finding tremendous value without 100% accuracy. Engineers need to be sure that the planes they design will fly and that software running real-time is certifiably correct. “Move fast and break things” is fundamentally not what you want to do with an airplane.

• Ted Unangst ☛ pipelined state machine corruption

  What I came up with is that the server might be relying on implicit state to drive its state machine. A server of the time would likely be using select to multiplex IO. I’m imagining a server might assume that each connection can only create one wakeup for one reason at a time. We wake up to read from the net connection. We read the MAIL FROM, then start some operation to check that, and wait for a response. If we wake up again because the net connection has RCPT TO pending, we might reply to that before the from address has been checked. This is quite some time before SPF, but we can imagine something like it.

• Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

  • David Mead ☛ Blink and you'll miss it — a URL handler surprise

    Blink is a mobile shell for iOS and iPadOS. It takes a different approach from some tools and isn't just focused on being an SSH client; you can run a few commands locally. Surprisingly (or maybe not, if you're a regular reader...) this ability to run local commands results in some special abilities if the input becomes attacker controlled.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Michael Tsai ☛ Chrome Doesn’t Support JPEG XL

    JPEG XL seems better, but even Apple’s not supporting it everywhere yet.