There's a lot here worth thinking about, and it puts in words some of the feelings I was having that motivated me to leave Google. I'm *also* quite worried about more direct autocratic control of US-based AI, there are signs of this starting to happen.

Josh Marshall@joshtpm.bsky.social · last mo.

Google, AI, Oligarchy and the End of the ‘Open Web’ talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/googl...

I spent the last month obsessed with finding colors that can't be displayed on a conventional screen. This is what I found. moultano.wordpress.com/2026/06/19/w...

Where to Find the Colors Your Screen Can’t Show You

An atlas of the vibrance of the real world

moultano.wordpress.com

Just like last year, we replaced a whole wall of movie posters with our own punny movie posters at the cinema where RustWeek 2026 took place. I designed seven new posters for this year's event. See the thread below 👇

I will be at RustWeek in Utrecht next week! Really looking forward to meeting people.

As a fun project, I implemented race-the-beam image decompression on RP2350 with DVI output. I can get 1280x720 at 60Hz with a bit of overclocking. PR at github.com/DusterTheFir... I'll probably write this up, the idea is pretty cool.

Our upcoming game The Hearth and Harbour is fully 2D, but with some neat tricks we’ve made it look 3D. Ethan, our environment artist, did this with a special type of texture called a Normal Map. (Thread! 1/7)

My "No Graphics API" blog post is live! Please repost :) www.sebastianaaltonen.com/blog/no-grap... I spend 1.5 years doing this. Full rewrite last summer and another partial rewrite last month. As Hemingway said: "First draft of everything is always shit".

No Graphics API — Sebastian Aaltonen

Graphics APIs and shader languages have significantly increased in complexity over the past decade. It’s time to start discussing how to strip down the abstractions to simplify development, improve pe...

sebastianaaltonen.com

As we go into the holiday season, there's lots of progress in Linebender from the previous month: linebender.org/blog/tmil-23/. Among other things, blur filters in Vello CPU (with GPU acceleration on the roadmap), SIMD progress, and a new port of Runebender to Xilem.

This is indeed an excellent talk, and I think contains the seeds of a path forward through the AI thicket. When tested against only "vibes," AI can generate reams of slop. But when tested against hard ground truth, in this case rigorous mathematical formalism, possibilities abound.

Linotype Pilgrim@symbo1ics.bsky.social · 8mo ago

#Math Professor Emily Riehl shows in her speciality that "vibe proving" with LLMs is consistently &insidiously wrong, and threatens to swamp a struggling peer review system: youtu.be/fzxW2XJS6SE But! "computer aided formalisation" building on GOFAI symbolic methods may revolutionise complex proofs

“We adopted #rustlang for its security and are seeing a 1000x reduction in memory safety vulnerability density ... with Rust changes having a 4x lower rollback rate and spending 25% less time in code review, the safer path is now also the faster one.” security.googleblog.com/2025/11/rust...

Rust in Android: move fast and fix things

Posted by Jeff Vander Stoep, Android Last year, we wrote about why a memory safety strategy that focuses on vulnerability prevention in ...

security.googleblog.com

😎😎😎😎 GOOD THINGS CAN STILL HAPPEN 😎😎😎😎

My talk on "I want a good parallel language" is now up: www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-eV... Slides here: docs.google.com/presentation... Thanks Arthur Gleckler and BALISP for hosting the talk!

I Want a Good Parallel Language, by Raph Levien (BALISP)

YouTube video by Arthur Gleckler

youtube.com

I'm thrilled that Laurenz Stampfl, a student at ETH Zurich, has completed his Masters degree, and has published the thesis: ethz.ch/content/dam/... 1/2

I'll be giving at talk tomorrow at the Hacker Dojo in Mountain View, entitled "I want a good parallel language." Meetup link is here: www.meetup.com/balisp/event...

I Want a Good Parallel Language, RetroAI, lightning talks, and socializing, Sat, Nov 1, 2025, 12:00 PM | Meetup

Hello, hacker ladies and gentlemen! On Saturday, November 1st, we'll have a talk by [Raph Levien](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raph_Levien), who is an expert in Rust and

meetup.com

There was already a *lot* going on with Bluesky, and now it's under even more pressure. I wrote about how I think about moderation, affordances, expectations, human needs, and powerful trolls for @techpolicypress.bsky.social www.techpolicy.press/trump-admini...

Trump Administration's Arrival on Bluesky Highlights Growing Pains for Open Networks | TechPolicy.Press

The administration’s antagonistic entry to the platform is best understood as a game of chicken, writes Erin Kissane.

techpolicy.press

Some updates from the Linebender ecosystem: we've published our monthly update blog (linebender.org/blog/tmil-21/), and also released fearless_simd 0.3.0 (github.com/linebender/f...). The train keeps rolling!

I gave a seminar entitled "How Rust won: The quest for performant, reliable software" at the Topos Institute on Jun 3, and the video (youtu.be/k_-6KI3m31M) is now published. I hope people enjoy it!

[Berkeley Seminar] Raph Levien | How Rust won: the quest for performant, reliable software

YouTube video by Topos Institute

youtu.be

We have our usual monthly update for Linebender: linebender.org/blog/tmil-19/ A lot of good progress, especially on the renderer, and fearless_simd is coming along well. Also some personal news: I'm leaving Google and taking a new role at Canva, moving to Australia in January.

With Tom Lehrer's passing, I suppose this is a moment to share the story of the prank he played on the National Security Agency, and how it went undiscovered for nearly 60 years.

When I was little, the U.S. military came to our home at gunpoint and took me and my family away. We were imprisoned for years in barbed wire camps simply because we were Japanese American. I have spent my life telling that story, hoping it would never be repeated.

Cool to see this work happening, and look forward to some nice GPU compute acceleration for path rendering!

David Neto 🇨🇦@dneto.dev · last yr.

Very cool stuff happening in Chrome graphics land. (And bonus, Graphite is shipping on top of Dawn, Google's implementation of #WebGPU) blog.chromium.org/2025/07/intr...

Topnotch reporting from Marisa Kabas on a very important topic. It's maddening that mainstream news sources are not meeting the moment. Support independent journalism by subscribing.

Marisa Kabas@marisakabas.bsky.social · last yr.

NEW from me — I wrote about FEMA Acting Administrator David Richardson, who has been completely silent and out of view since deadly floods devastated Texas last week, and spoke to staffers about what it's like to respond to a disaster with no leader. Read here:

Last week I did a research retreat on stroke expansion yielding a cubic Bézier approximation. It went well. I wrote a summary: docs.google.com/document/d/1... That document requires a certain amount of context and background to understand fully, but hopefully some people will find it interesting.

Research retreat 2025-06-16 summary

Research retreat 2025-06-16 summary I did a research retreat week focused on cubic-to-cubic stroke expansion. Overall I made lots of progress on both practical and theoretical issues, but the problem ...

docs.google.com

Faster, easier 2D vector rendering by Raph Levien at RustWeek 2025! www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sv8... @raphlinus.bsky.social‬ #rustlang #RustWeek

Faster, easier 2D vector rendering - Raph Levien

This talk presents new work on high performance vector path and text rendering, to make it not only fast but easier to integrate with other code. Multiple mo...

youtube.com

My talk is in here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sv8... Enjoy!

Faster, easier 2D vector rendering - Raph Levien

YouTube video by RustNL

youtube.com

Julius Gustavsson@jgust.xyz · last yr.

The talks from RustWeek are now available on YouTube! It was great fun and a big honour to get our Rust efforts: youtu.be/2JIFUk4f0iE?...

I wrote linebender.org/blog/a-plan-... and published it over the weekend. I'm excited about pushing Rust SIMD to be more usable, and open to feedback about the specifics of the proposal.

Our data compression projects aim to offer best-in-class performance. @tweedegolf.bsky.social‬'s Folkert de Vries shows how SIMD helps us to speed up zlib-rs in compare256, a crucial part of the compression algorithm that finds repetitions in the input. trifectatech.org/blog/simd-in... #rustlang

SIMD in zlib-rs (part 2): compare256 - Trifecta Tech Foundation

In part 1 of the "SIMD in zlib-rs" series, we've seen that, with a bit of nudging, autovectorization can produce optimal code for some problems.

trifectatech.org

This hits close to home. The PhET people are brilliant and dedicated, and we've shared ideas and some code on 2D rendering technology. One tiny facet of a great loss.

New blog post up on the state of SIMD in Rust: linebender.org/blog/towards... It's an update on my previous blog post from 7 years ago, and also links to a podcast I recently recorded with Andre Popovitch: www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0Wc.... I think it's a good intro to SIMD, and I had fun doing it.

I've now published my blog post, "I want a good parallel computer." raphlinus.github.io/gpu/2025/03/... . Thanks much to all the feedback on the draft, I'd like to think I've clarified some things that might have been confusing.