Ricardo Nabinger Sanchez

Possibly a carpenter bee, feasting on a drop of honey placed on a small tree branch, over grass.

Brought up some honey to a (possibly) carpenter bee, that looked pretty exhausted. Quite uncommon for me to find them on the ground; lots of woodpeckers and other predators visit the garden.

Hope it can fuel up quickly and return to its nesting log soon enough!

Herbie will march triumphantly in 2050.

Modern cars are dangerously relying on software for trivial things such as starting the engine, for absolutely no good reason.

Frank Klepacki, particularly Command & Conquer (1995). It was an "AWE32" moment where a great game could have a soundtrack as good as the game/gameplay itself. In my opinion, Klepacki's soundtrack was on a different level, becaming an instant favourite for many years (decades!) to come.

#Intel released the 89th edition of the Software Developer’s Manuals with a new SEAM, and completely rewritten CPUID (with domain info) section:
All-in-One:
cdrdv2-public.intel.com/868137/32546...
Changes v81:
cdrdv2-public.intel.com/868136/25204...
UDB (opcode D6h) canonized

Colleges do a terrible job of teaching C++.



It’s not “C with Classes”. Injected into curriculums as a demonstration of early CS concepts, it leaves many with a sour taste.



Students later immediately fall in love with the first language that *doesn’t* feel that way.

An image with P99 CONF speakers

P99 CONF is next week! Which talks are on your "can't miss" list?

If you ever get a chance to inspire, do it! ... as great day had at #CyberGirlsFirst event at Aston Uni, inspiring 13yo girls to pursue tech careers by sharing my journey & passion for tech. Loved their energy & curiosity! Let's keep encouraging the next gen of women in STEM! #WomenInTech

Color coded display of a zlib compressed version of this post's text, rendered by the flateview demo

lynn.github.io/flateview/
Impressive. Visualizer of zlib (gzip) - paste in a paragraph or two of text.

Reminds me of @angealbertini.bsky.social's binary file-format illustrations (google 'corkami').

Everyone knows that the x86 ISA is big.


Modern CPUs have ~1000+ mnemonics. Guess how many make up 90% of compiled C/C++ code?

TWELVE. I'm not kidding.

The question is…what if we shrank it?

Panel 1. image of a huge nuclear plant. “Reactor Overheating” 2. A worker in a hazmat suit works at a computer. The screen reads: “Press cancel to avoid critical overload” 3 - 9. The worker continues to type at the computer. The screen changes in each panel and reads: “Enter password to confirm” “Incorrect password” “Incorrect password” “Do you want to reset your password?” “Reset link has been sent to your email” “Please choose a new password” “New password can't be the same as old password” The colour gets hotter in each panel. Starting blue in 1 and ending in red in 9. Panel 10. Wide view. The entire earth is blown up.

My latest cartoon for @newscientist.com

p.s. this week I am on a USA/Canada tour with my new book. Details and preorder links at tomgauld.com

Code Complete is one of the most enduring books on software engineering. Steve McConnell wrote the 900-page handbook just five years into his career - decades later, Code Complete is still a best-seller.

Steve rarely gives interviews, so I hope you enjoy this special one.

Our technical deep-dive about AppSuite PDF Editor backdoor is out 📝👇

www.gdatasoftware.com/blog/2025/08...
#GDATA #GDATATechblog #AppSuite

A photo of me holding up the Compiler Explorer system V ABI mug. It has a green handle and green inside. On the mug is the ABI for system V (Linux etc)

A photo of me showing the other side of the nug which has the Compiler Explorer logo on it

Finally got my own "final version" ABI mug! Really happy with how they came out!

Fancy one yourself? Get yours at shop.compiler-explorer.com ! All proceeds go to keeping the site running.

New Tool: xstack - Completely Passive eBPF Linux Stack Profiling Without Any Tracepoints

tanelpoder.com/posts/xstack...

A new tool in 0x.tools family:

xtop - Top for Wall-Clock Time. It uses eBPF/xcapture v3 and gives you "x-ray vision" into Linux system activity.

It will be available on next Tuesday 19 Aug at 1pm EDT when I also run a live demo webinar!

tanelpoder.com/posts/xtop-t...

A CT scanner reveals surprises inside the 386 processor's ceramic package Intel released the 386 processor in 1985, the first 32-bit chip in the x86 line. This chip was packaged in a ceramic square with 132 gold-pl...

For more information on the 386 package, see my latest blog post. Thanks to @jonbruner.bsky.social and Lumafield for the CT scans.
www.righto.com/2025/08/inte...

In its own right, that is not solid advice

The Death of Industrial Design and the Era of Dull Electronics Hackaday Article

The Death of Industrial Design and the Era of Dull Electronics

A gray box of electronics. It has thirteen large orange digits displayed at the top, with lights and switches underneath. These have labels such as Message, UDL Compare, AGC Confirm, and Program Start. A paper tape reader sticks out of the front, with a paper tape threaded through it. The unit is rack-mountable with two handles on the front.

We obtained a mysterious box of 1960s electronics. I reverse-engineered it, and with much effort, we got it running. It turns out to be a test unit for testing NASA's Up-Data Link, a system from the Apollo moon landing to control the spacecraft from the ground. Let's take a look inside... 1/n

Relatable. Instead of a proper and neutral mentoring, some weird combustion happens and suddenly (some?) students end up absolutely loathing certain topics/works. I never enjoyed literature classics, and ended up abhorring them. Same goes for acting. (Happily surrounded by books I love, now!)

One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.

One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.

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.

New Blog: Catbench Vector Search Playground has Postgres Query Throughput and Latency Monitoring Now

This is a demo app that helps you to learn and experiment with adding vector search-based functionality into new or existing apps!

(link in reply)

Here in Brazil the manufacturer is required to add a warning about the reduced amount in the label for a few months, as it became a widespread practice years ago.

[Possible hot take] FWIW, most of what we all do is wasteful. Washing hands? Too much water wasted, not so much proper washing done. Cooking? Oh wow, not to mention discards. When we have abundance, we waste. Snobbily picking on that dude's methods/preferences/what-not; a waste of time/attention?

Low-Latency & Performance-Obsessed Engineers: Share Your Insights At P99 CONF Obsessed with high performance and low latency engineering? Discuss your experiments, optimizations, ideas, and lessons learned with ~30K like-minded engineers... at P99 CONF 2025!

Our annual #P99CONF brings technologists together to discuss the latest experiments, optimizations, ideas, and lessons learned. If you have an idea or a big problem that you've solved, we invite you to submit your session idea today! www.p99conf.io/2025/05/05/c...

#ScyllaDB

Wow! lsds is super useful if you ever had to cat/grep a thousand places for finding out about disks/block devices.

Optimizing eBPF I/O latency accounting when running 37M IOPS, on 384 CPUs

tanelpoder.com/posts/optimi...

The Pentium chip under a microscope. It is a complex pattern of tan and brown regions, mostly rectangular. I've labeled the main functional blocks, such as the caches, the integer execution unit, the floating point unit, and the microcode ROM.

The Pentium processor, like many others, implements its instructions in microcode. Each step of an instruction is described by a micro-instruction, stored in the chip in the microcode ROM.
This die photo shows the parts of the Pentium. Let's take a quick look at the microcode ROM...1/N

Meet the recipients of the 2024 ACM A.M. Turing Award, Andrew G. Barto and Richard S. Sutton! They are recognized for developing the conceptual and algorithmic foundations of reinforcement learning. Please join us in congratulating the two recipients! bit.ly/4hpdsbD