Move With The Times

Hi ,

Do you know windmills? Not the modern ones that generate electricity. I'm talking about the traditional once you can see in the Netherlands (and elsewhere); the ones that were built do grind grain to flour. You'd hardly see one in use today, except maybe to attract tourists. At the beginning of the 18th century, steam-powered mills took over all the grinding work. If you'd still own an old windmill, you'd hardly make any money with it (except if you show it to tourists). Millers had to move with the times to stay in business.

The current software industry is at a similar inflection point today. But it's not the same as the change in the milling industry: Back then, it was clear that steam engines will take over. We still don't know how the production of software will change in the next years. But I'm not willing to sing the doomsayer's song. On the contrary, I'd rather ride the wave of changes than letting it swap me away. I wan to run more experiments to find out how LLMs affect software development exactly. I want to see others experimenting as well. Can we find synergies between agentic coding and human software craftsmanship, rather than just expecting that LLMs will make all human software writing skills pointless?

I wanted to write a Spotlight about this, but I have a hard rule (that I created today) that if I have no Spotlight ready on the Tuesday after the issue should have gone out, I must send the issue without it. So this time, it's a shorter issue (folks also seem to have written less last week).

Talking about moving with the times: Users of encoding/json may have to adapt their code to the new v2 engine that behaves differently in subtle ways; read more about these subtle changes in the featured article.

Quick Note

I have no category for this kind of news (yet?), so I put it here:

Jev, the decision-making model (see this spotlight article) got a brother: Inception's Mercury Decide. Also, Ollama offers four decision models for local inference. A quick recap: Decision models are so-called System One models (after Daniel Kahnemann's theory about fast and slow thinking) that make fast decisions, but only decisions; no chat, no thinking. Great for apps that need to evaluate unstructured data quickly and for cheap.

Happy coding!

–Christoph

Featured articles

Go JSON v2 Migration: What Breaks in Go 1.27

Go 1.27 uses the new encoding/json/v2 engine under the standard encoding/json package by default. Behavior on the "happy path" should not change, but error message do, as well as the behavior around handling nil slices, omitempty, duplicate names, invalid UTF-8, and more. Here is a migration primer.

Quote of the Week: Winds of Change

When the winds of change blow, some people build walls and others build windmills.

– Chinese proverb

More articles, videos, talks

Don't couple your Go code to GitHub

On the unquestionable benefits of vanity import paths. (appliedgo.net/what reads so much nicer than github.com/appliedgocode/what and survives a repo migration to GitLab or Codeberg.)

Arch-specific SIMD in Go

After the previous blog post about Go's new platform- and size-agnostic SIMD interface, this post looks one level deeper: The archsimd package is the architecture the SIMD abstraction layer is built upon. Where developers would have to write assembly previously, in order to match a specific target architecture's SIMD instruction set, they now can enjoy a uniform interface with sensible names and zero-cost type conversions.

Projects

Tools and applications

cmd/cgo: add cgo without a C toolchain as a GOEXPERIMENT · Issue #81662 · golang/go

This has been a PITA for many: Once Go interfaces with C code, even if only accesses existing, precompiled C libraries, a C toolchain must be present.

Proposal #81450 suggests to remove that dependency if there is no C code to compile. Now, a new GOEXPERIMENT (#81662) has been set up to start implementing the proposed functionality iteratively.

AWS at home: Spinifex is an open source "clone" of AWS services (such as EC2, EBS, S3, EKS, and ECS) that you can run wherever you want (sufficient hardware implied).

Completely unrelated to Go

Writing Something Real in OctoGo: A PDP-11/40 That Boots Unix V6

Cznic, maker of modernc/sqlite and other Go goodies, created a Go-like language, OctoGo, running on a Propeller-2 microcontroller. To test its real-world capabilities, cznic created a PDP-11/40 emulator, together with Claude.

Part 2.

Superpersuasion will look like bribery

Do you think an LLM could talk you into taking a legally or morally questionable action? No? What if the LLM bribes you instead? How large would the bribery have to be so you would accept the deal?

AI security must cover entirely new areas that classic IT security never had to deal with...

Self-hosted HTTP tunnels with SSH and nginx

Who didn't have this situation once or twice: You want to demo a service or web app to someone but it only listens to connections from localhost. Luckily, it only requires OpenSSH and nginx to set up an HTTP tunnel so that your local server becomes reachable from the internet. (I reckon this could as well be done with Caddy instead of nginx, to get a more Go-ish setup.)