Andrew Lilley Brinker
LightNews LightNews
banner
alilleybrinker.com
Andrew Lilley Brinker
@alilleybrinker.com
1.6K followers 300 following 5.2K posts
A MAZE OF TWISTY LITTLE THREADS, ALL ALIKE

Writing on alilleybrinker.com and elsewhere.

Principal Engineer doing CVE and OSS security at MITRE. Opinions are my own.
Posts Replies Media Videos
Pinned
alilleybrinker.com
Andrew Lilley Brinker @alilleybrinker.com · Nov 10
"Memory Safety for Skeptics," where I argue why memory safety is worthwhile to pursue amid competing priorities!

queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

#rustlang
Memory Safety for Skeptics - ACM Queue
queue.acm.org
alilleybrinker.com
New from me: "Passkey PRFs and the Passkey Loss Blast Radius"

Passkeys are great, but tying encryption to a passkey increases the blast radius when they're lost!
Passkey PRFs and the Passkey Loss Blast Radius — Andrew Lilley Brinker
I work on software security at MITRE, including serving as amember of the OmniBOR Working Group, where I lead development of the Rustimplementation, and as the project manager for Hipcheck, a tool for...
www.alilleybrinker.com
January 14, 2026 at 6:00 PM
alilleybrinker.com
Hopefully this starts the process of other crates migrating their public time APIs to jiff instead of chrono
fasterthanli.me amos @fasterthanli.me · 1h
ah!

PSA: chrono is soft-retired
January 14, 2026 at 5:35 PM
alilleybrinker.com
There are decent reasons to argue against LLMs, but arguing they don't work isn't credible.
alilleybrinker.com Andrew Lilley Brinker @alilleybrinker.com · 23h
The "AI literally never works" position is IMO akin to a flat earth position at this point
January 13, 2026 at 7:20 PM
alilleybrinker.com
Average Pomeranian weight is between 3 and 7 pounds. What threat is a Pom to *any* cop?
gabrielmalor.bsky.social Gabriel Malor @gabrielmalor.bsky.social · 1d
8th Cir.: because officer was trying to shoot a 9-pound Pomeranian mix when he missed and shot the dog's owner instead, he did not intend to restrain owner, he intended to restrain the dog, which means there was no seizure so no 4A violation.

QI for officer.

ecf.ca8.uscourts.gov/opndir/26/01...
The undisputed facts in this case all point to the absence of a seizure. See UnitedHealth Grp. Inc. v. Wilmington Tr. Co., 548 F.3d 1124, 1127–28 (8th Cir. 2008) (reviewing de novo the “purely legal questions” left by the “undisputed” facts). Perhaps the most important one is that, as Hight concedes, “Deputy Williams fired his county[-]issued service weapon at [the] Pomeranian.” His words matched his actions, given that each of his statements was about getting the dogs under control, including ordering them to “get back!” And finally, the bodycam video shows that he fired downward toward the dog as it approached, which supports the conclusion that it was his target, not Hight. Hitting her was an unfortunate accident. See Brower v. County of Inyo, 489 U.S. 593, 596 (1989) (explaining that the Fourth Amendment does not address “the accidental effects of . . . government conduct”).
January 13, 2026 at 7:12 PM
alilleybrinker.com
Anyone here know any relevant RFCs, Pre-RFCs, internals.rlo threads, or anything else?
robp.bsky.social Rob Patro @robp.bsky.social · 2d
Here's a rust question for folks out there in the community. Why not have an annotation for macros that signifies that they should be evaluated after constants/generics are placed rather than before? This would let macros fill a big gap that const generics are currently missing.
January 12, 2026 at 3:14 PM
alilleybrinker.com
To me this is a “don’t be a jerk to your coworkers” rule, but I guess some are reading it as a ban on criticizing LLMs, which I don’t think is a defensible reading.
January 11, 2026 at 11:02 PM
alilleybrinker.com
Bad weekend for snarling cat logo NFL teams
January 11, 2026 at 9:14 PM
Reposted by Andrew Lilley Brinker
alilleybrinker.com
The Posters Dilemma: shitpost or discourse?
January 10, 2026 at 6:29 PM
Reposted by Andrew Lilley Brinker
eikopf.com
the wise man bowed his head and spoke: "theres actually zero difference between mechahitler and claude code. you imbecile. you fucking moron"
January 10, 2026 at 6:22 PM
alilleybrinker.com
This reasoning is of course exactly backward. Harassers require people to harass, and if the targets of their abuse left en masse they’d likely fall further to infighting as they look for new targets among the remaining users.
brendelbored.bsky.social Brendel @brendelbored.bsky.social · 4d
I mean it’s gonna be really hard to top this one
Despite everything, I'm resisting the urge to log off X. Not because I endorse anything Musk has done, but because I refuse to let the predators win. If every woman deletes her account, what are we left with? A degenerate echo chamber where perverts and paedophiles are welcome, provided they pay an entry fee? That helps no one. In fact, I suspect that the more of us leave, the more this kind of behaviour will escalate.
January 10, 2026 at 5:56 PM
Reposted by Andrew Lilley Brinker
lopatto.bsky.social
I sat in a fucking court room and heard Apple imply that a naked cartoon banana was somehow inappropriate but somehow Grok non consensually undressing women and children is ok?? www.theverge.com/policy/85990...
Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai are cowards
Once you’ve traded your principles for proximity to power, do you even run your own company?
www.theverge.com
January 9, 2026 at 9:30 PM
Reposted by Andrew Lilley Brinker
sunshowers.io
the stated goal the revealed behavior
diff showing an update to README.md: "The intention of this list is to raise awareness of this technology's usage in popular software, as well as give people informed alternatives that they can reach for when they want to make decisions for themselves. This is not a list created so you can go and give these projects trouble for their decision. If you want to file a complaint about it with them, we consider that acceptable but ask that it be done respectfully and constructively." "This is what LLM boosters sound like when you tell me that 'calling attention to their usage is not going to change their minds' btw / Just admit you weren't gonna change your mind anyway / You've had years of conversation and need to do so / I don't care" Below is a four-panel political cartoon by Matt Bors (The Nib). It depicts a woman with brown hair holding a phone and a man in a red MAGA cap. Panel 1: Woman says "My GAWD these Trump people are racist." Man responds "That attitude is what's PUSHING me to be racist!" Panel 2: Woman: "Say what?" Man: "Might as well! You say I'm a Nazi so, fine, I'll be a Nazi if that makes you happy." Panel 3: Woman: "It... doesn't." Man, now wearing a Nazi uniform with armband: "I bought this Waffen SS uniform for Halloween. You'll cry 'offensive' so maybe I'll just wear it every day." Panel 4: Woman, holding a tattoo gun with a pained expression: "I just hate to do this." Man, getting a swastika tattooed on his arm: "Bzzzzzzzz... I feel bullied, really."
January 9, 2026 at 7:49 PM
alilleybrinker.com
I love how messy and weird real-world compilers can be.
January 9, 2026 at 7:53 PM
alilleybrinker.com
"[T]hat one time" is important re: the slopware list.

Projects qualify for inclusion on the list for *any* identified use of an LLM on an OSS project by *any* contributor, or *any* use of an AGENTS or similar file for LLMs. That's an absurd degree of purity testing!
elizas.website eliza🌻 @elizas.website · 4d
i am currently paying @there.is.no.aarch64.mov $0/month for the rights to use yaxpeax in my hobby operating system. if i stopped doing that and linked with libopcodes, i would still be paying ixi $0/month. this creates real economic pressure encouraging ixi to stop using Claude that one time.
January 9, 2026 at 7:14 PM
alilleybrinker.com
Not for nothing, it can also be hard to process commands being screamed at you. 🧵 1/5
mckay4senate.bsky.social Bill McKay @mckay4senate.bsky.social · 4d
They tell you conflicting things so they can say you’re not listening to them and kill you either way.
adamkinzinger.substack.com Adam Kinzinger @adamkinzinger.substack.com · 5d
Officer 1: “Get out of the car!”
<simultaneously>
Officer 2: “Get out of here!”

The confusion is not surprising. The shooting officer had his phone out too.

This deserves a clear and fair investigation
January 9, 2026 at 7:00 PM
alilleybrinker.com
Eliza's thread is good, and balances personal anxiety with clear-headed realism about the future.
elizas.website eliza🌻 @elizas.website · 5d
i wish i could go back in time and uninvent the transformer architecture, and the prevalence of LLMs has had me actively wondering when it will be time to manage my keys, but even i agree that zkat’s callout list stuff is in bad taste and just makes them look like an ass
myrrlyn.net speed limit respecter @myrrlyn.net · 5d
oh it is undeniably a little bit “and yet you still use a computer” yeah. i firmly do not have the finesse of language to avoid that here and i am frustrated that my own antagonism to genai usage is, i feel, undermined by a tin shield my purported ally is holding
January 9, 2026 at 6:25 PM
alilleybrinker.com
I know it's in vogue to hate on GitHub's AI features, but the Copilot-suggested commit messages in the web commit UI are pretty good!
January 9, 2026 at 5:47 PM
Reposted by Andrew Lilley Brinker
goose.art
wtf how did i not know you can access an RSS feed from any bsky profile just by adding /rss to their url

check this out https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:hsqwcidfez66lwm3gxhfv5in/rss
bsky.app
January 9, 2026 at 2:02 AM
Reposted by Andrew Lilley Brinker
sjshancoxli.liberalcurrents.com
"I couldn't sit at home any more. I had to face the enemy eye to eye."
democrats.org Democrats @democrats.org · 5d
This veteran is speaking up for his community after ICE shot and killed Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis yesterday.
January 8, 2026 at 11:10 PM
Reposted by Andrew Lilley Brinker
kattenbarge.bsky.social
Previously, several of these companies, like Apple, IBM, and Disney, have paused advertising on X in response to antisemitic content. But antisemitism on X never slowed, sexual abuse imagery increased, and all of these companies quietly resumed advertising anyways.
spitfirenews.com/p/grok-deepf...
Why isn't there a bigger Grok boycott?
Advertisers, politicians, and investors are still all-in on X, despite a sexual abuse crisis.
spitfirenews.com
January 8, 2026 at 9:09 PM
Reposted by Andrew Lilley Brinker
polotek.bsky.social
And that's when it clicked for me. Why Black people are so consistent even though we are also deeply disappointed by Democrats. Because we know what the other option is. We know how bad it can get. We're able to do an actual comparison of the options. While many other people are just guessing.
March 4, 2025 at 8:54 PM
Reposted by Andrew Lilley Brinker
bwb.dev
We're actively looking to grow our team at @ersc.io again! If you are interested or know someone who might be, I'd love to chat.

We are looking for distributed storage folk as well as frontend/UX.
January 8, 2026 at 10:25 PM
alilleybrinker.com
Most things worth doing take too much time to be possible to time "correctly" anyway.
January 8, 2026 at 9:34 PM
alilleybrinker.com
Gonna get mileage out of this screenshot.
alilleybrinker.com Andrew Lilley Brinker @alilleybrinker.com · 5d
I wrote this about memory safety, but it applies here too.
Segment of "Memory Safety for Skeptics," written by me and published in the ACM Queue. It reads as follows: "Get good" is not a strategy There is a common reply in conversations about memory safety, coming from the most hardcore skeptics: Programmers should just write better code. They argue, explicitly or implicitly, that programmers who benefit from the guardrails of memory safety are bad programmers, and that real programmers are sufficiently skilled that they do not need a machine double-checking their work. Let's be clear: This is anti-intellectual nonsense—macho self-aggrandizement masquerading as a serious technical argument. You should not take it seriously and should consider someone advancing this argument as fundamentally unserious and to be ignored. There is no step function in quality of work in the history of human achievement that happened because people one day woke up and decided to be better at their jobs. Improvements in productivity or quality or reductions in error and harm happen because of the invention of new techniques, processes, and tools.
January 8, 2026 at 9:22 PM
Reposted by Andrew Lilley Brinker
steveklabnik.com
#jj-vcs 0.37.0 came out yesterday! im intrigued by the new divergent change syntax, seems very neat

github.com/jj-vcs/jj/re...
Release v0.37.0 · jj-vcs/jj
About jj is a Git-compatible version control system that is both simple and powerful. See the installation instructions to get started. Release highlights A new syntax for referring to hidden and...
github.com
January 8, 2026 at 7:42 PM