Friday, March 6, 2026

it all sucks


For larger applications there doesn't tend to be much useful retained L1 I-cache or D-cache from one process to the next on the same CPU. The notable exception is the microkernel itself. If IPC is synchronous, it seems as if you can sometimes skip the D-cache flush if a long enough string has been transferred, because it has effectively been flushed by the copy operation and the state now in the D-cache is receiver state. I'm not clear how helpful that is in practical terms.

Northup says that most of the hardware people are throwing up their hands at the cost of cache flush and declaring that dedicated secret stores are the answer and us punk-ass software pukes will just have to do more work to protect our secrets. Unfortunately, there are enough applications where that works to make it seem like a viable approach, and it becomes a big game of marketing "chicken" for competitive performance benchmarks. At least for now, the incentives do not favor the more secure approach.

humans are cannon fodder

ok that is not a good metaphor at any time in history, and certainly not these days.

 

but ignoring that: isn't it funny how captcha is getting unsolvable? and that there seems to be UX designs where you almost have to solve a captcha in order to get to the real captcha?


(i also love that aws help has broken internal links. because link checkers haven't been invented yet in our timeline?)


oh my digital lord in heaven above, have mercy. 

vibe code much, aws team?

 


evar moar

The days when nothing really works in tech land? Everything is janky or outright broken? And there's pretty much no easy way to discern where the fudge the problem is, end to end? That's our hallowed consumerist internet EXistenZ right now.

cAIgon, take me away

The UX of most-all systems is terrible, in ways big and small. I want an AI system that runs locally as a proxy for all web apps that lets me tell it what I want fixed, in natural language, interactively, and it will fix up the stuff so that the UX I experience is less wrong, less anti-user, less evil.

 

(e.g. Yahoo! Mail is a nightmare.) 

Saturday, February 28, 2026

after the drug trip

talking with copilot is like a drug trip (from what i have read in books) where you have awesome insights, but when you come down off it, you cannot explain it any more. 


i talk to copilot and it is amazing! we are building up a great idea! and then i ask for a design doc! ... and it outputs 7.3% of what happened. wtf.