The article details the collaborative effort to disassemble and decode the microcode ROM of the Intel 80386 processor, which contains 94,720 bits—far larger than the 8086's 10,752 bits. Using high-res…
The article describes the process of extracting and disassembling the microcode ROMs from high-resolution photographs of the Intel 8086 and 8088 dies, revealing the internal instruction sequences of t…
In a letter to their children's headmistress, parents Andrew and Genevieve Jenner declined to provide the countries of birth and nationalities of their children for a Department for Education census, …
The article argues that political parties often simplify their missions to maximizing GDP (right) or equality (left), but both approaches can lead to undesirable outcomes. It proposes an alternative m…
The article argues that web browsers should block ads on behalf of users, even if it means running scripts twice to prevent websites from detecting the blocking. The author contends that the web would…
The article argues that online reputation systems should rely on whitelists and subjective, PageRank-like scoring rather than blacklists or global scores, because internet identities can be easily aba…
The article discusses the high cost of housing, particularly for younger adults who struggle to afford homeownership despite stable wages. It explores the hypothetical elimination of mortgage foreclos…
The article discusses a design consideration for the ALFE programming language, where the author explores the possibility of treating integers as types to enable fixed-length arrays indexed by non-int…
The article argues that humanity has already created a "paperclip maximizer" in the form of a global economic system optimized for profit, which operates without any central control or "off switch." I…
The article discusses the potential benefits of hardware support for "ravioli memory," a concept where data is stored in fixed-size blocks called ravioli. It explores how hardware could accelerate ope…