Good read about cancellations in Async Rust https://sunshowers.io/posts/cancelling-async-rust/

This blogpost covers a lot of the problems in this space very well. I like how it emphasizes definitions and semantics, shows examples of bugs they came across to, and list some practical recommendations.

The "double-edge sword" of cancellation in Rust is spot on: on one hand, it's cool how "easy" and simple it is to cancel future in Rust -- you *drop* it. Especially given how non-trivial it can be in synchronous environments.

However, this also means it's far too easy to *silently* drop a future. This is scary on its own, and combined with the fact that cancellation of parent futures propagates down to child futures (because of the single ownership model) makes it much more concerning.

This post also links another (much older, Feb 2024) blogpost that covers this space well, elaborating on async clean-up problems and mentions linear types as a solution https://without.boats/blog/asynchronous-clean-up/

A lot of vendors and open-source projects are dealing with a pretty serious problem lately: a flood of AI-generated “bug reports”. These reports are, put politely, confident garbage.

It reminds me of the prize offered for solving Fermat's Last Theorem and the experience the Wolfskehl committee had. Quoting Wikipedia:

“Prior to Wiles's proof, thousands of incorrect proofs were submitted to the Wolfskehl committee, amounting to roughly 10 feet (3.0 meters) of correspondence. In the first year alone (1907–1908), 621 attempted proofs were submitted, although by the 1970s, the rate of submission had decreased to roughly 3–4 attempted proofs per month. According to some claims, Edmund Landau tended to use a special preprinted form for such proofs, where the location of the first mistake was left blank to be filled by one of his graduate students”

The real problem now is that a lot of these AI-written so called “bug reports” sound just plausible enough that you can’t automatically dismiss them. So, instead of building trust between the external community and engineering teams, companies end up wasting expensive resources reviewing mountains of garbage.

Cool, apparently, I have been cited by CISA: https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/2023-12/The-Case-for-Memory-Safe-Roadmaps-508c.pdf

But seriously, I’m happy to see more folks mention Firebloom. Firebloom is amazing. It was super fun reversing it and revealing how powerful and life-changing it is. Definitely the right kind of mitigations. Remember, folks: always target 1st order primitives (or a stage as close to the 1st order as possible :P)

“Assessing Game Balance with AlphaZero: Exploring Alternative Rule Sets in Chess" - very interesting work.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.04374