nanolith

5 ms·

1.
by nanolith 13d ago
I have no doubt that SF has its ups and downs. My comment was based on my subjective experience. I'm sure we've all seen the Hollywood accounts of SF in the Dirty Harry movies. It was once bad enough to get such an impression. I w
2.
by nanolith 13d ago
That's based on actually working in these cities and interacting with people. I don't watch Fox News.
3.
by nanolith 13d ago
I had a contract with a company in the SF Bay Area back in 2011-2012. I spent 50% of my time in the Bay Area, despite living in Florida. I often stayed in a San Francisco hotel and walked to a commuter bus that would take me to corporate he
4.
by nanolith 14d ago
This risk factor is similar to one I brought up during architectural review of an IoT company I helped to build. It's why the identity certificates our devices used were entirely disconnected from domain names, and why the discovery pr
5.
by nanolith 15d ago
The difference is that Rust and Java can only verify certain properties. I can build model checks to verify any property that I can discharge with an SMT solver, which is significantly more powerful. For instance, I can build function contr
6.
by nanolith 15d ago
I think that reading and reviewing software is responsible. Source code exists for humans to read first, and for computers to read second. Programming languages are unambiguous, and most languages take well to abstraction. Software can be w
7.
by nanolith 15d ago
This article comes close to making a fallacious argument about formal methods, which is that formal methods aren't useful unless you can exactly specify how something works. I use model checking (a form of formal methods) daily. I sepa
8.
by nanolith 25d ago
If you had enough money to convince AMD to sell you the tapeout, and if you could hire a fab using a similar process, you could make a new CPU. Other than that... probably not. The next best thing would be buying a replacement.
9.
by nanolith 26d ago
Security researchers do face legal harassment all of the time. They may not be charged with or convicted of felonies, but it is a game that they need a lawyer to navigate all the same. In a just world, the kind of weaponized incompetence th
10.
by nanolith 2mo ago
Personally, I see these language fights as being a bit pointless. They are trying to optimize at the wrong layer. Unless one is working with a dependently typed language, which requires a proof assistant to discharge type checks, then it&#x
11.
by nanolith 2mo ago
There are plenty of open core alternatives that replicate the architecture and ISA. Many of these are cycle accurate. Some have been tape-out proven. Hobbyist retro-computing enthusiasts who wish to build a Z80 system still have options eve
12.
by nanolith 2mo ago
How am I only now seeing that Nedry's SGI monitor had a picture of J. Robert Oppenheimer on it with a scrawled message, "Beginning of Baby Boom"? What an oddly specific Easter egg.
13.
by nanolith 2mo ago
Wait... wasn't it already understood that relativity influences electron orbits of heavy elements? I clearly remember being taught some of this in physics, in the mid-noughties. For instance, we know that gold gets its color from relat
14.
by nanolith 2mo ago
I spent some time this evening beating the dungeon. It took a bit of time to get my head around the syntax, but once I found the tutorial, it clicked. The game reminds me quite a bit of The Little Prover and The Little Typer.
15.
by nanolith 3mo ago
If the flavors are permanently dead, it would be fitting if the grave markers included recipes for those mourning the loss of this flavor and who wish to recreate it at home.
16.
by nanolith 3mo ago
Fair enough. I use my fiber library for cooperative multitasking, as an alternative to async I/O. It's still non-blocking, but as far as user code knows, it behaves as if it is blocking. To do this, I disable signals on threads th
17.
by nanolith 3mo ago
> For example, Boost uses ucontext as part of its fiber implementation. Maybe for the incredibly slow fallback, it does. Boost context and Boost fiber has ABI support for *nix / MacOS / Windows for x86_64 and ARM/ARM64. Th
18.
by nanolith 6mo ago
There is plenty of room for debate over this advice. Prefer do notation if the effects of the flow are more important than the data structure, and prefer using Applicative style if the data structure layout is more important to understand t
19.
by nanolith 8mo ago
That's true. The only advantage of writing a driver in this case is if I wanted to add functions, such as a programmable level shifter.
20.
by nanolith 8mo ago
I could spot the clone because I'm familiar with the form factor of the FTDI IC, and I'm familiar enough with the datasheet to spot the expected passives. I'm not too keen these days with FTDI's reputation for manipulati
21.
by nanolith 8mo ago
In libc, you can use setvbuf to change the buffering mode.
22.
by nanolith 9mo ago
As per my original comment, these examples are only indicative that profitable endeavors can come out of these things in unexpected ways, but that's not the point of doing these things. I'm never going to profit from, nor recoup t
23.
by nanolith 9mo ago
That is an excellent way of considering both leisure and work, and certainly, a testament to the importance of studying the humanities. Aristotle famously developed the Greek concept of εὐδαιμονία (eudaimonia), which dovetails into what you
24.
by nanolith 9mo ago
Allegedly, it was given a lower grade due to it not being a feasible business plan, in the professor's estimation. Of course, this forms part of the legend behind Fred Smith and FedEx, so that should be taken with a grain of salt. htt
25.
by nanolith 9mo ago
We need more people in this world willing to do their own thing, even if others might find it intimidating or silly. The important thing is to have fun and learn things. Compiler hacking is just as good as any other hobby, even if it's
26.
by nanolith 9mo ago
I'm starting to. One of the libraries I've started on recently is open source. I'm still really early in that process, but I started extracting a few functions for the optimized single and double linked list containers and wi
27.
by nanolith 9mo ago
I have been formally verifying software written in C for a while now. > is that only for some problems is the specification simpler than the code. Indeed. I had to fall back to using a proof assistant to verify the code used to build con
28.
by nanolith 9mo ago
Sadly, I did not. I have the source code on an old laptop somewhere. I was disheartened when I considered productizing it and discovered just how deep of a patent tarpit I was dealing with. It's on my list to revisit in the future. At
29.
by nanolith 9mo ago
Around 15 years ago, I built a barbecue controller. This controller had four temperature probes that could be used to check the temperature of the inner cooking chamber as well as various cuts of meat. It controlled servos that opened and c
30.
by nanolith 10mo ago
The function contracts are integrated into the codebase. Bounded model checking tools, such as CBMC, can be used to check for integer UB, memory safety, and to evaluate custom user assertions. The latter feature opens the door for creating

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