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C's Flexible Integer Sizes Were Not a Design Mistake
Gustavo Pezzi defends C’s platform-sized integers: how 12–60-bit machines shaped int, why minimum ranges beat fixed widths, and what Lua’s portable C still teaches.
2 min · 486 words
Arm & SoftBank: Part 1 — Masa comes calling, bearing gifts
Today, something a little different: a joint post in the form of a conversation between Jon Metzler and Babbage.
11 min · 2,555 words
Friday Facts #447 - Factorio that you can touch
Factorio’s Friday Facts #447 covers a physical Factorio experience: how a playtesting event snowballed into a touchable factory build players can visit, with design notes from the Wube team.
10 min · 2,235 words
John D. Cook explains dawn-dusk sun-synchronous orbits: why satellites there stay in perpetual sunlight, and what that means for powering orbital compute servers.
1 min · 257 words
When to choose x86-64 vs aarch64
Not all cloud vCPUs are created equal. When you create a PlanetScale Postgres or Neki database, you have to choose between `aarch64` (ARM) and `x86-64`. Two clusters on different architectures can have the same vCPU count and RAM, yet perform very differently. It's worth understanding the implications, since you can't easily switch the CPU architecture on your cluster later. x86 grew up on the desktop, prioritizing backward compatibility and performance. It began at Intel in 1978 and IBM’s…
6 min · 1,326 words
Mac Mini M6: Retro PC Emulation with 86Box (600MHz PII?!)
Benchmarking cycle-accurate 86Box on an M6 Mac Mini: why one core matters for retro PC emulation, a stable 600MHz Pentium II clock, and how timing accuracy compares to original hardware.
7 min · 1,678 words
Lab on a Contact Lens Can Measure Stress Through Serotonin
IEEE Spectrum covers a smart contact lens that aims to measure serotonin as a stress biomarker, part of a broader push toward continuous body-chemistry sensing.
4 min · 960 words
mitxela builds a FLIP fluid simulation on salvaged Hanover flipdot panels for EMF2026—drive electronics, power, eight-panel install, and the pun that started it.
2 min · 377 words
One CPU Atomic Instruction, One Packaging Infinite Loop: The Story of the Lost Update on LA664
Jie Ge documents a Loongson LA664 erratum where an atomic instruction can lose updates, how it surfaced as an infinite packaging loop, the root cause analysis, and what it means for correctness on that CPU.
14 min · 3,163 words
Building a 64-Bit OS — Chapter 3: Interrupt Descriptor Tables (The magic behind a working keyboard)
Building a 64-Bit OS — Chapter 3: Interrupt Descriptor Tables (The magic behind a working keyboard) Interrupts Interrupts are easily one of my favorite topics.
11 min · 2,612 words
Notes on loading oliveoil22's Casio CZ-101 patch banks into the browser-based CZP-1 synthesizer, with downloadable JSON bank data and step-by-step library import instructions.
2 min · 363 words
Behind Project Suncatcher, our moonshot to put AI in space
Google Research outlines Project Suncatcher: a moonshot exploring solar-powered ML infrastructure in space, and the engineering facts behind the idea.
4 min · 846 words
Blinking a Blue Pill LED with Rust, from scratch
A from-scratch Blue Pill walkthrough in Rust without a HAL: wiring and flashing, the reset vector, volatile GPIO writes, delay loops, and the assumptions a working blink can hide.
22 min · 5,155 words
Why Buran Had Four Computers, Not Three — and What a Lean Proof Adds
**Date:** September 24, 2026 · **Author:** Dmitrii Zatona - Buran’s flight computer was four identical Biser-4 machines running the same programs synchronously. A comparison scheme blocked a failed one, and the design had to survive any two failures (Section 1). - Four is what two failures cost if a failed channel is found by comparing outputs alone. It is not the 3f + 1 of Byzantine agreement, which is a different problem (Sections 2 and 3).
33 min · 7,503 words
Running local LLMs on your Mac: what fits, what's free, and what's overkill
A practical guide to running language models on Apple Silicon: which sizes fit common Macs, free options that work well, and when bigger local models are overkill.
5 min · 1,125 words
An essay arguing that LLM tokens are heading toward electricity-like cheapness within a decade—covering GPUs, models, inference engines, MoE, local vs hosted AI—and what Jevons-paradox demand and investor returns look like when inference is abundant.
14 min · 3,198 words
SDF vs. MSDF vs. Slug: GPU Text Rendering
Chris Hanson compares SDF, MSDF, Slug, texture atlases, and Rive for GPU text: how signed-distance fields trade sharpness, memory, and shader cost when you draw outlines yourself.
15 min · 3,398 words
mantle.nes breakdown blog part 1
Drmelon walks through building mantle.nes—a multi-month NES demake/fangame of a Deltarune Chapter 3 sequence—covering constraints, techniques, and why the project took shape.
16 min · 3,755 words
ReBarUEFI: Resizable BAR for almost any UEFI systemA DXE driver and tooling to enable Resizable BAR on motherboards that never exposed the option.
Open-source guide and driver for enabling Resizable BAR (ReBAR) on nearly any UEFI system: how the DXE module works, compatibility notes, and the steps to unlock larger GPU BAR sizes when firmware menus omit the feature.
4 min · 880 words
Extending Scapy for Hardware Reverse Engineering
VoidStar Security shows how to use Scapy as a binary protocol framework to dissect SPI/QSPI logic-analyzer captures, trace flash erase/program cycles, and reconstruct firmware without desoldering the chip.
24 min · 5,435 words