What’s the smallest amount of useful work you can get done? For CPU’s it’s kinda complicated. Call it the “minimum profitable scheduling quantum”. Say you hiccup for ~1 microsecond. Maybe a memory stall or something. It’s an eternity (~5,000 cycles), but it’s also kinda…not?

I made a free, browser based x86 disassembler with CPU-specific modes. Disassemble POP CS at last! No ads or trackers. If I ever make it shitty, fork it. #retrocomputing #emulation #assembly #x86 #reverseengineering dasm.martypc.net

Marty x86 Disassembler

Disassemble machine code for the Intel 8088, NEC V20, and Intel 80386 in your browser.

dasm.martypc.net

There's a reason why these LLM chatbots and the effect they have on cognitive skills is called 'cognitive surrender'. This isn't about 'learning to use a calculator' or something like finding resources on the Internet. This is about nuking cognition in students, like a virtual lobotomy.

Charlotte Weatherill@ckweatherill.bsky.social · last wk.

The point isn't to produce essays, it's to teach students how to think for fuck's sake. The minute you automate that, it's over. You might as well close the course. Which they're also doing. This is an attack on learning, and everyone is just shrugging.

“Writing has been called the process by which you find out you don’t know what you are talking about. Actually doing stuff meanwhile is the process by which you find out you also did not know what you were writing about.” - berthub.eu/articles/pos...

A 2024 Plea for Lean Software (with running code) - Bert Hubert's writings

This post is dedicated to the memory of Niklaus Wirth, a computing pioneer who passed away January 1st. In 1995 he wrote an influential article called “A Plea for Lean Software”, and in what follows, ...

berthub.eu

“Who knows what other childhood curiosities are quietly growing into world-changing ideas right now in bedrooms, backyards and notebooks across the globe? The next big breakthrough might not come from a high-tech lab. It might come from a 10-year-old who just can’t stop wondering about butterflies”💖

Oisín McGann@oisinmcgann.bsky.social · 3w ago

I don’t know why this post doesn’t give his name, but it’s Jo Nagai. This is a true story. medium.com/@zehraanjum2...

I've uploaded a new chapter of my PC Emulation Book, on everyone's favorite CGA video standard, composite video. book.martypc.net/display-grap... #retrocomputing #emulation

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.

No championships, no trophies, no stars: How Norway made sport fun for kids. Country’s approach to sports prioritises joy while offering youngsters choice – and Erling Haaland’s World Cup exploits show that it works, by Jesse Gerritsen www.theguardian.com/football/202... via @theguardian.com

No league tables, no trophies: how Norway made sport fun for kids – and built a football team that beat Brazil

The country’s model prioritises joy while offering youngsters choice – and Erling Haaland’s World Cup exploits show that it works

theguardian.com

“Science is a way to call the bluff of those who only pretend to have knowledge. It is a bulwark against mysticism, against superstition, against religion misapplied to where it has no business being.” ― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World

GORILLA.JS, a web port of QBasic GORILLAS with online multiplayer: gorillas.zone

Gorillas

A faithful browser recreation of the classic QBasic game Gorillas with local and online multiplayer.

gorillas.zone

I love looking at old crazy ideas in expired computer patents. Modern CPU Branch Predictors are invisible. You, as a dev, can’t really see *what* paths the CPU is guessing…it’s all a bunch of AMD/Intel/Apple secret sauce. For a brief moment in the 80s, there was this wacky proposition of...

In the 1980s, if you wanted your IBM PC to be faster for spreadsheets or CAD, you could buy the Intel 8087 floating-point chip. Internally, the chip runs special code called microcode. We opened the chip, extracted the microcode, and are figuring out how it works. 1/n

CPUs tend to get slower with time. Probably not for the reason you’d expect.

 Unfortunately, many microcode updates are security related, which almost universally cause performance regressions…or even complete feature loss!

 Haswell might be the worst performing processor family of all time...

The world is now so full of ridiculous things that I struggle to deal with it all. But this is not an 'us' problem. The world really is idiotic. I made a list of things that are impossible to believe. Seeing it in writing might help you deal better with the situation. berthub.eu/articles/pos...

The Impossible Things We Have to Believe - Bert Hubert

“Alice laughed. ‘There’s no use trying,’ she said. ‘One can’t believe impossible things.’ I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-ho...

berthub.eu

There’s a famous Usenet story about a programmer (Mel) who refused higher level abstractions.

 It was the late 1950s, and even in that era, Mel was…well today we’d call him a boomer.

 Mel only wrote in raw hexadecimal. He didn’t approve of compilers, and refused to use optimizing assemblers.

Building a Debugger is part of the Humble Books Bundle for the next couple weeks! www.humblebundle.com/books/linux-...

Humble Tech Book Bundle: Linux, the Good Stuff by No Starch

Unlock new levels of freedom and creativity when you use Linux—master the ins and outs of Linux today and help support charity!

humblebundle.com

Modern DRAM is based on a brilliant design from IBM. But, we're still paying for a latency penalty that's existed since the 60s! In this video, I'm introducing my research project (Tailslayer) that immensely reduces p99.99 latency on traditional RAM!

Mark Simonson reminisces about when he discovered type design. “The idea of coming up with an original alphabet design fired my imagination. And learning that it was possible to design type professionally was a revelation.” [marksimonson.com]

The Day I Discovered Type Design

Fifty years ago this month, March 1976, at 20 years old, is when my interest in type design began.

marksimonson.com

Today's recommended website is chiptube.app. If you love chiptune music/SFX then head over for a huge slice of nostalgia. A massive catalogue of SID, NES, SNES, N64, GENESIS music awaits, plus lots more. Volume up to 11. chiptune.app/browse

Chip Player JS

An online MIDI and VGM music player with SoundFont support. Over 250,000 songs, focused on performance and nostalgia. Play VGM, SPC, NSF, S3M, XM, MOD and more.

chiptune.app

Twin adventurers are cleverly testing modern vs. historic gear. “If they went on an expedition, and Ross wore modern kit while Hugo wore historic replicas, any difference in performance…could be attributed solely to the gear, not genetics.” [carryology.com]

How the Turner Twins Are Mythbusting Modern Gear

Modern adventure apparel should outperform heritage gear, right? Well, the genetically identical Turner twins put this theory to the test...

carryology.com

How to make perfume in 1230 BCE in the heartland of ancient Assyria. First, you need to mix cane with cleansed water from the palace well of the city of Aššur (pronounced Ashur). Second, you need to pour this mixture into a special vessel before adding...

The second edition of Designing Data-Intensive Applications, by myself and @chris.blue, is finished and sent off to the printers! Ebooks should be available in the next week, and print books in 3–4 weeks. Sigh of relief. 😅 (BTW, this is a good opportunity to support your favourite local bookshop!)

Fuzzing software becomes much more effective if you can generate _valid_ inputs. We have now built the first approach to _statically_ extract complete and precise input grammars from parser code, producing syntactically valid and diverse inputs by construction. Enjoy! dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

The arithmetic/logic unit (ALU) in the Intel 8086 processor (1978) is more complicated than you might expect, performing 28 different operations from addition and logical AND to shifts and BCD adjustment. A special control circuit reconfigures the ALU for each operation. Let's look closer...

If you've ever wondered about the infrastructure behind the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine, check out this teardown ➡️ hackernoon.com/the-long-now...

Tiled.art: “Discover great tessellation art, understand how it works, and create your own.” [tiled.art]

Tessellations, Escher-style

Discover great tessellation art, understand how it works, and create your own.

tiled.art

Linux 6.18: All About the New Long-Term Support Linux Kernel: thenewstack.io/linux-6-18-a... via @thenewstack.io & @sjvn.bsky.social What exactly is Long Term Support #Linux, and what's in the latest LTS Linux kernel?

Linux 6.18: All About the New Long-Term Support Linux Kernel

The newest version of the Linux kernel offers two years of long-term support, plus upgrades to the slab memory allocator, security hardening and more.

thenewstack.io

13) What if… just throwing out ideas here… what if… *you* didn’t sign up your pre-teens for social media sites? What if *you* made a signal group chat with grandma instead? No? Nuke privacy for everyone in society instead? I see. You clearly had no other choice.

In 1980, Intel announced the 8087 Math Coprocessor, a chip that made floating-point 100 times faster. I opened up the chip, took photos of the silicon structures, and analyzed its circuitry. It's a very complex chip for its time. Let's take a look inside...

This...is Programming Like a Fighter Pilot. A single unhandled exception destroyed a $500 million rocket in seconds. The F-35 wasn't going to make the same mistake. By carefully slicing C++, engineers created one of the strictest coding standards ever written.