Anecdote about having fun with x86 performance-monitoring counters.

Anecdote about having fun with AMD's "instruction-based sampling" features.

A veiled complaint about Elon Musk tweeting on how Neuralink creates the possibility of "conceptual telepathy."

tl;dr I wrote a somewhat-simple crate for decoding 32-bit ARMv5 and Thumb instructions called armbf.

A story about being afraid to write poetry.

A friend of mine brought up a great question some months ago:

"Why does GCC spit out a huuuge ELF when I compile the simplest possible 'hello, world' program? Shouldn't it be a lot smaller than ~8Kb? That seems pretty big ..."

This is an example of a classic stack-smashing attack, and some discussion about associated mitigations in Linux.

Some thoughts after watching Brendan Gregg's LCA2017 talk about developments in eBPF tracing. Figured I'd play around with it a bit. It's really cool!

Social systems are complicated, and people are not machines.