weekly-videos-2026-11

Bryan Cantrill, CTO of Oxide Computer, spent the 1990s and 2000s writing operating-system kernel code in C, mostly at Sun, while the rest of the industry built languages to make developers’ lives easier. In this Rust NYC talk he argues that much of that era’s convenience was an unacknowledged trade: easier for the developer, harder for whoever ran the software in production. Rust reversed the trade. The second half applies the same lens to LLMs, which he thinks are excellent at Rust for the same reasons, and dangerous for a reason most people haven’t named....

When Go was announced in 2009, many programmers read “concurrent language” as “parallel language”, ran their programs on more cores, watched them get slower and decided Go was broken. Rob Pike gave this 31-minute talk at Heroku’s Waza conference in January 2012 to correct the mistake. He thought the problem was the programmers’ mental model, not the language. The talk is a classic because its central distinction still gets confused in code reviews, and because the explanation is a cartoon about gophers burning manuals that’s hard to forget....

People usually treat cost and quality as a trade-off: pay for a bigger model or more thinking, or save money and accept worse answers. Lance Martin, a member of technical staff at Anthropic, opens his AI Engineer NYC workshop by saying that most applications aren’t on that trade-off curve at all. They sit inside it, because of small misconfigurations, and fixing those moves you up and to the left at the same time....