Tim Misiak

The Internet is just a fad

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:

The book Building a Debugger, featuring a robot designing a complex debugging machine on a drafting board

The book placed in front of a tortie cat

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!

Building a debugger: write a native x64 debugger from scratch, by sy brand The cover shows a robot at a drafting board, drawing a complex machine

A view showing the spine, which is quite deep, as the book is over 700 pages ling

!!!!!! 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!

This interview was recorded for the GOTO Book Club. #GOTOcon #GOTObookclubhttp://gotopia.tech/bookclubRead the full transcription of the interview here:https... Building a Debugger • Sy Brand & Tim Misiak • GOTO 2025

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

I suspect advances in AI debugging capabilities will come from new ways of capturing, organizing, and retrieving relevant information. And I don't think it will be sufficient to just gather lots of unstructured data, throw it at a vector DB, and call that "knowledge"

I remember a debugging guru explaining to me that one particular crash was debugged not just by looking at the assembly code, but also by looking at the region where the crashes originated. And realizing that region pirated Windows a lot. And pirated windows came with certain malware... that crashed

But what about those 1% of cases that require deep analysis? Will an LLM help with those cases? I hope so. But I also suspect the biggest challenge there is the collection, organization, and retrieval of domain knowledge that can't be directly learned from the source code or a stack trace.

The vast majority of crashes are extremely shallow to analyze. The chain of events leading to a crash are directly available from a stack, source code, locals, and maybe a little disassembly. And I bet most LLMs get those cases right.

But so does "!analyze"...

AI taught to analyze Windows crash dumps, released to open source — 'like going from hunting with a stone spear to using a guided missile' Brings crash dump analysis into the AI era by integrating GitHub Copilot with WinDBG.

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...

Some day when Sanderson completes another series I will get back to reading his books.

Yes. Season 7 is definitely peak taskmaster. But I almost hesitate to tell people that because it spoils some of the other seasons in comparison.

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

Haven't tried Gemini much. It feels like we are quickly getting to a "they're all good" state for the majority of queries, with each having a few smaller areas of strength.

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.

Not entirely sure. The glowy box on the right is the actual RFID scanner. I assume some part of the locking mechanism is inside the door itself, generating heat.. but that's a LOT of heat while essentially idle. All the doors in that stairwell are like that. The other stairwell is fine. Weird right?

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 Because vulnerability management has nothing to do with national security, right? US government funding for the world's CVE program – the centralized Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures database of product security flaws – ends Wednesday.…

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

A graph in Datadog showing the health of several players in Valheim fluctuating over the course of several hours.

A Datadog graph showing values for skill levels in categories like "run", "bows", and "jump. Most categories trend up, except at one point in the timeline where they all drop by a percentage.

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

RtlVirtualUnwind2 function (Wdm.h) - Win32 apps Given a representation of the CPU context within a function, calculates CPU context representing the parent (caller) stack frame.

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...

I didn't realize this was a thing until last week when the ONLY charger I brought on a trip was 130W dell charger, and it would trip the breaker without even being plugged into a device.

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)

Someone needs to add a florped heap bugcheck code so we can properly blame all these heap florpers.