venkat

Engineer, Alum of @UBuffalo

[venkat @venk8krish]

@rakyll Sorry to hear. I hope for a swift and successful recovery. Take care ❤️

[venkat @venk8krish]

@jnagal Welcome back!

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

I've never felt this much behind as a programmer. The profession is being dramatically refactored as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse and between. I have a sense that I could be 10X more powerful if I just properly string together what has become available over the last ~year and a failure to claim the boost feels decidedly like skill issue. There's a new programmable layer of abstraction to master (in addition to the usual layers below) involving agents, subagents, their prompts, contexts, memory, modes, permissions, tools, plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP, slash commands, workflows, IDE integrations, and a need to build an all-encompassing mental model for strengths and pitfalls of fundamentally stochastic, fallible, unintelligible and changing entities suddenly intermingled with what used to be good old fashioned engineering. Clearly some powerful alien tool was handed around except it comes with no manual and everyone has to figure out how to hold it and operate it, while the resulting magnitude 9 earthquake is rocking the profession. Roll up your sleeves to not fall behind.

[Murat Demirbas (Distributolog) @muratdemirbas]

[new blog post]

Optimize for momentum

https://t.co/YkOMB1m1Kb

[venkat @venk8krish]

@rakyll What agents do you use? Any preferences there?
Can you describe your agent setup? :)

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

Agency > Intelligence

I had this intuitively wrong for decades, I think due to a pervasive cultural veneration of intelligence, various entertainment/media, obsession with IQ etc. Agency is significantly more powerful and significantly more scarce. Are you hiring for agency? Are we educating for agency? Are you acting as if you had 10X agency?

Grok explanation is ~close:

“Agency, as a personality trait, refers to an individual's capacity to take initiative, make decisions, and exert control over their actions and environment. It’s about being proactive rather than reactive—someone with high agency doesn’t just let life happen to them; they shape it. Think of it as a blend of self-efficacy, determination, and a sense of ownership over one’s path.

People with strong agency tend to set goals and pursue them with confidence, even in the face of obstacles. They’re the type to say, “I’ll figure it out,” and then actually do it. On the flip side, someone low in agency might feel more like a passenger in their own life, waiting for external forces—like luck, other people, or circumstances—to dictate what happens next.

It’s not quite the same as assertiveness or ambition, though it can overlap. Agency is quieter, more internal—it’s the belief that you *can* act, paired with the will to follow through. Psychologists often tie it to concepts like locus of control: high-agency folks lean toward an internal locus, feeling they steer their fate, while low-agency folks might lean external, seeing life as something that happens *to* them.”

[Sam Lambert @samlambert]

most people mess up bechmarking because they fail to generate the right type of load. they are often just measuring how contended some benchmarking tool is.

[Richard Artoul @richardartoul]

This is a great summary of the history of Go’s garbage collector, and a small glimpse into why Go became so prevalent in the distributed systems space so quickly

[venkat @venk8krish]

@MarcJBrooker Thanks for sharing! It’s really fascinating how adding just a few extra nodes causes an exponential decay of system unavailability, and then the plateus.

N(1) - 5261
N(2) - 57.8
N(3) - 5.78
N(4) - 5.26
N(5) - 5.25

Intutively, I was expecting a a linear decline :)

[Abhinav Upadhyay @abhi9u]

I revisited this article recently. The number of things I learned while writing it, and from the discussion on HN was mind blowing. Can't believe it's already been 1.5 years since it was published.

[Vivek Galatage @vivekgalatage]

Check out https://t.co/7aFQgcEzKD - it's a fun learning experience!

[Protty @kingprotty]

Blog: Intuiting TLS

The thought process of starting with "I want to talk privately on the internet" & ending up on something that looks like TLS.

https://t.co/sk7YtUkQJH

[Quanta Magazine @QuantaMagazine]

Hash tables are among the most thoroughly studied data structures in all of computer science. A recent advance in their efficiency initially sounded too good to be true.
https://t.co/Zn7PZ7ZFSM

[Murat Demirbas (Distributolog) @muratdemirbas]

I recommend this very straightforward book about writing.

It is mostly about the mechanics of writing. Its main message is simple: Schedule time for writing on your weekly calendar, and at those times sit down to write.

https://t.co/VCqO3HBZ75

[Juncheng Yang @1a1a11a]

I am taking students in Fall 2025, if you are interested in storage systems, databases, and machine learning systems, please apply to the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Harvard University. https://t.co/EokeqCCcDb

[NucNet Nuclear News @NucNetNews]

🇮🇳 India’s Rajasthan-7 PHWR #Nuclear Plant Achieves First Criticality With Commercial Operation Expected This Year. #nuclearpower #nuclearenergy

Unit is third in planned series of 16 indigenous plants

https://t.co/976M6Is9bh

[Jaana Dogan ヤナ ドガン @rakyll]

Today in a meeting, I said my brain probably got smaller because of Go but it's a good thing. I don't deal with indirection, over-abstraction, circular dependencies, syntactic sugar magic, you name it...

[Isovalent @isovalent]

@lizrice & John Fastabend explore how it's possible to implement Conway's Game of Life in eBPF in this new blog post!
🗞️ https://t.co/BEMnenhq67

[Jose Fernandez @jrfernandez]

🐝 Using #eBPF to detect noisy neighbors at Netflix!

Our latest blog post explains how we leverage eBPF to continuously instrument the Linux scheduler, which helps us detect CPU contention in multitenant environments.

https://t.co/wEzWyHqUt3

[venkat @venk8krish]

@SwiftOnSecurity Stackoverflow