Low-level Concurrency in Practice. This practical book helps Rust programmers of all levels gain a clear understanding of low-level concurrency. You’ll learn everything about atomics and memory ordering and how they’re combined with basic operating system APIs to build common primitives like mutexes and condition variables. Once you’re done, you’ll have a firm grasp of how Rust’s memory model, the processor, and the role of the operating system all fit together.

via: https://folk.computer/newsletters/2025-08

Users often struggle with cloud file-sharing applications. Problems appear to arise not only from interface flaws, but also from misunderstanding the underlying semantics of operations like linking, attaching, downloading, and editing. We argue that these difficulties echo long-standing challenges in understanding concepts in programming languages like aliasing, copying, and mutation.

via: https://blog.brownplt.org/2025/08/25/cloud-sharing.html

via: https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2025/07/real-life-is-uncertain-consensus-should.html

In this reference guide, we provide basic definitions, intuitive explanations, and theoretical underpinnings of various consistency models for engineers and academics alike.

via: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9cM8f_qSLQ

In every team and organization important decisions need to be made related to goals, strategy, and allocation of resources. When decisions are announced people make evaluations of the fairness of the decision based on two aspects. First, the outcome of the decision (distributive justice) and second, the process by which the decision was made (procedural justice).

The framework of distributive and procedural justice, apparently due to Tom R. Tyler, seems to be quite useful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_R._Tyler

PDF version: https://bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/sites.mit.edu/dist/3/652/files/2020/06/Sharing-Difficult-Decisions-.pdf

Scientists and engineers use diagrams of networks in many different ways. Together with many collaborators I am studying networks with the tools of modern mathematics, such as category theory. You can read blog articles, papers and a book about our research. I am collaborating with the Topos Institute to use the resulting math for scientific computation, such as quickly adaptable models of infectious disease.

Collection of notes on the intersection of networks and categories by one of the contemporary GOATs of category theory.

Whether your app is local-first or more traditional, collaborative text editing is a tricky problem that requires advanced algorithms. Or does it? In this talk, I will describe a simple approach to collaborative text editing based on intuitive “insert after” operations. By using these operations in a general-purpose collaborative architecture (server reconciliation), you can implement text editing without CRDTs or OT. I will also discuss nuanced conflict resolution and decentralized variants.

Text version: https://mattweidner.com/2025/05/21/text-without-crdts.html

via: https://www.localfirst.fm/14

Soon, we’ll feed requirements to AI and get working software without writing code. But when cars replaced horses, the horses never had to debug the cars.

Building open-source alternatives to proprietary tools often requires breaking certain assumptions that we hold about how tools ought to be built. It is not enough to make your open-source tools self-hostable, but make them scalable enough so you can offer them yourself for free.

Yoel is joined by a mysterious pseudonymous duo called Slime Mold Time Mold, who are proposing a new paradigm for psychology based on principles from cybernetics. This means thinking of the behavior as the result of “governors” (think drives) that are trying to reduce the distance between a set point and the state of the world by motivating you to do stuff. So when you are thirsty, you are highly motivated to drink, and when you need to pee, you are highly motivated to find a toilet. Those are simple examples, but can we use the same principles to explain more complex phenomena like emotion, motivation, personality, mental illness, and more? That is what my guests on this episode are proposing.

A computer can never be held accountable

Therefore a computer must never make a management decision

Adding a bit of systems rigor to the notion “why don’t you see it my way.”

Why do facts bounce off some people? It’s not about logic; it’s about structure. Your worldview isn’t a list of opinions—it’s a living network. And right now, it’s at war.

When you are arguing with someone who is deeply embedded in a different belief graph, you’re not just trying to change one opinion. You’re engaging with a network of ideas that is stabilized by powerful psychological mechanisms.