Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
Bryan Cantrill reflects on Sun Microsystems’ culture and mistakes—what Oxide’s homage tees revive, and which lessons still matter for hardware-software companies.
3 min · 718 words
An unofficial community project revives Amiga Unix (Amix) for 68040/68060 machines and modern accelerators, with a modern toolchain, package manager, and open grimoire of the work.
3 min · 626 words
Glashütte Trash Clock – A 30-minute pendulum clock made from trash
Niklas Roy builds a fully mechanical 30-minute pendulum clock from scavenged junk in Glashütte, Saxony—documenting escapement design, found materials, and the craft of making timepieces from trash.
12 min · 2,722 words
Own the Agent, Rent the Intelligence: Building My Always-On AI Agent Server
James M explains why a Mac mini M6 became his always-on Hermes agent server—routing hard work to cheap cloud models like DeepSeek Flash and Claude Sonnet instead of owning local inference hardware.
24 min · 5,439 words
Hello, HellGatesPostmortem of a year-unsolved gate-level crackme that GPT-6 cracked in minutes
xutaxkamay recounts designing HellGates—a VHDL custom CPU with obfuscation, anti-tamper, and anti-debug that stumped humans and LLMs for a year—until GPT-6 solved it in under half an hour, then walks through what actually broke.
25 min · 5,662 words
Photon-Emission-Guided Laser Fault Injection Enables RP2350 Secure DebugDifferential photon-emission microscopy localized debug enable register activity before SWD-guided laser injection restored Secure debug on an RP2350 A4.
Ledger Donjon shows how photon-emission microscopy guided laser fault injection to set DEBUGEN bits on a locked Raspberry Pi RP2350 A4, then used rescue reset to recover an OTP challenge secret—requiring destructive access and ~$250k lab gear.
13 min · 3,017 words
ShapeLearn-Lite Held Up. ShapeLearn Did Better: Qwen 3.8 27B
ByteShape publishes full ShapeLearn GGUF builds of Qwen 3.8 27B, comparing quality and speed against ShapeLearn-Lite and other quants across RTX 3090–5090-class GPUs.
19 min · 4,316 words
Daniel Mangum digs into unexpected register values on Nordic's nRF54L while poking the Key Management Unit from a debugger, and explains how SoC security components can make the debugger's view of memory misleading.
11 min · 2,579 words
How did AMD Ryzen get 50% faster in two years?
Daniel Lemire compares AMD Ryzen 7 X3D chips from Zen 3 to Zen 5: Geekbench gains of ~50% came less from clock and more from wider cores, larger caches, bigger ROBs, and 512-bit SIMD.
2 min · 468 words
The Lamentable Later Life of LemmingsHow a 1990s smash franchise faded after DMA Design’s early triumph
Jimmy Maher’s Digital Antiquarian traces the later Lemmings sequels and ports after the 1991 phenomenon—covering DMA Design’s struggle to turn a surprise hit into a lasting franchise, and why the later games never matched the original’s magic.
19 min · 4,454 words
Dylan Patel's Information Machine
Substrate profiles Dylan Patel and SemiAnalysis: how a research shop became an information machine covering AI infrastructure, semiconductors, and the supply chains that power frontier models.
14 min · 3,133 words
Introducing Bonsai 2 27B: Near-Lossless Compression in a 9x Smaller Footprint
PrismML introduces Bonsai 2 27B, a near-lossless compression of a 27B-class multimodal model into roughly a 9× smaller footprint aimed at efficient on-device and local inference.
4 min · 931 words
This year we are going to see many LLMs<sup>1</sup> being tested as robot-use agents. In the same way as an LLM can use tools like calculators, web search, and even complete computers (“computer-use agents”), an LLM can also use a robot as a tool. Think of it as Claude acting as the puppeteer of a robot body. This ability has been researched for years<sup>2</sup> <sup>3</sup> <sup>4</sup>, but a common view remained that while LLMs might be useful for high-level planning,…
3 min · 611 words
How SpaceX Streamlined the Raptor Engine
Brian Potter walks through Raptor 1→3: how SpaceX deleted sensors and flanges, internalized plumbing with 3D printing, and cut vehicle-side heat-shield mass while raising thrust—and where complexity merely moved inside.
15 min · 3,366 words
Welcome to the first feature article on our site. We’re going to cover an ongoing problem with x86 emulation that affects every application that we emulate. This comes down to a single over-arching term that has wide-reaching ramifications; Emulating the x86 Total Store Ordering memory model (x86-TSO).
31 min · 7,172 words
Flock cameras are riddled with security vulnerabilities and hard-coded credentials
This morning, DDoSecrets published an exciting new dataset: Filesystem images of the partitions from an in-use Flock ALPR camera. 404 Media and Wired published a joint investigation into it. I downloaded the dataset and am now thoroughly nerd-sniped. Hackers from a collective called stegan0gram collected the data. “Why just destroy [Flock cameras] when we can reverse engineer them and find the secrets of those spying on us?” one of the hackers told 404 Media and Wired in an interview. “We liberated hardware in the field, disarmed them, and proceeded with reverse…
6 min · 1,438 words
Apple Copland D11E4 booting in your Browser
Michael Steil ships Apple’s cancelled Copland OS build D11E4 in-browser via improved DingusPPC wasm, with patch notes for unlocking the last developer build.
1 min · 161 words
Subnormal floating-point numbers are expensive… on Intel processors
Daniel Lemire benchmarks IEEE subnormal floating-point performance across Intel Granite/Emerald Rapids, AMD Zen 5, AWS Graviton 5, and Apple M4 Max, finding ~45–50× slower multiplies on Intel while AMD and Arm stay near full speed.
2 min · 466 words
Running Ubuntu on the Lenovo IdeaPad Duet
A hands-on walkthrough of firmware hacking a Lenovo IdeaPad Duet Chromebook (ARM64 MediaTek) to run Ubuntu after ChromeOS and postmarketOS fell short.
38 min · 8,821 words
The engineering behind the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve
One of the most fascinating things I’ve learned about recently is the engineering behind the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Here are the key requirements it’s designed to meet:
4 min · 939 words