What happens when your open source library changes millions of lives? To kick off season 3 of the Bug Bash podcast, we sit down with @drmaciver.bsky.social, Zac Hatfield-Dodds, and Liam DeVoe — three generations of Hypothesis maintainers, the PBT library used by ~5% of all Python devs.
here's a lil tool i wrote at work that may be of interest to some of you: github.com/antithesishq...
GitHub - antithesishq/fluke: Tracing-based Nix evaluation cacher
Tracing-based Nix evaluation cacher. Contribute to antithesishq/fluke development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com
So I joined Antithesis a little while back. When I did, I pitched them on a crazy idea. Antithesis... Hypothesis... Hegel! And here we are. Hegel is our attempt to do Hypothesis-grade PBT everywhere. Today: Rust. Tomorrow: The world! (Well. In a week or two: Go) antithesis.com/blog/2026/he...
Hypothesis, Antithesis, synthesis
Introducing Hegel, our new family of property-based testing libraries.
antithesis.com
I've largely got out of the habit of posting on social media to make number go up, but it feels somewhere between appropriate and darkly ironic to do that for my review of @add-hawk.bsky.social's new book, "The Score". drmaciver.substack.com/p/how-to-be-...
Many LM applications may be formulated as text generation conditional on some (Boolean) constraint. Generate a… - Python program that passes a test suite. - PDDL plan that satisfies a goal. - CoT trajectory that yields a positive reward. The list goes on… How can we efficiently satisfy these? 🧵👇
Post a photo you took with no context to bring some zen to the timeline
Alice Cann@alicecann.bsky.social · 2y agoPost a photo you took with no context to bring some zen to the timeline
Shrinkray has very sensible rules that apply well to languages it has no specific knowledge of -- we make a *lot* of use of this and it's brilliant! -- and it scales near-linearly to the number of cores. If you need a reducer, I highly recommend it! Thanks @drmaciver.bsky.social!
I wrote some notes on how LLMs work, aimed at non-programmers, that you might find interesting. notebook.drmaciver.com/posts/2025-0... Feedback, corrections, and follow-on questions very welcome.
How do LLMs work?
notebook.drmaciver.com
Every time you wonder how something in Hypothesis works, you can usually reverse engineer it from the following design logic: 1. What's the obvious, natural, way to do it. 2. What are the problems with that? 3. Can those be fixed? Not without doing something ridiculous and unreasonable. 4. Do that.
@defenderofbasic.bsky.social I think that (possibly in a few minutes) this message is going to show up in your search.
Something I very much enjoy on discord is when one of us memes the others into trying ridiculous exercises. e.g. a while back we had a conversation about whether it was easy to stand on one leg with your eyes closed (it's not) and we had like a dozen people going "Surely it is..." and trying it.
I enjoyed the last threadapalooza I did, so I think I'll do another one or two in December. They're a good way of drawing out thoughts about topics, and I've got a couple of concepts that I'm trying to figure out how to articulate better. Current candidate threadapalooza topics:
Are there any academics you're completionist about reading their papers? e.g. you've got a google scholar alert that tells you when they've got a new paper out and always read it when they do.
I thought I was pretty good at self massage, but I'm sortof blown away at how effective this really simple technique that I didn't know is at relaxing me. www.youtube.com/shorts/3fxEU...
Quick Relief: Banish Muscle Knots with Sub-Occipital Massage in 45 Seconds
YouTube video by Next Level Physical Therapy
youtube.com
x.com/DRMacIver/st... This one isn't my top tweet of all time, it's only my tenth most quoted tweet of all time, but it probably is my best tweet of all time.
I posted this on discord and now we're all talking about how great animals are and all the animal species we like.
Korea Expert here. I’ll explain what’s going on over there because the Orient can be confusing to Westerners. In Korea, there is a concept known as “the law.” (법) This is a set of rules which are enforced to encourage prosocial behavior and ensure stability which leaders aren’t allowed to break.
One peril of too much philosophy is that if someone asks "Do you know X?" it's very easy to get into a spiral of "What even is knowledge??"
When an astute observation becomes a named law, it ceases to be a good observation.
If I had a nickel for every time I've invented a genuine improvement to binary search (for a specific application) I'd... Have two nickels. But it's weird that it's happened twice. notebook.drmaciver.com/posts/2024-1... notebook.drmaciver.com/posts/2019-0...
Filtered sampling from sorted values with incremental binary search
notebook.drmaciver.com
Bluesky really needs a per-account "turn off reposts from this account" feature like Twitter has. Or does it have one and I'm missing it?
Right, it's December 1st, and I said I'd do a 100 post thread on here instead of Twitter for Threadapalooza this year... but also it's late and I don't have much energy left, so here's the start of one: 1. This will be a thread about running an Internet community.
Tentatively I think I will be doing my threadapalooza thread on running communities on the internet.
You've probably seen it in the screenshot internet because everyone has at this point. My brother was complaining that his friends keep posting it on Facebook. x.com/DRMacIver/st...
Ryan Teague Beckwith@ryanbeckwith.bsky.social · 2y agoEveryone should post their most viral tweet here, just for posterity's sake
The point is that I'm suspicious of the people who present this as an obvious issue. I tend to think of them as extremists. I particularly don't like the ones who ascribe sinister motivations to people on the other extreme, yet ignore the rest of us entirely.
