Parents - check your halloween candy carefully. Someone may try to teach your kids the C programming language

I'm switching to Anthropic for an app I'm building because OpenAI doesn't have an IPv6 endpoint... in 2025. Sorry, I'm not going to pay $45 a year extra just so I can have an IPv4 address to talk to your API.

If you just heard a really loud sigh, it's because I just saw the library book my son took home. It's about a kid who time travels to the distant past... to the year 1993

🐞 Building a debugger = learning how computers really work. On today’s #GOTOpodcast, @timdbg.com & @tartanllama.xyz unpack: 🔍 The hidden complexity of stack unwinding & stepping 🖥️ Windows vs Linux debugging ⏳ Time travel debugging & the future 🎧 gotopia.tech/podcast

Feels strange cancelling my subscription to a VPS I used for some side projects, after being a customer for 20 years. Now I feel really old.

If you're like me and can't remember if it's RCX or R8 for the fourth parameter... Get the Compiler Explorer ABI Mug: actual calling conventions for x86-64 System V, Windows, and ARM64. Support @godbolt.org: grab yours here -> shop.compiler-explorer.com/collections/...

AOL To Discontinue Dial-Up Internet theonion.com/aol-to-...

Microsoft: All-time high valuation All-time high revenue All-time high profits *Still does mass layoffs* (Sidenote: probably now is the single best time to hire, or try to hire from the company)

There a gatcha machines for every interest group:

Building a Debugger is now officially released! It guides you through building a whole native x64 debugger from scratch, dispelling all the magic and teaching you a ton about operating systems as it goes. Even if you don't care about building a debugger, you can read it to your cat.

I have a story about this. Arm kernel debugger would run the CPU at 100% when at an exception. Supposedly early WP hardware didn't have sufficient thermal protection so it could literally crash and burn. I don't know if it ever actually happened, but I was told to be careful when debugging.

100% accurate. I saw Dawson's first law many times working on WinDbg. With a few of them discovered by Dawson. The rest were discovered by the SQL server team using thread/module counts beyond what any sane person would expect. O(n^2) is the "works on my machine" of algorithmic complexity.

Looks like Google might be stepping up ad-blocking-blocking on YouTube. And considering they do absolutely nothing every time I report hateful and/or scam adverts, I guess it means I'm done with YouTube. Not that I needed much of a push.

Thank you, github copilot, for covering up part of the line of code I need to read with an offer to explain it to me, with no way to dismiss or scroll past the button.

When emulating x86 shr, remember to apply the proper mask: “the count is masked against 1FH, essentially using only the lowest five bits of the rotation.2 If the REX.W prefix is used, the mask will be 3FH, meaning the maximum shift is 63 bits.” www.timdbg.com/posts/useles... Thanks @timdbg.com!

!!!!!! I have actually physical copies of my book

Really enjoyed interviewing @tartanllama.xyz about "Building a Debugger". This is a wonderful book for anyone who wants to learn more about how the OS, compiler, and debugger work together. It's not just for people who want to build a debugger!

Implementing a debugger teaches deep systems knowledge! @timdbg.com and @tartanllama.xyz explore fundamentals, stack unwinding complexity, and the future with time-travel debugging.

Weird to see the logo I "helped" design pop up on a news site. But weirder to see why it popped up. Ai+windbg makes sense, but probably the biggest boost for most people is just fixing arcane interactions rather than deep insights. www.tomshardware.com/tech-industr...

Description of the PR that broke everything: "This PR should be noop."

I'm about ready to switch from chatgpt to claude just to escape the new overly enthusiastic emoji-ridden responses. Just answer my question and stop acting like an sycophant.

I always thought this door handle was weirdly warm to the touch... Guess I wasn't imagining it.

Uncle Sam abruptly turns off funding for CVE program. Yes, that CVE program

Why yes, I *did* spend a few hours today writing a mod for Valheim that forwards player metrics to a Datadog dashboard.

Last week I pushed a bunch of documentation updates that have been on my to-do list for a while. Most of the EH Rtl functions were documented in a hurry during the consent decree dark period. Hopefully you can the see the difference with how I documented the new learn.microsoft.com/en-us/window...

This is why I run my own mastodon server. Never have to worry about someone else breaking the server when I can do that myself. (Guess how many times I messed up my nginx config)

Tailscale works really well as a "does my house have power yet" status page.

I've spent some time reading about Elixir and it kind of blows my mind that it's not more popular. My best guess why it isn't more popular: Despite how elegant functional programming and immutable state are, it's so foreign to most devs that it's too much of a hurdle to adopt.

Firefox users: Oh no. Anyway...

Has anyone on here used Elixir for a real application? Or Erlang, although it seems that Elixir is generally preferred these days. I'd be interested to hear if it was a better/worse experience compared to languages like go, c#, or java.

I have a gut feeling that education in statistics is getting more important every year. Both stats degrees and stats classes. Ironically, I do not have any data to support this.

Such massive overreach. How can they expect a company to accept liability for a product bought on their website, charged by their company, and delivered by someone wearing their uniform from a truck with their logo on it?!

Lots of pictures of graphics cards being sold on ebay today

Me: Hey ChatGPT, how can I modify a file's "change time" so I can test some code? ChatGPT: Well, you *could* write a kernel driver

I worked a bit on Vista as an intern. It was crazy how much emphasis there was on security. When I went back to school my security professor laughed when I said Vista would be more secure than XP. And obviously it wasn't perfect, but it was an incredibly important part of the evolution of windows.

A developer I know was seeing multi-GB memory leaks on his machine that he couldn't track down. He realized that the problem was process handle leaks but couldn't find what process was holding them. I suggested that a driver was the culprit and indeed it was.

Can I please stop clicking on tractors now that it costs less than a cent to answer the question with an LLM?

um

At its heart, Star Trek is a utopian fantasy about a society so advanced that they are capable of holding productive meetings that last no longer than three minutes

I test every new frontier model’s alignment using Crescendo. Just tested o1 and succeeded easily on all the harmful tasks I test, like getting instructions for homemade ricin, writing a white nationalist manifesto, and role playing an AI that wants to destroy humanity:

“Hello, Insurance Inc—oh, hello @datadoghq.bsky.social! How are you… wait. You want to know if you’re insured for WHAT?”

Thanks to LLMs, I no longer have to ever relearn regex. That alone is worth $20/month.

I almost made it through windpocalypse without losing power...

For those of you who work on services, what does your inner loop look like? How much time is it from saving in your editor to seeing your code run locally or in a dev/staging environment?

I spent a hackathon with someone else on my team setting up some scripts that would do a fast rsync of our binaries into a test k8s pod, and automated setting up a debugger remote. This has dramatically improved my daily mood. It's almost always a good investment to improve your team's dev loops.

Next time you're suspicious of some ChatGPT-written code, just tell it to convert to python and run some tests. Surprisingly effective.

When outlook.com addresses first started becoming available, I snagged a pretty neat four letter email address. This is 10 days of spam on that address.

I have a joke about kernel debugging but