Simon Willison’s Weblog

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7 items tagged “threads”

2024

Threads has entered the fediverse (via) Threads users with public profiles in certain countries can now turn on a setting which makes their posts available in the fediverse—so users of ActivityPub systems such as Mastodon can follow their accounts to subscribe to their posts.

It’s only a partial integration at the moment: Threads users can’t themselves follow accounts from other providers yet, and their notifications will show them likes but not boosts or replies: “For now, people who want to see replies on their posts on other fediverse servers will have to visit those servers directly.”

Depending on how you count, Mastodon has around 9m user accounts of which 1m are active. Threads claims more than 130m active monthly users. The Threads team are developing these features cautiously which is reassuring to see—a clumsy or thoughtless integration could cause all sorts of damage just from the sheer scale of their service.

# 22nd March 2024, 8:15 pm / facebook, threads, mastodon, activitypub, fediverse

2021

How we found and fixed a rare race condition in our session handling. GitHub had a terrifying bug this month where a user reported suddenly being signed in as another user. This is a particularly great example of a security incident report, explaining how GitHub identified the underlying bug, what caused it and the steps they are taking to ensure bugs like that never happen in the future. The root cause was a convoluted sequence of events which could cause a Ruby Hash to be accidentally shared between two requests, caused as a result of a new background thread that was introduced as a performance optimization.

# 18th March 2021, 11:06 pm / github, security, threads

2020

Weeknotes: Datasette Writes

As discussed previously, the biggest hole in Datasette’s feature set at the moment involves writing to the database.

[... 604 words]

2019

An Intro to Threading in Python (via) Real Python consistently produces really comprehensive, high quality articles and tutorials. This is an excellent introduction to threading in Python, covering threads, locks, queues, ThreadPoolExecutor and more.

# 18th April 2019, 5:24 am / python, threads

2009

Using Scala with Google App Engine. Scala works, but I haven’t seen confirmation on actors yet (which are likely to break due to their dependency on threads).

# 11th April 2009, 3:28 pm / appengine, google, java, scala, threads

django-springsteen and Distributed Search. Will Larson’s Django search library currently just talks to Yahoo! BOSS, but is designed to be extensible for other external search services. Interestingly, it uses threads to fire off several HTTP requests in parallel from within the Django view.

# 25th February 2009, 10:28 pm / concurrency, django, djangospringsteen, http, python, search, threads, will-larson, yahooboss

2007

Just because Java was once aimed at a set-top box OS that didn't support multiple address spaces, and just because process creation in Windows used to be slow as a dog, doesn't mean that multiple processes (with judicious use of IPC) aren't a much better approach to writing apps for multi-CPU boxes than threads.

Guido van Rossum

# 8th May 2007, 9:21 pm / guido-van-rossum, ipc, java, python, threads, windows