| pronouns | https://pronoun.is/he/him |
| blog | https://blog.nelhage.com/ |
What do you call it when someone writes a dramatization of the trials and tribulations of a bold emacs session heroically handling a keypress which results in writing a single character into the current buffer?
`self-insert-command` fanfiction
In light of the PSF's recent loss of an NSF grant and attendant funding shortfall, I will be matching donations up to $5000. Send me your receipts.
Very happy if you've already donated for similar reasons but the point is to motivate *new* donations so be sure the timestamp is after this toot 😉.
'Solving Regex Crosswords with Z3' - excellent blog post by @nelhage
https://blog.nelhage.com/post/regex-crosswords-z3/
Talks a lot about experiments with Z3 solver performance improvements by setting up the problem in different ways.
(the post uses qntm's greenery regular expression library to which I did a single pr at some point, fixing a performance problem. I'm still proud of that one 😅)
In honor of the late Robert Redford, "Sneakers", in high def ANSI with full subtitles:
(needs a terminal with 24 bit color support)
After my earlier adventures benchmarking CPython, I ended up going deep down a rabbithole on CPU branch prediction and learning a bunch of interesting things, which I have attempted to write up and share:
Modern CPUs are actually pretty good at predicting the indirect branch inside an interpreter loop, _contra_ the conventional wisdom. We take a deep dive into the ITTAGE indirect branch prediction algorithm, which is capable of making those predictions, and draw some connections to some other interests of mine in the areas of fuzzing and reinforcement learning.
A deep dive into the performance of Python 3.14's tail-call interpreter: How the performance results were confounded by an LLVM regression, the surprising complexity of compiling interpreter loops, and some reflections on performance work, software engineering, and optimizing compilers.
https://bughunters.google.com/blog/5424842357473280/zen-and-the-art-of-microcode-hacking
Shot: "This opens up the potential for hardware attacks (e.g., reading the key from ROM with a scanning electron microscope), side-channel attacks (e.g., using Correlation Power Analysis to leak the key during validation), or other [...] attacks"
Chaser: "We noticed that the key from an old Zen 1 CPU was the example key of the NIST SP 800-38B publication and was reused until at least Zen 4 CPUs."
Cat 🐈🥗 (D.Burch) 
Glyph
CF Bolz-Tereick
Ryan Castellucci (they/them) 
Kabootie computey!
Tony Finch