Dear David, I'm afraid my off the cuff response the other day wasn't too well thought out; when you talked about taking calc III and linear algebra, and getting resistance from one of your friends because "wolfram alpha can do all of that now," my first reaction was horror-- which is why I replied t...

Here's the graph of a toy benchmark1 of page-aligned vs. mis-aligned accesses; it shows a ratio of performance between the two at different working set sizes. If this benchmark seems contrived, it actually comes from a real world example of the disastrous performance implications of using nice power...

Earlier this year, I interviewed with a well-known tech startup, one of the hundreds of companies that claims to have harder interviews, more challenging work, and smarter employees than Google1. My first interviewer, John, gave me the standard tour: micro-kitchen stocked with a combination of healt...

In CPU design, most successful teams have a fairly long lineage and rely heavily on experienced engineers. When we look at CPU startups, teams that have a successful exist often have a core team that's been together for decades. For example, PA Semi's acquisition by Apple was a moderately successful...

What's the first thing you do when you find a bug or see a missing feature in an open source project? Check out the project page and submit a patch! Oh. Maybe their message is so encouraging that they get hundreds of pull requests a week, and the backlog isn't that bad. Maybe not. Giant sucker than ...

You ever notice that there's this funny threshold for getting to the front page on sites like HN? The exact threshold varies depending on how much traffic there is, but, for articles that aren't wildly popular, there's this moment when the article is at N-1 votes. There is, perhaps, a 60% chance tha...

Troll? That's how people write Verilog1. At my old company, we had a team of formal methods PhD's who wrote a linter that typechecked our code, based on our naming convention. For our chip (which was small for a CPU), building a model (compiling) took about five minutes, running a single short test ...

Verilog is the most commonly used language for hardware design in America (VHDL is more common in Europe). Too bad it's so baroque. If you ever browse the Verilog questions on Stack Overflow, you'll find a large number of questions, usually downvoted, asking “why doesn't my code work?”, with code th...

About The Blog This started out as a way to jot down thoughts on areas that seem interesting but underappreciated. Since then, this site has grown to the point where it gets millions of hits a month and I see that it's commonly cited by professors in their courses and on stackoverflow. That's flatte...

this is an archive of an old article by John Carmack which seems to have disappeared off of the internet Abstract Virtual reality (VR) is one of the most demanding human-in-the-loop applications from a latency standpoint. The latency between the physical movement of a user’s head and updated photons...

This is a transcript of the Kara Swisher / Jack Dorsey interview from 2/12/2019, made by parsing the original Tweets because I wanted to be able to read this linearly. There's a "moment" that tries to track this, but since it doesn't distinguish between sub-threads in any way, you can't tell the dif...

This is an archive of the Jonathan Shapiro's "Retrospective Thoughts on BitC" that seems to have disappeared from the internet; at the time, BitC was aimed at the same niche as Rust Jonathan S. Shapiro shap at eros-os.org Fri Mar 23 15:06:41 PDT 2012 By now it will be obvious to everyone that I have...

This is an archive of an old Google Buzz conversation (circa 2010?) on a variety of topics, including whether or not it's inevetible that a closed platform will dominate social. Piaw: Social networks will be dominated primarily by network effects. That means in the long run, Facebook will dominate a...

This is an archive of an old Google Buzz conversation on MIT vs. Stanford and Silicon Valley vs. Boston There's no reason why the Boston area shouldn't be as much a hotbed of startups as Silicon Valley is. By contrast, there are lots of reasons why NYC is no good for startups. Nevertheless, Paul Gra...

This is an archive of some posts in a forum thread titled "Beware of Bioware" in a now defunct forum, with comments from that forum as well as blog comments from a now defunct blog that archived that made the first attempt to archive this content. The original posts were deleted shortly after being ...

This is an archive of Dan Weinreb's comments on Symbolics and Lisp machines. Rebuttal to Stallman’s Story About The Formation of Symbolics and LMI Richard Stallman has been telling a story about the origins of the Lisp machine companies, and the effects on the M.I.T. Artificial Intelligence Lab, for...

Archived from an unknown source. Possibly Gravitron? In regards for history: Chapter #1 (Around) December 1995 is when it all started. Rod Humble wished to create something like Air Warrior but online, he approached Virgin Interactive Entertainment with the idea and they replied with something along...