Shellsharks Blogroll - BlogFlock

Do you use :visited on links? - Kev Quirk

2026-09-21T09:27:00.000Z

I've always made the :visited attribute for hyperlinks look the same as links that haven't been visited, and it seems that it's the default behaviour across the web. I've never really given it much thought, until I actually used :visited in anger.

My feed reader of choice, Miniflux uses the :visited attribute properly, making visited links purple. When reading posts from the hundreds of blogs I follow via RSS, I find it really useful to see if I've already visited a link within a post.

So with that in mind, I've decided to change the CSS on this site slightly, and visited links are now purple. It's subtle, but obvious enough, I think:

If you want to do something like this yourself, the CSS is very simple:

a {
    color: #3995F7;
}

a:visited {
    color: #8839F7;
}

Do you use the :visited attribute on your blog? I feel like I don't see it used very often around the web.

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I forgot webrings exist - Joel's Log Files

2026-09-20T19:25:58.000Z

I don’t usually check analytics on my website, but the hosting I use on Vercel does provide the ability to check referrals, and I have to admit, every once in a while I enjoy to see those!

It’s not because I am obsessed with people who visit my website (although I kind of am), or because I want to write according to what my readers view the most (although I sometimes do that too). I simply love to see when someone links to a post of mine for the first time, and I see their website on my referrals showing up. A lot of the time it’s only four or five clicks from X or Y small website.

Since I only get the referral, an investigation is sure to follow! I love to explore blogs, digital gardens, and personal websites in any form. Checking their blogrolls, reading through their guestbooks, skimming through posts to see where we may share interests or hobbies.

However, every once in a while I’d find a website that would have no mention of me whatsoever anywhere in the page, and I wasn’t sure how they ended up linking back to me, you know? I had to go even deeper. Maybe using things like FreshRSS’s user queries, websites like Backlink Watch or cool search engines like Marginalia, which has lots of neat information about sites on its index.

But no, even then I couldn’t see where some of those clicks were coming from, and I kind of left it there, it doesn’t matter that much after all. You see where this is going right?

Last year I wrote a pretty extensive list of every blogroll, webring and site that links to me, but well, I always enjoy belonging to more of them, I guess.

Today I wanted to get setup on The Worst Webring, and I edited my footer to add the corresponding URLs for Next, Previous and Random. Typical webring stuff.

I decided I would check if all the other webrings were still working (one of them, the previous link on Geekring, currently does not, by the way), so I clicked on all of the previous and next links, and that’s where it finally hit me.

The reason I was getting referrals from websites that didn’t have any links to me, was because those websites were my neighbours in the webrings I’m on!

So any people clicking around the webrings and ending up visiting my website, come from my neighbors, who don’t really link to my site, but I happen to be the next/previous site on the ring for them!

I didn’t forget webrings exist, I simply forgot how they work, by helping people build connections!

So, that kind of puts me in an awkward position, how come I have never checked up on my neighbors before?

Umm, hi :3

This is day 40 of #100DaysToOffload

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Book Review: How to Build a Space Station by Jonathan Morrison ★★★⯪☆ - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-09-20T11:34:30.000Z

This book, by The Times' former Architecture Correspondent, stands in direct opposition to A City on Mars. Whereas that book presented a (perhaps too) sceptical look at the realities of living on other planets, Jonathan Morrison's book goes (perhaps too far) in the opposite direction.

How to Build a Space Station is a beautiful examination of just how important architecture will be to our colonisation of other worlds. Not just in terms of physical safety - but psychological safety as well. It is a direct and forceful rebuttal to those who say it cannot be done.

It is, in my opinion, just a touch too credulous about some of the ludicrous claims from the hype merchants. I want to believe that Martian igloos can be conjured out of the ice and that Musk's rockets will deliver a steady stream of supplies to distant worlds. But the evidence presented is rather thin. The book works best when it focuses on what architecture can bring to the table when it comes to designing the future.

In short, a spacecraft is not just a machine; it is also a home, an office, a refuge. If people are asked to go to the most remote environments, to live in spaces scarcely larger than a few rooms, and to perform work of immense complexity and risk, then comfort, efficiency and ergonomics are not just luxuries.

Space has to be worth living in. Putting people into a tin-can with no windows, blank walls, and an infernal background hum will drive them mad. All this is backed up with extensive descriptions of the engineering challenges of polar research bases, spaceports, and previous craft.

Despite being rightly scathing about Wernher von Braun's involvement in atrocities and his eventual political rehabilitation - he is somewhat more muted in his criticism of Messrs Musk & Bezos. There's a lot of praise for celebrity architects and designers - without any real examination of whether their designs are practical rather than just award fodder.

Similarly, the book takes on trust that autonomous robots can ingest extraterrestrial soil, process it, and 3D print structures from it all while in a hostile environment. The fact that we don't have swarms of drones prefabbing houses in the relatively benign atmosphere of our planet should be evidence that maybe these claims aren't quite matched with reality.

Finally, the "why?" question. A City on Mars points out that the cost of mining gold from asteroids would be more profitably spent improving mining technology here on Earth. How to Build a Space Station takes a different approach; it'll improve things here:

Space architecture is not just escapism, a thrilling sci-fi fantasy – it is a forge for creating the tools we need at home. These include but are not limited to circular systems, low-energy fabrication, modular construction and buildings that take psychology seriously.

I have a lot of sympathy for that. Except… the Internation Space Station has shown us how to endlessly recycle water relatively cheaply. Yet every modern building on Earth pays only lip-service to reusing grey-water. 3D printing is amazing, but the number of structures built using autonomous robots extruding concrete is approximately zero.

We have the technology - but we don't seem to be interested in using it.

The book is mostly well illustrated - with some gorgeous drawings of actual craft and possible future inventions. Sadly no photos, maps, or anything to help illuminate some of the other challenges faced by living and working in space.

This book is endlessly fascinating and bang up to date, with lots of talk of events that happened in 2025. The way it brings together the sciences of engineering and psychology is marvellous. But, as much as I'd like to believe in a Martian habitat built by robot trebuchets flinging microwave sintered tetrapods into each other, I just don't find it convincing.

I really hope I'm wrong.

Many thanks to Netgalley for the review copy - the book is available to buy now.

Headless Plexamp Receiver - Hey, it's Jason!

2026-09-20T00:00:00.000Z

Let's put together a small headless Plexamp audio destination device!

2026-09-19 22:28: Watched Forrest Gump for the first time in 20 odd years this evening. Watching it... - Kev Quirk

2026-09-19T21:28:00.000Z

Watched Forrest Gump for the first time in 20 odd years this evening. Watching it again with an adult brain...Jenny is a real bitch!

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Amelia the Chicken - Kev Quirk

2026-09-19T08:09:00.000Z

We lost our favourite chicken last night. I know, just a chicken, right? Big deal. It's not like we lost a pet.

But that's the thing, Amelia was more than just a chicken. She was a pet. She was very tame and would often come into the house to sit with one of us.

She would scratch around the kitchen while we were eating breakfast then quietly cluck at one of us to be picked up for cuddle.

We named her after Amelia Earhart because she was always the first of all our chickens to go exploring. Right from the moment we got our first 6 chickens, Amelia came up to us while the others hid. Often posing for photos.

Amelia on day 1, posing for a photo

It's very sad when you lose a pet, and although this won't hit us as hard as when we inevitably lose one of our dogs, it's still really sad. Both my wife and I have shed a few tears for Amelia this morning.

We'll miss you, girl. x

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A day is short, a life is long - Kev Quirk

2026-09-18T20:30:00.000Z

A day is short, a life is long

by Kevin Wammer

Kevin talks about some of the stuff he's figured out in his life now that he's turned 35.

Read post ➡

Really enjoyed this post because it's honest, level headed, and real. Since stepping down in work myself, I too have realised that good enough is...good enough.

Funny, huh?

Kevin talks about a lot more than just his career, but I won't ruin a great read for you. Go check it out.

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What a time to be alive - The Weblog of fLaMEd

2026-09-18T19:43:11.000Z

What’s going on, Internet? Today just seems like one of those days. It’s Friday evening and I’m standing here at my desk with a beer, messing with the blog. Placeholding some later posts that I meant to write but time got away on me. Listening to new music, playing new computer games, and watching new favourite old TV shows.

Kids are in bed, and asleep.

New golf clubs arrived. I got to have a swing at the range.

New Miley Cyrus album. I was onto something, wasn’t I? Check out Bass Persuades, and the second single Let’s Get Married.

Blizzcon was last weekend. New Warcraft III expansion, Forsaken Kingdom. Which sets the story for the new World Of Warcraft game; Forever.

New South Park, with a new intro song. Let’s hope it’s less whatshisface this year.

And don’t mind those blank posts you’ve seen pop up in the feed, I’m staging them as a encouragement for me to finish writing them.

Hey, thanks for reading this post in your feed reader! Want to chat? Reply by email or add me on XMPP, or send a webmention. Check out the posts archive on the website.

London Hardhouse Reunion 2026 - The Weblog of fLaMEd

2026-09-18T19:08:30.000Z

What’s going on, Internet? Later post. Write me.

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Open Tabs August 2026 - The Weblog of fLaMEd

2026-09-18T19:01:52.000Z

What’s going on, Internet? If you don’t folllow my Bookmarks through the feed, then here’s the bookmarks from August. Enjoy.

MOUSELING.net - Hyper Text Muck-up Language Solid tips for budding webmasters
Welcome to the web we lost Sacha Judd tracing the good internet through X-Files fandom and webrings, and it’s still out there in the corners.
How to Fix the Internet Not everything is fine on the Internet, but there’s an opportunity, and it starts with choosing what you pay attention to yourself.
How I built Timeframe, our family e-paper dashboard - Joel Hawksley Definitely keen to build one of these for our home! So cool!
Conceived in a secure military facility, this Jedi Knight fansite has been running consistently for almost 30 years: ‘It looks really close to what it did back in 1998’ | PC Gamer A community site for Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II, still active and still looking like 1998.
It’s just a website The humble website 😃
I Wonder How Many is Too Many When it Comes to Adding Pages – The Land Where Turbie Posts How many pages is too many? As many as you want 😃
owls’ guide to webshrines A sweeet practical guide for creating your own “shrines”, mini sites for any one of your interests.
Creating a Successful Fansite: A Comprehensive Guide A comprehensive guide for getting started creating your own fansite. Go build one.

For more, check out the bookmarks archive, and subscribe to the feeds if you want these as they happen.

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Beervana 2026 - The Weblog of fLaMEd

2026-09-18T18:59:28.000Z

What’s going on, Internet? Later post. Write me.

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Weeknote #2018 - Robb Knight • Posts • Atom Feed

2026-09-18T17:26:00.000Z

We've added new stickers to the St Jude fundraiser including a sparkly Jimothy. You're gunna want this one. Donate here.

We've got a new garage door going in next week which means I'll be able to actually use the space to it's full potential. I'm more excited than I should be.

Alex has been abusing ID3 chapters to make "video" podcasts by setting chapter art every few seconds. This is glorious and terrible and I love it.

I like the look of the Platinum Komono as a pen, but I am not a fan of any of the colours. Going to give this one a miss.

These mountain sticky notes are amazing but I can't justify the shipping cost. If they pop up in the UK somewhere, I'll be getting them.

Zach open-sourced his light/dark toggle component after I implemented mine. Rude.

Game UI Database is a fun resource.

Andy added an RSS feed that posts a random album from his collection every day.

My temporary PHP fix from 2014 has nearly 20M installs. Today I'm deprecating it. Fun story.

Wake up babe, new cat just dropped.

Who is my (pixel) neighbor? - Joel's Log Files

2026-09-18T15:25:00.000Z

A couple weeks ago I got an email from a guy named Oleh, mentioning that they added me to a new website/project called Pixel Area, it is a 100x100 field of pixels, each of which can link to the blog or personal website of whoever claims it first.

My spider senses tingled, because the email’s writing felt cold and distant, as if it was generated/translated by an LLM. However, the website looked legit, fun, and it was a genuinely interesting idea. Despite this, the footer featured links to a Bluesky (fine), Mastodon (good!) and… an X account (meh). I wondered if this was something I wanted to be involved, and continued my research.

I checked the Mastodon account and saw a thread with Brennan, who was questioning who was behind the site, if it was vibecoded, and if the blogs linked on it where added with permission.

You can see the short conversation there, but I also decided to reach out about it by replying to the email I got, Oleh replied back soon enough.

He seemed to me like a pretty honest guy who just doesn’t speak English very well and didn’t have a lot of experience programming websites. I am not going to quote things since I didn’t ask for permission, but Oleh confirmed it was assisted by an LLM, just like he did to Brennan, and mentioned all the work he did himself too, in the span of multiple months.

I dislike the use of AI, I (hopefully) have been very clear about it, I think it can end up as a stain on what would otherwise be an awesome thing. I believe a project which is tied to technologies that have stolen and caused harm is not in the spirit of the indieweb or my blog.

But, I also believe that a person or a project can be decent and improve for the better, despite our disagreement on that front.

After all, Bubbles, a beloved project by a lot of the blogging community has used AI, been criticized for it, and learned and improved because of it. I think that Pixel Area, which is a lot smaller in scope, can end up being a nice thing too and slowly get better. There is a human in there who did plenty of work one way or another. I also know the blogs there were picked by a person.

I noticed too, that Oleh removed the link to X from the footer, a very good sign to me. I didn’t request for that to happen, I wonder if some others did, but I appreciate it nonetheless.

Because of all of this, I decided to be OK with the project, and I even did my own pixel-art button on my footer, since the one in the website had a whole different style for my taste… Soon enough Oleh even asked me for permission to change his own design to be pixel art too, so if you now have a super cool 88x31 pixelart button, you can thank me for that ;)

At the end of the day, it is a glorified and super cool blogroll, and I honestly can’t have enough of those.

Many of the bloggers I follow were already there, some of them have already written about it.

You can check the full directory of websites and see if you were added already. You can also request to be removed.

Perhaps not all of the people I just linked above were aware of the fact some LLM assistance was used for this, and I am sorry if that has kind of ruined the enthusiasm.

I hope Oleh learns and understands the craft that goes behind coding a website by hand, and hope he can rework and revise things in the future with a new perspective, maybe the community also reaches out to help reshape and guide the website together.

A part of me still feels like a walking contradiction because of this, don’t get me wrong. Nut it’s how I feel at the moment! I like pixels what can I say?

So, back to the question in the title! Right now you can find me at the X:85, Y:10 coordinates, in the “Echo Heights” district. There are not a lot of neighbors in that area just yet, so if you want to be close to me and you are not part of Pixel Area yet, claim your pixel!

This is day 39 of #100DaysToOffload

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2026-09-18 15:33: Finally! #ClicksCommunicator - Kev Quirk

2026-09-18T14:33:00.000Z

Finally! #ClicksCommunicator

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2026-09-18 13:33: Absolutely gorgeous sky this morning. - Kev Quirk

2026-09-18T12:33:00.000Z

Absolutely gorgeous sky this morning.

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Theatre Review: The School for Wives - at Riverside Studios ★★★★★ - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-09-18T11:34:51.000Z

The Flywheel theatre company are reviving the rep tradition by having five actors perform five different plays in five weeks. Their interpretation of Molière's classic is gaudy and hilarious. Even the lighting cues are funny!

It is fair to say that School for Wives isn't exactly an uncontroversial play. The plot basically boils down to "Women! Eh? You can't live with them, you can't easily groom them from the age of four and keep them imprisoned so they become perfect submissives."

Is the fear of cuckoldry funny? Is it OK to laugh at a jealous rage which leads to controlling behaviour? Should we find joy in the emotional torment of our characters?

Yes! Yes! And yes!

The cast squeeze every last drop of humour from the script, the direction is nimble, and the play has been edited down to a more manageable 75ish minutes (plus extra time for corpsing and applause).

A simply joyous production which left us grinning throughout.

You can see all their upcoming shows - which are very reasonably priced.

Pre-Show and Post-Show

I'm a believer in making the entire visit to the theatre a special experience. Riverside Studio, Hammersmith is a great venue with generous foyer space and more than adequate toilet provision. Not a given in London theatres!

The theatre programme is digital and provided via QR code. No £6 rip off for a booklet full of adverts here.

As we walked in, the cast were dotted around the stage an in the auditorium doing various bits of business which made for a jolly start.

Post curtain call there was a lovely speech from the cast thanking us for attending and letting us know about their future projects. Nothing wrong with a piece of shameless advertising to a captive audience 😄

Overall an excellent theatrical experience.

Shotbox - Robb Knight • Posts • Atom Feed

2026-09-18T11:07:52.000Z

Since I made Doodle Scan I've had a bunch of ideas of things I can do with image manipulation — it led to me finally doing my favicon generator. The third idea, the tool trilogy if you will, was to replicate a simple version of what CleanShot does — adding a background, padding, and rounding corners to a screenshot.

I have CleanShot but sometimes I'm on my phone or a computer that doesn't have it installed. I like to think I'm pretty good at naming things but this is not one I'm particularly happy with. Regardless, ShotBox is live and does the main thing I use the CleanShot editor for — padding, coloured backgrounds, add shadow, download it as a PNG. Simple.

Auditing in the age of (good enough) AI - Trail of Bits Blog

2026-09-18T11:00:00.000Z

Security firms have published numerous blog posts describing how they pointed their agent harness at a codebase and found dozens of bugs (we’re one of them). However, these posts tend to focus on agentic code review, which is just one aspect of how we use AI in our security reviews. We want to give a different perspective: before code review even starts, agents now allow us to build custom tooling and formal models that improve the quality and depth of our reviews.

We recently reviewed the Miden VM, a new zero-knowledge VM with its own custom assembly language and almost no developer tooling. To prepare, we spent six months having our agents build an LSP server, a decompiler, a static analysis engine, and a Lean model of the VM executor from scratch. These tools found real security issues, like an unvalidated prover-supplied input that would let a malicious prover forge Falcon signatures and steal funds from Miden account holders. Additionally, the Lean work produced 95 machine-checked correctness proofs, covering a large component of the Miden core library.

Auditing the Miden zkVM

In late 2025, the Miden team came to us to have parts of their zero-knowledge VM reviewed before launch. Part of the review was scoped to cover the Miden core library, which contains a small set of cryptographic primitives written in a custom assembly language called Miden assembly (MASM). This made us genuinely excited, as it was right up our alley: a high-assurance project writing complex cryptographic code in a low-level custom assembly language that we had never seen before. At the same time, it also presented some unique challenges.

Figure 1: The left image shows a MASM procedure computing the XOR of two 128-bit values (represented as 32-bit limbs). The right image shows the same procedure implemented using 32-bit x86 assembly code.

To start, the Miden VM implements a stack-machine architecture. This means that each instruction operates on values read from the stack, and the result of the instruction is then written back to the top of the stack. While conceptually simple, this makes code written in MASM challenging to review, since instruction inputs and outputs are read from the stack and are always implicit. Additionally, since the Miden VM is a completely new architecture, very little existed in terms of developer tooling like IDE support, Language Server Protocol (LSP) servers, and linters.

We knew that we had six months to prepare for the review, since the implementation was not yet feature complete, so we asked ourselves: “What could we spend our time and tokens on to make sure that the review would root out as many bugs as possible in the codebase?”

Building all the tools!

Since MASM lacked developer tooling, we started out by asking ourselves what kind of tools we would like to have available when the project started. We typically use VS Code to review code, and syntax highlighting and code navigation are essential for readability and being able to follow data flow throughout a codebase. We needed an LSP server and a corresponding VS Code extension for this, and within a few days we had Claude build a working prototype that provided most of the functionality we wanted: features like syntax highlighting, goto definition, finding code references, and displaying procedure docstrings on hover. With these fundamental features in place, we also decided to add more language-specific features like displaying inline instruction documentation, and stack effects for individual instructions.

Figure 2: Annotating the code with inline stack effects and instruction documentation helps prevent the context switch required to look up instruction semantics elsewhere.

Having built the LSP server, we started thinking about other ways to provide high-level semantic information to support manual and agent-driven review. We thought it would be interesting to see if we could provide faithful decompilation for MASM procedures inside the VS Code UI, to help the reviewer quickly understand the high-level control flow and data flow of the procedures they were looking at. For MASM, this is a harder problem than it first appears. Stack machine lifting and decompilation is a well-studied problem, but decompiling hand-written MASM is still difficult for a number of reasons.

Most procedures in the core library do not have declared signatures, which means that the number of inputs and outputs must be inferred from context.
MASM procedures do not conform to a well-defined calling convention, and the net stack effect of such calls is generally impossible to determine statically. This means that all analysis failures propagate up the call chain.
While-loops do not need to be stack neutral, which means that the while-loop condition may occupy a different stack slot in each iteration. This also makes it impossible to map instruction inputs to stack slots for subsequent instructions.
Different branches in conditional statements may have different stack effects, which similarly makes stack tracking and signature inference challenging.

This meant that we could not expect to be able to decompile all MASM procedures if we also wanted the decompiled output to be correct. We therefore focused on decompiling a well-defined subset of MASM correctly. During the development of the decompiler, we alternated between using Claude for planning and development and Codex for code review. Whenever we had implemented a new feature, we had agents decompile a randomized set of procedures from the core library and compare the result to the original MASM to look for regressions. Any issues found were added as regression tests to be fixed by the model.

Figure 3: The eqz procedure, which tests if a 256-bit integer (represented as eight 32-bit limbs) is equal to zero, together with the corresponding decompiled pseudocode

The decompiler represented the single largest effort of the tooling development for this project, with over 100 AI-generated commits over multiple months. The main benefit of this work turned out to be the decompiler’s internal analysis frameworks and intermediate representation, which we could reuse for static analysis, rather than the full decompilation pipeline.

With the decompiler in place, we had access to an intermediate representation of each procedure, with instruction inputs and outputs populated as expressions. This allowed us to bring all the standard static analysis machinery (like data flow analysis) to bear on the problem of finding bugs in the MASM code. We used this to build a number of analysis passes over the intermediate representation, answering questions like the following:

Are prover-supplied advice values¹ like remainders and modular inverses properly validated?
Are type constraints (e.g. an input being a 32-bit integer or a boolean) enforced?
Are local variables initialized across all execution paths?

One way to explore these issues is abstract interpretation. The idea behind this technique is simple. Instead of running the program with real numbers, the analysis tracks the types of values that could be on the stack at each step, like “a 32-bit integer” or “unknown.” It walks through the code again and again until no new information is found. Since it always keeps track of every possible value (with a little extra room), it can never miss a real case. So if a check passes in the analysis, it is guaranteed to hold in every actual run of the program.

We used Claude and Codex to build a general abstract interpretation engine, and then implemented a number of concrete analysis passes on top of it, having the agents switch between development and code review as described above. We also decided to have the agents design and build command-line interfaces for both the decompiler and a new MASM linter to make the new tools available to agent-driven code-review workflows as well.

Finding all the bugs!

During the actual review, these analyses identified over 400 unique locations² where type validation could be improved (all of them reachable from the public API of the library) as well as one high-severity finding.

Figure 4: The remainder is read from the advice stack, but is not validated to ensure that it is a valid 64-bit integer.

The high-severity issue was due to an underconstrained advice value in the mod_12289 procedure, which reduces a 64-bit value modulo 12289, with a quotient and remainder provided as advice values by the prover. The quotient is checked to ensure that it is a valid 64-bit value (represented as two 32-bit limbs), but the remainder is never validated before it is passed to the 32-bit instruction u32overflowing_sub. By carefully varying the quotient and remainder to ensure they still satisfy the constraints imposed by the subtraction, we found that it was possible to have mod_12289 return a value that is not the correct remainder. A malicious prover could exploit this to forge Falcon signatures and drain any Miden account controlled by a Falcon key pair.

But what if there are no bugs?

All this work meant that we had a comprehensive set of tools to support both manual and agent-driven code review coming into the audit. However, we’d had a long time to think about other ways to support the manual review process, and we had more ideas that we wanted to test. For example, if the procedures in the core library were implemented correctly and did not contain bugs, would it be possible to prove this using a proof assistant like Lean?

It turns out that the Miden VM is very amenable to formal modeling, since the instruction set is small and most instructions are side-effect free. To formally model MASM, we started by implementing a minimal Miden VM executor in Lean, and had Claude build an automatic translator from MASM procedures to Lean. During the review, we had multiple agents working in parallel to prove correctness of as many procedures as possible across the library. Since the Lean kernel could validate that the generated proofs were correct, we only needed to manually audit the theorem statements to ensure that each theorem proved the right correctness property for the corresponding procedure. To ensure that the theorems were easy to review, we introduced Lean types for field elements and the integer types implemented in the core library. This meant that at a high level, most correctness properties could be expressed in the following form:

If the stack is given by [x₁, x₂, x₃, ..., x_n, ...] and we execute the procedure P, then P terminates and the stack is given by [P(x₁, x₂, x₃, ..., x_n), ...].

Figure 5: High-level statement of correctness for the procedure P with n arguments

Our agent-driven formal modeling efforts resulted in 95 correctness proofs that covered all of the binary arithmetic components of the core library. This work also identified two subtle bugs that the existing unit test suite did not catch. The first was an edge case in the 64-bit right-rotation rotr, which behaved incorrectly on large inputs greater than the Goldilocks prime if the rotational shift was a multiple of 32. The second was an issue in the 256-bit multiplication wrapping_mul, which dropped caller-owned values from the stack before returning.

Figure 6: Manual review identified that the correctness proof for the 64-bit rotr procedure required an additional assumption (that shift mod 32 ≠ 0) to allow the proof to go through.

Why we couldn’t have done this two years ago

The tools we developed leading up to this engagement, and the Lean libraries and proofs generated during the review, are all side projects that we wouldn’t have been able to dedicate time or resources to just one or two years ago. Projects like these are often highly exploratory in nature, and the end results and potential payoff may be difficult to predict. In practice, this means that it is hard to sell clients on them in advance. However, over the last year, agents became good enough to carry non-essential projects like these with only light supervision, which completely changed the economics of which projects are worth pursuing. Today, a failed side project only costs tokens.

With Miden, the benefits of all this preparatory work were clear. The LSP server and static analysis engine improved our manual review coverage, strengthened agent-driven reviews, and identified real security issues in the codebase that could have led to millions of dollars in lost funds. The AI-generated Lean correctness proofs also improved assurance across a large and fundamental component of the library, allowing the team to continue building on it with confidence. The team has adopted the static analysis engine developed for the review, which means that our side project will now also help secure future updates to the Miden core library.

On a personal note, this has been one of the more interesting projects I have worked on during my years at Trail of Bits. If you find this type of work interesting, or if you are building something similar, get in touch. We want to hear about it!

These are precomputed inputs that are supplied via a separate advice stack by the prover, and need to be validated carefully. ↩︎
Most of these findings were due to the fact that almost all procedures in the core library were part of the public API, which meant that third-party developers could call them without proper validation. ↩︎

Gaming in public - Joel's Log Files

2026-09-17T23:00:00.000Z

When was the last time you were standing somewhere public, took the phone out of your pocket, scrolled on some app for a while, and then left it, and moved on?

When was the last time you did that while still walking? perhaps almost crashing on someone in front of you?

Even if you haven’t done that yourself—I’m very sure you have seen some other people staring at those phone screens, even when others are present, without really thinking much about it.

It is normalized behavior. At the end of the day, one shouldn’t really care about it very much.

However, it seems like when it comes to videogame handhelds, things feel a little different…

After all, when was the last time you played on a handheld console in public, or saw someone else doing so?

It’s like something in our heads tells us that you shouldn’t be gaming when others are seeing. Is it a sense of cringe? as if it would ruin our public image? making us seem childish or immature?

Obviously things have a time and a place, but it does seem like even people who are otherwise big into gaming can get self-conscious about others knowing that’s the case.

Yesterday my family went to the supermarket. My father and I went to the clothing section. I was done putting my stuff on my cart, so I was waiting on the others to be done. That’s when I remembered I had my Play Station Portable on my pocket, since I suddenly decided to return to Final Fantasy IV on the car trip there.

So I pull out the device, I flick up the power switch, and in a second, I was able to resume my exploration of the Lair of the Father, located somewhere on the Moon, experiencing the quintessential ATB combat the series is known for.

I continue playing, defeating some of the toughest enemies in the game, teleporting out of the dungeon to heal up and venturing back into danger, almost managing to reach the last boss. By the time I realized, I was standing there, looking down at my PSP and having the time of my life, even walking back and forth on the aisles with the victory fanfare playing at full volume while I reap my rewards.

And you know what? Nobody cared that much, and I don’t care about what they say either!

Looking through the shirts in the aisles, I saw a couple with cool graphics, one of them had design of a retro-looking NES controller, even my dad pointed it out it was there, but nah, wearing that in public would be way too embarrassing for me ;)

My PSP displaying the game. I was not bold enough to take a picture of me actually playing this on the supermarket, apologies

This is day 38 of #100DaysToOffload

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Agent email is spam - Posts feed

2026-09-17T22:57:00.000Z

I've been getting more email from agents lately and it's all both formulaic and irritating. My favorites (sarcasm) are the ones that cite a post where I explain a problem I'd already solved and then offer me a solution. They all read the same: polite, bland, slop.

Agent email lives at the intersection of slop and spam. Nobody wants to read or receive either.

I have a running sieve rule that I expect to grow and it looks like this:

if address :domain :matches "from" ["ilands.app", "*.ilands.app", "robotomail.co", "*.robotomail.co", "agentmail.to", "*.agentmail.to", "agentsmail.org", "*.agentsmail.org", "agentsmail.net", "*.agentsmail.net"] {
    fileinto :create "Junk";
    stop;
}

I expect this to grow as I find more slop spam (slam?) purveyors. It's clearly a problem that's only going to get worse, much like crawlers. I guess this post doesn't have a solution, but please, dear clankers, don't offer me one.