Tessera

Imagine getting a Computer Science degree, but you are otherwise restricted to the works published across a 10-year timespan.   What decade would you choose?   The 1960s? The 1990s? What would give you the most durable understanding?

How do you protect an immensely vulnerable system against a stronger, even God-like adversary? Well, you use a Shadow Server of course. Power plants have lots of interesting ideas. The NIST published a “Situational Awareness For Electric Utilities”.

Physical Hardware is often (artificially) softlocked by firmware.  One of the biggest “unlock” hacks in history happened on IBM’s POWER8.   IBM Servers are kinda weird. They often ship with 40+ processor cores installed, but you only get to use whatever was licensed.

In terms of “gimmicky programming conference stuff”, the Java Ring might be the coolest.   You’d get your ring, write down your coffee preferences, and then use it to authenticate for free “Java” at JavaOne 1998.

A Scottish audio company, famous for their turntables, once invented a CPU architecture.   Their internal software kind of sucked. Somehow along the way, the company became convinced that the problem was that all Von Neumann-style computers were WRONG.

Erasing (not writing!) is the main thing that kills SSDs. With the industry pushing towards HBF as a DRAM / HBM alternative, endurance is the name of the game. There’s two knobs you can adjust for NAND flash that make a huge difference:

The first state-controlled, distributed computing project, was the British’s Naval Almanac. Intended to advance the greater good of humanity, pre-computed mathematical tables for naval navigation. 35 human “computers” did the calculations.

I’m convinced that a large % of programmers don’t actually like computers. As a side effect, are also perfectly happy to throw away their reasoning to a model as soon as they can. I don’t get it, at ALL.

How interesting. Samsung dropped a paper a few days ago with little fanfare:   KV-cache offload over a CXL memory pool.   Really scrappy setup too. Early-gen CXL stack (2.0), old switches, yet simple interleaving of the KV Cache across CXL modules kept the GPUs as well fed as real DRAM!

I wonder what the world would look like if IBM won instead of UNIX. IBM’s i operating system is gorgeous (and still updated)! Everything is an object, no binaries are native (translated bytecode, almost JVM-y), and pointers all have an absurd amount of (useful) metadata.

Real Time Audio on general purpose operating systems is ridiculously hard to code.   Unfortunately (and unlike the visual system!) humans are *really* good at noticing audio hitches. In video, you might have ~16ms to process a video frame, and if you miss the deadline, eh...

the sentence: “I’m going to reflect on my concepts” could mean soo many things in the context of C++ haha

It’s so funny that computers used to be stinky when they failed. In the 60’s IBM used selenium rectifiers. If you look at a periodic table, group 16, you’ll encounter what’s referred to as the “stinkogens”. Starting with sulphur, as you move down the column things get exponentially smellier.

@TheCherno has such an excellent programming channel. Been a fan for a while now, figure it deserves a shoutout if you haven't seen it before!

Happy fourth!

i’m pretty convinced that LISP is the highest-IQ programming language   absolute S-tier reflection. if you use a derivative like 3-LISP I’d say you can even hit SS+ tier with it’s meta-circular interpreters.

everyone has a miniITX SFF phase before growing up and buying the chonkiest possible towers with no branding (girl by server for scale)

Something that keeps me up at night is the amount of miscompiled software running in the wild. There’s a famous story, “the Core 59 problem” from Facebook where seemingly random files were missing in one of their Spark databases.

I love how clever video encoders get. There’s a lot of research hype right now around optimization for Screen Recordings specifically.   If you think about it, it’s a VERY different arena to what we’d consider “traditional” video.

Funny to see the “gee, we don’t have enough RAM!” problem pop up over and over again throughout computer science history.   meanwhile, NASA in 1990:

Had a great time presenting my talk implementing C++26-enabled runtime reflection!

I don’t care what people say, Modern C++ is starting to get really cool.   For example, C++26 compile-time reflection uses this neat little trick to represent heterogeneous data with a single, scalar value (std::meta::info).    This value is *technically* an ID into the compiler's AST.

I’m convinced that old games feel “hard” because modern emulators have like 30 layers of abstraction between the input and the screen.   Today you’ve got controllers going through bluetooth driver stacks, on general purpose operating systems, with thread coordination, GPU APIs, display latency...

Most computer faults aren’t clean, single bit flips. In GPUs especially, ~60% of errors are multi-bit events! This makes a lot of sense when you think about the pipeline. If you get a corruption early enough, the datapath is way more likely to affect the entire warp.

most non-C++ developers are just users playing inside a C++ dev’s program.