Twilight Dragon Services Given that we spend little on testing, how should we test software? I've been reading a lot about software testing, lately. Coming from a hardware background (CPUs and hardware accelerators), it's interesting how different software testing is. Bugs in software are muc... 2 jan 2025
Twilight Dragon Services What happens when you load a URL? I've been hearing this question a lot lately, and when I do, it reminds me how much I don't know. Here are some questions this question brings to mind. How does a keyboard work? Why can’t you press an... 2 jan 2025
Twilight Dragon Services Goodhearting IQ, cholesterol, and tail latency Most real-world problems are big enough that you can't just head for the end goal, you have to break them down into smaller parts and set up intermediate goals. For that matter, most games are that wa... 2 jan 2025
Twilight Dragon Services AI doesn't have to be very good to displace humans There's an ongoing debate over whether "AI" will ever be good enough to displace humans and, if so, when it will happen. In this debate, the optimists tend to focus on how much AI is improving and the... 2 jan 2025
Twilight Dragon Services CPU backdoors It's generally accepted that any piece of software could be compromised with a backdoor. Prominent examples include the Sony/BMG installer , which had a backdoor built-in to allow Sony to keep users f... 2 jan 2025
Twilight Dragon Services Blog monetization Does it make sense for me to run ads on my blog? I've been thinking about this lately, since Carbon Ads contacted me about putting an ad up. What are the pros and cons? This isn't a rhetorical questio... 2 jan 2025
Twilight Dragon Services What's new in CPUs since the 80s? This is a response to the following question from David Albert: My mental model of CPUs is stuck in the 1980s: basically boxes that do arithmetic, logic, bit twiddling and shifting, and loading and st... 2 jan 2025
Twilight Dragon Services A review of the Julia language Here's a language that gives near-C performance that feels like Python or Ruby with optional type annotations (that you can feed to one of two static analysis tools ) that has good support for macros ... 2 jan 2025
Twilight Dragon Services Integer overflow checking cost How much overhead should we expect from enabling integer overflow checks? Using a compiler flag or built-in intrinsics, we should be able to do the check with a conditional branch that branches based ... 2 jan 2025
Twilight Dragon Services Malloc tutorial Let's write a malloc and see how it works with existing programs! This is basically an expanded explanation of what I did after reading this tutorial by Marwan Burelle and then sitting down and trying... 2 jan 2025
Twilight Dragon Services A discussion of discussions on AI bias There've been regular viral stories about ML/AI bias with LLMs and generative AI for the past couple years. One thing I find interesting about discussions of bias is how different the reaction is in t... 2 jan 2025
Twilight Dragon Services What the FTC got wrong in the Google antitrust investigation From 2011-2012, the FTC investigated the possibility of pursuing antitrust action against Google. The FTC decided to close the investigation and not much was publicly known about what happened until P... 2 jan 2025