Stuff I think about
After I posted 8086 microcode disassembled, Ken Shirriff sent me a high-resolution image of the microcode ROM from the 80386. I didn't expect I would ever do anything with it for a couple of reasons: one is that it's absolutely huge (94720 bits) compared to the 8086 one (10752 bits) so (even with bitract or […]
Recently I realised that, as part of his 8086 reverse-engineering series, Ken Shirriff had posted online a high resolution photograph of the 8086 die with the metal layer removed. This was something I have been looking for for some time, in order to extract and disassemble the 8086 microcode. I had previously found very high […]
Dear Miss N...., Thank you for your letter of the 28th of November regarding the Department for Education census. We are writing to let you know that we are declining to provide the countries of birth and nationalities of our children, and we have told our children to decline to provide this information to members […]
National governments are some of the most powerful entities in the world today. But what are their missions (or what should they be)? What are they optimizing for? Democratic governments at least are supposed to represent the interests of the voting public, but this just means that the voters get to choose between one of […]
These days it seems like the vast majority of websites are stuffed with adverts. I'm old enough to remember a time when very few websites had ads, and when they started to appear it was a shocking and shameful development. With the rise of ads has come the rise of ad-blockers, and the rise of […]
A nice feature of most places on the internet is that people can easily create a new identity (you might have to solve a captcha but that's about it). This wouldn't work so well in real life as it does on the internet - in real life if someone commits a crime they need to […]
The high cost of housing is a big problem for a lot of people. Younger adults in particular often can't afford to own their own homes like their parents did, despite earning similar wages corrected for (non-housing) inflation. Many of those who do own have huge mortgages that will take the majority of their careers […]
In C++ there are two kinds of things you can use as template arguments. One is the obvious one, types, but less well known is that integers (and some other values) can also be used. Early on in the design of ALFE's type system I decided to simplify things by having template arguments all be […]
Several very smart people are worried about artificial intelligences becoming smarter than people, taking over the world, and not necessarily having our best interests at heart. A specific concern is that some form of paperclip maximizer might optimize the world for something that is harmful to us if the optimization in question is taken too […]
Ravioli memory is something that could benefit significantly from hardware support. Page operations and inter-thread communication are some specific things that could be accelerated, but there are others as well: Dereferencing through reverse-ravioli trees (and forward-ravioli trees to find parent objects). Allocating and deallocating/moving. The latter requires fixing up any pointers than happen…