yosh

yosh, 5 months ago to random

To the surprise of nobody whose worked on any collaborative projects at scale — people with toxic styles of engagement burn out the people actually doing the work and negatively affect the entire project.

This paper is specifically about Wikipedia, but like no shot this doesn’t apply to open source as well:

https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/2/12/pgad385/7457939

yosh, 12 days ago to random

Never ceases to stump me that we have the technology to kill 99.95% of airborne viruses, proven to work, non-invasive, cheap to deploy and install, and is produced at scale already and we just like - collectively - kind of just don't really use it.

HEPA-grade air filtration is proven, cheap, and makes everyone's lives strictly better. It, like, makes zero fiscal sense for governments not to mandate its use in all covered public spaces ASAP.

yosh, 6 months ago to random

When people say: “COVID is here to stay” it just sounds like people are throwing in the towel? Like, to me it makes as much sense as if people were to look into our water supply and said: “Cholera is here to stay.”

What do they even mean? Just like we can filter water, we can filter air. This is a thing we know how to do, is relatively inexpensive, and if subsidized would likely pay itself back in productivity gains alone. It really shouldn’t be that hard.

yosh, 2 months ago to random

Again: if you’re on an airplane, you should be wearing a high-filtration mask. It’s sound practice for the entire flight, but especially before takeoff and after landing.

Here are the CO2 measurements from a flight I took yesterday - the two peaks are from embarking and disembarking, showing the plane’s ventilation systems being shut off. This is unfortunately a frequent practice.

yosh, 5 months ago to random

Holyyyyyyy, it seems sterilizing vaccines might actually happen? If this ends up working out, it’ll be huge. This would mean vaccines which actually meaningfully stop transmission!

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-04003-4

yosh, 5 months ago to random

With the latest SARS-CoV-2 variant Pirola, cases in Europe are the highest they've ever been.

If you've paused the habit of using FFP2 masks in public, at-home tests, or other preventative measures - now would be an excellent time to pick it back up.

We know that the virus is airborne. We know that well-fitting masks prevent transmission. That at-home tests are good at detecting infection. And the horrifying consequences of repeat infection. Please keep yourself and your loved ones safe.

The chart for Switzerland showing a high peak
The chart for Austria showing a high peak
The chart for the netherlands showing a high peak

yosh, 6 months ago to random

“Better things aren’t possible” feels like such a failure of imagination.

I’m reading the wasmtime 2023 report, and among the myriad of features they added one of the things they talk about is how they used formal methods to systematically eliminate miscompilations.

https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~avh/veri-isle-preprint.pdf

Like let this sink in. This is a (critical!) bug in a from-scratch LLVM alternative, built using bleeding-edge designs, for an in-progress language (Wasm/WASI), built by a handful of people. And they did it

yosh, 8 months ago to random

Oh I missed the announcement that long-Covid is now starting to be recognized as an auto-immune disease.

Coupled with the fact that Covid is airborne (bio-aerosols, not droplets), you definitely shouldn’t want to catch this or spread it.

https://www.autoimmuneregistry.org/long-covid-announcement

yosh, 7 months ago to random

Holy shit, I love this: https://metric-time.com/

yosh, 5 months ago to random

Does anyone know of any OpenStreetMap communities plotting indoor air quality?

I have an Aranet4 CO2 monitor on me literally everywhere I go, and it seems like a shame to not be able to contribute that data back to be used? Surely something like this must exist?

(Retoots welcome; I'd really like to know!)

yosh, 6 months ago to random

Huge announcement today: Microsoft is investing an additional $10 million to make Rust a first-class supported language in our internal build systems, plus donating an additional $1 million to the Rust foundation.

https://twitter.com/dwizzzleMSFT/status/1720134540822520268

yosh, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago) to random

Holy shit, Rustc (via Ferrocene) being ASIL-D certified is a huge deal! That’s the highest level of verification for automotive applications, which enables it to be used in stuff like braking, steering, and other critical vehicle systems.

I had absolutely no idea what any of the standards were about. But now that I understand what they are, that seems huge! Amazing work by @ferrous!

https://ferrous-systems.com/ferrocene/

yosh, 6 months ago to random

I surprised someone again yesterday by saying that I legitimately don’t think technical issues are the hard part of shipping projects.

I find the constraints are almost always about how to navigate conflicting points of view, deadlines, organization, planning, and budgets. People, planning, and money are the hardest topics. The technical parts seem far less difficult -sometimes even trivial- in comparison.

yosh, 3 months ago to random

I just compiled and published a list of national Covid wastewater dashboards!

https://github.com/yoshuawuyts/covid-wastewater-dashboards

These can be pretty tricky to find; so I figured I should make a list of the ones I know of. If you know of any not on this list, please let me know or file a PR.

yosh, 11 months ago to random

Yay, the Rust Leadership Council is now up and running!

https://blog.rust-lang.org/2023/06/20/introducing-leadership-council.html

yosh, 11 months ago to random

New blog post: What is WASI?

WASI has been iterated on a lot over the past four years, and WASI Preview 2 is expected to be released soon. This post covers how I think about Wasm, WASI, and how they fit in the computing landscape.

https://blog.yoshuawuyts.com/what-is-wasi/

yosh, 18 days ago to random

I disagree with a lot in this article, but hey it's good that four years into the pandemic the WHO finally recognizes that SARS-CoV-2 is airborne:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-fight-about-viruses-in-the-air-is-finally-over-now-its-time-for-healthy/

Now that that's out of the way, hopefully we'll start seeing governments act on implementing clean air protocols. More research is nice (hi Far-UVC), but the focus of governments worldwide really ought to be to roll out mechanical ventilation where possible, and HEPA filtration everywhere else. This should be standard.

yosh, 10 days ago to random

Yay! The in-progress wasi:i2c proposal (WASI spec for embedded devices) just moved to phase 2!

This means it's not just something promising anymore, but it seems ready to be implemented in host systems and begin gathering implementation and user feedback from.

I'm legit very excited about this! — But this seems like it has a real shot at improving the embedded development experience. Virtual platform layering, local platform emulation, standard APIs, etc. etc. I'm into it!

yosh, 1 year ago to random

The future of Rust at Microsoft is very exciting! From the Azure blog:

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-azure-security-evolution-embrace-secure-multitenancy-confidential-compute-and-rust/

yosh, 9 months ago to random

It is such a scam that companies pay you wages after the fact, while rentiers seek rent beforehand.

Wages should either be paid upfront, or rent should only be payable after services provided. The current state of things puts workers at a huge disadvantage.

yosh, 2 months ago to random

Want to work with me at Microsoft? One of the teams I work closely with is hiring a senior software engineer to among other things work on Hypervisor tech for use with WASI. Work is primarily in Rust. Job is remote friendly.

More details here: https://x.com/davidjustice/status/1770157442581528716

Direct link to the job page: https://jobs.careers.microsoft.com/global/en/job/1687215/Senior-Software-Engineer

yosh, 16 days ago to random

Yesssssss!!!! It’s now possible to write VS Code extensions using WASI 0.2 and Wasm Components!

https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2024/05/08/wasm

It doesn’t yet eliminate the need for TypeScript in extensions, but it certainly provides a more compelling experience than managing sub-processes and bespoke RPC calls - as is common in extensions using languages other than JS/TS.

yosh, 6 months ago to random

Oh wait, we get to talk about Hyperlight in public now?

Hyperlight is a Hypervisor by Microsoft which is specifically designed with WebAssembly in mind. Booting VMs takes microseconds (boots 2000 VMs in 1.7s). Uses minimal memory (2000 VMs use 3.1GB of memory). And has response times on par with regular processes.

Imo it’s one of the coolest pieces of infrastructure being worked on in Azure. Mark Russinovich (Azure CTO) shows it in action here:

https://youtu.be/Tz2SOjKZwVA?si=UFMwZvCSiqe3J1FH

yosh, 2 months ago to random

I’m out here writing async runtimes again like it’s 2019 — very pleased that I somehow still got it, hehe