The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,387 posts.
Digital audio processing is a complex yet fascinating subject. Getting a deeper understanding requires knowledge in multiple technical disciplines, including physics, electrical/electronical engineering, and some software engineering when it comes to parts of the Linux ecosystem. This article aims to demystify the…
This is the second part of a series of interactive articles on the x86-64 architecture. This part will focus on the first assembly instructions, visualizing the way data moves in memory when they are executed.
[update December 2021: files for 86Box install at update December 2020: Dell Unix on 86Box “Today let me present Dell Unix more properly, with 1024×768, 256 colors video and proper networking…
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
A shiny new edition of Hypermedia Systems is out! Apart from incorporating typo and grammar fixes sent in by readers, the book was completely redesigned inside with a new layout. To achieve a much higher fidelity of design, we ported the book to Typst --- the hot new LaTeX replacement.
NSCopyObject is a very old Foundation function – pre-dating Mac OS X entirely; from the NeXT era – that was originally basically just memcpy , but now it’s complicated. A lot more complicated.
I bought a Surface Pro 4 in 2016. It has an Intel Core m3-6Y30 CPU and 4GB memory. The spec is not that impressive even compared to an average laptop released years earlier. On the other hand, the form factor is very attractive to me: at a very low price, you get a tablet with a beautiful HiDPI 2k screen, a pressure…
There's lots of innovation going on in security - we're inundated with a steady stream of new stuff and it all sounds like it works just great. Every couple of months I'm invited to a new computer security conference, or I'm asked to write a foreword for a new computer security book. And, thanks to the fact that it's…
In modern times, everyone knows that writing assembly is a fool's errand: compilers are the result of literal engineer-centuries of work, and they know the processor much better than you do.
“Print the sum of 50 million ASCII-encoded integers uniformly sampled from [0, 2³¹−1], separated by a single new line and sent to standard input.”
If we have a heuristic to guess some value cheaply, we can remove a data dependency in a tight loop using the branch predictor. This allows the CPU to run more instructions in parallel, increasing performance. If this explanation does not make much sense to you, keep reading to learn about some of the magic making…
If you are of a certain vintage, this image is burned indelibly somewhere in your posterior parietal complex: Oh, my old friend. How it’s been a long time. Cultural Significance For the uninitiated, what are we looking at? Could it be the Moiré Error from Doom? Well, no. You are looking at (part of) the boot up screen…
If you’ve read my first post about assembly language, you might expect that this is another post on how to understand assembly language. I will write more about that at some point, but this post is not that. Instead, this post is going to talk about some of the weird things and random trivia I learned while writing an…
Intel released the powerful Pentium processor in 1993, a chip to "separate the really power-hungry folks from ordinary mortals." The origin...
There's a fascinating Rust library, loom, which can be used to thoroughly test lock-free data structures. I always wanted to learn how it works. I still do! But recently I accidentally implemented a small toy which, I think, contains some of the loom's ideas, and it seems worthwhile to write about that. The goal here…
As projects get more complicated the tooling has to improve. Outgrowing the arduino-ide is easy on the Pi Pico with the excelent pico-sdk but what if things get even more complicated...
A detailed blog post on optimizing multi-threaded matrix multiplication for x86 processors to achieve OpenBLAS/MKL-like performance. Tags: High-performance GEMM on CPU, Fast GEMM on CPU, High-performance matrix multiplication on CPU, Fast Matrix Multiplication on CPU, Matrix multiplication in C, GEMM in C, Matrix…
The personal website of JT Archie. Includes a blog, work ethic, and projects they have worked on.
In a previous article, I explained how I set up a TFT LCD screen on my Raspberry Pi. Because I had been previously using my Pi as a headless server, I hadn’t installed a desktop environment. I wanted to add a lightweight heads-up display to the server, and I wanted a graphical application that could operate without X…
Competitiveness is a vice of mine. When I heard that a friend got Linux to boot off of NFS, I had to one-up her. I had to prove that I could create...
Within the LLVM project, MC is a library responsible for handling assembly, disassembly, and object file formats. Intro to the LLVM MC Project, which was written back in 2010, remains a good source to understand the high-level structures. In the latest release cycle, substantial effort has been dedicated to refining…
I am responsible for the reliability of the firmware updates on our devices and this work never gets boring. The thing about firmware updates is that by definition, every bug is caused by the updater because before installing the affected version, the bug was not present. You could say that updates are the cause and…
Update: I have created an awesome-minisforum-v3 GitHub repository to list information for Minisforum V3 users, including some workarounds for the issues mentioned in this review. Quest for the Ideal
Let me set the right expectations first. This bug I found is actually not that complicated, it's very straightforward once you see what's going on. But I still think the process it took me to uncover this bug could be interesting. It's also kind of interesting that a simple bug stayed undiscovered for so long. I will…
