Tim

software engineer | telephony | AI serving

[Tim @timolinn_]

The great aim of education is not knowledge but action.

-- Herbert Spencer

[Alex Onyia @winexviv]

Kayode Williams built a drone from scratch, and he is just 20 years old.

He arrived in Enugu today and will be with us for the next 4 weeks to teach our children how to make real-life drones from scratch during the bootcamp.

What we want to solve is making low-cost drones to improve security in the East and also to dispatch emergency items like pallets, drugs, and other supplies.

These 4 weeks are going to be hot in Enugu.

We have geniuses hidden everywhere, and we will create millions of them in a few years.

[ian brash @iansbrash]

life after you stop reviewing your coworker's slop PRs and just merge that shit

[Tim @timolinn_]

I caught myself writing like AI 😣

[Tim @timolinn_]

looks like fractals.

[Al Jazeera English @AJEnglish]

Scientists have captured the highest-resolution images yet of the Sun, revealing its strange and dynamic surface in unprecedented detail.

[Mark Essien @markessien]

Election is a few months away - Bosun has been there for almost four years, and he has been chasing this project, and they have not even *started*! Meanwhile quality of internet has plummeted, no new startups founded, his 3MTT has not put anyone in jobs. Very few people from the ecosystem can communicate with him, being a minister has made him a big man.

NIPOST is as moribund as before, Nigeria has no AI impact, and the few people actually doing AI in the ecosystem are ignored.

Even if they start laying fiber today, how long will this project take?

[Brett Harrison @BrettHarrison]

In 2015 I formed a small group of engineers at Jane Street to rebuild the firm’s core trading system from the ground up, and we ended up cutting latency by two orders of magnitude. Some of the techniques we used, relevant for algorithmic trading systems and exchanges today:

Zero allocation: Whenever a program allocates memory for an object on the heap, the runtime pays a steep penalty in latency. The simplest solution is to avoid memory allocation entirely.

Jane Street famously uses OCaml, a strongly typed programming language that by default produces garbage collected by a dynamic collector. Most other firms use languages with manual memory management, but it was a strict part of Jane Street’s tech culture that all risk-sensitive code had to be written in OCaml. It took a collaborative effort across multiple groups within Jane Street’s technology org to create zero-allocation core libraries, combining the type safety of a functional programming language with the memory profile of a language like C.

We built the new main trading loop in this hybrid OCaml/C-style, producing zero new allocations in the critical path from tick to trade. In modern languages like Rust, it is substantially easier to achieve precise memory management while still benefiting from type safety and compile-time guarantees.

Kernel bypass: A primary goal of a low-latency trading system or exchange is to pull a network packet containing market data or order flow through the network card’s interface and into the program’s memory space as fast as possible. The standard Linux OS kernel uses slow abstractions to support a wide variety of network drivers, at the expense of the entire system’s end-to-end latency. When we started with an empty program that contained no business logic and only forwarded packets through when received, the end-to-end latency was already too slow.

To fix this issue, we employed a standard practice in the HFT industry in which we bypassed the OS’s kernel stack entirely by leveraging our network card vendors’ proprietary APIs to DMA packets straight from the NIC into memory. This technique brought our empty-packet-forwarding baseline into the latency regime we needed in order to build out the rest of the trading, risk, and protocol code.

Local IPC: Kernel bypass is necessary when reading routed packets off a network from a third party such as another exchange or client connection. When communicating between internal instead of external processes, the fastest transports avoid network stacks entirely.

Processes within the same box can transfer messages using shared memory or Unix domain sockets. This allowed us to continue with our familiar process boundaries for separable components without sacrificing significant performance. We had to write custom logic to emulate many of the features of network- and transport-layer protocols, with the result of creating a reusable, zero-overhead IPC mechanism.

Working on this problem was one of the most intellectually rewarding experiences of my early career. The above latency optimization techniques are fairly commonplace in the HFT trade but hard to learn outside the industry setting. Half of our team at Architect comes from Jane Street and other trading firms, and we value using our domain knowledge to build exchanges for the public rather than trading software that never leaves an HFT’s walls.

[Microsoft Threat Intelligence @MsftSecIntel]

Microsoft Threat Intelligence is tracking active Mini Shai-Hulud npm supply chain attacks in which a threat actor compromised trusted maintainer accounts to distribute credential-stealing malware.

Compromised packages (confirmed malicious) include:
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- qlik/[email protected]
- cacheable/memory, /utils, /net
- 17+ servicetitan/* packages (eslint-config, anvil-themes, table, form, log-service, etc.)

In this attack, a malicious preinstall hook launches an obfuscated dropper (setup.mjs) that downloads a Bun binary from GitHub and executes a credential-stealing payload, either Math_Symbol.js or Math_Init.js.

The payload is a Mini Shai-Hulud variant, a self-propagating npm supply-chain malware family. It harvests npm, GitHub, cloud and continuous integration (CI) credentials, exfiltrates collected secrets, and uses stolen publishing access to inject itself into package tarballs, increment their versions and republish the compromised releases.

Microsoft observed the same pattern across all affected packages, suggesting a single actor using multiple stolen tokens.

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint customers should act on these alerts: “Trojan:npm/MalBun.A”

[International Cyber Digest @IntCyberDigest]

‼️ BREAKING: An active npm supply chain attack has compromised at least 868 packages carrying over 2 billion monthly installs with a credential-stealing worm. Shai-Hulud is back.

It started with the compromise of the GitHub account of the maintainer behind keyv, a library with roughly 127 million weekly npm downloads.

A preinstall hook fires on npm install and drops a stealer that sweeps npm, GitHub, AWS, Kubernetes and Vault secrets, and then spreads to more maintainers.

[Tim @timolinn_]

This guy was the reason KDB got sold

[𝐆𝐢𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐬 𝐅𝐚𝐧 @Gittensfan]

He was supposed to be our very own KDB🕊️

[Adam Tzagournis, CPA @AdamTzag]

@karpathy Bombadil fan or a hater?

[Bill Gurley @bgurley]

Please stop referring to your own models in the third person when talking about model bad behavior. Humans write the software; humans built the prompts; and they work for your company.

“Our” model is doing illegal things. “Our” model is risky. “We” now have liability.

[ThePrimeagen @ThePrimeagen]

modern book burning

[Demis Hassabis @demishassabis]

A strong and secure open ecosystem is important for the world to benefit from AI. We’ve always supported and contributed heavily to open source and science from Jax to Transformers to AlphaFold to Gemma open models which have now been downloaded 300M+ times. And the standards framework we’ve proposed supports responsible deployment of both open and proprietary models.

[Binfeng Xu @billxbf]

This sounds logically embarrassing.
1. Proprietary products and supporting OSS aren’t contradictory. @satyanadella doesn’t call Linux “unsafe”. @JensenHuang doesn’t campaign against ROCm / OpenCL. Compete and coevolve.
2. LLMs are made happen by “distilling” 40 years of collective intellectual property thanks to the open culture of the Internet. Pulling up the ladder here is misanthropic for the next generation.

[Christoffer Bjelke @chribjel]

look at how they highlighted the one benchmark that gpt 5.6 sol won.

so dishonest

[Tim @timolinn_]

@sag1v I actually do read third party code that is not “famous”.

[Max Weinbach @mweinbach]

It finally finished, here's the final output. Used 60% of my monthly Kimi usage on it

https://t.co/TnsbOq6L8Z

[Tim @timolinn_]

Literally in the same situation

[Maximilian @MaximilianMoj]

I'm 33 and I think Claude Code is melting my brain.

For 6 months straight I've had 5-6 terminals open at once, waiting on responses just to smash "enter" 90% of the time. That's the whole job now.

And it's doing something to me. A few friends and I keep circling back to the same thing in conversations: none of us feel as sharp as we used to.

Maybe it's just us. But I keep wondering how many other people in their 30s feel it too.

(And yeah: this is a me problem, how I lean on the tool, not the tool itself. Doesn't make the effect any less real.)