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abhi9u.bsky.social
NetBSD Dev | Python Internals, AI, compilers, databases, & performance engineering | https://blog.codingconfessions.com/
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Every few years linux distributions decide that they need to make it more difficult for you to generate and find core dump files. Now you need to install a systemd utility to do this.

submitted 9 days ago • 1 comment

Woke up to an email from Douglas Mcilroy himself in response to my article on his work on Unix Spell. I am very grateful that he took the time to read and respond to it! PS: I fixed the error he found in the article. Article: blog.codingconfessions.com/p/how-unix-s...

submitted 21 days ago • 0 comments

How do you fit a 250kB dictionary in 64kB of RAM and still perform fast lookups? For reference, even with gzip -9, you can't compress this file below 85kB. In the 1970s, Douglas McIlroy faced this exact challenge while implementing the spell checker for Unix at AT&T.

submitted 39 days ago • 1 comment

Some old papers are a joy to read because of their simplicity. This is the abstract from a 1966 paper describing a compression technique for infinite codes. For static data, you know the probabilities of the symbols, and can build a Huffman tree, but for an infinite stream, you can't do that

submitted 53 days ago • 2 comments

Back to school, time for Free Python Coding Resources for Schools, and by resources we mean our entire curriculum, all video lessons Help us spread the word with school teachers everywhere 50+ hours of lessons covering all levels, beginner to advanced, designed specifically for school children …👇🏻

submitted 55 days ago • 5 comments

I noticed that my latest article trending on HN! So it's worth sharing here as well. It is first in a series to cover the internals of context switching in Linux. This one explains the core data structures for process and state management during context switching.

submitted 55 days ago • 0 comments

An article I wrote a while back was trending on HN today. It explains the impossibility theorem of clustering, according to which a perfect clustering algorithm is impossible to achieve.

submitted 61 days ago • 1 comment

You thought systems programmers don't need to know math? Linux kernel developers prove you wrong by contradiction—they prove corollaries in their comments.

submitted 63 days ago • 0 comments

What does it mean for something to be Turing complete? I answer this question, and more, through a series of fully interactive Turing machine simulations! Play, pause, step forwards and backwards, and even write your own Turing machine programs in my latest blog post. samwho.dev/turing-machi...

submitted 68 days ago • 23 comments

Continuing on the hardware concurrency thread, this paper is a must read. It simplifies reasoning about concurrency on x86 by providing an abstract machine model

submitted 68 days ago • 0 comments

What every systems programmer should know about concurrency—a very dense but impactful read. Things like lock free and wait free synchronisation techniques will stop seeming like black box if you understand this. PDF: assets.bitbashing.io/papers/concu...

submitted 80 days ago • 0 comments

Ulrich Drepper is a rockstar. I keep running into his papers. This one is on the implementation of thread local storage: PDF: www.akkadia.org/drepper/tls....

submitted 81 days ago • 0 comments

Sometimes it takes me 22 years (+ one evening) to write a blog post. Here are my thoughts on "homoiconicity" and, as an alternative, "bicameral syntax". (Warning: 4000 words.) parentheticallyspeaking.org/articles/bic...

submitted 87 days ago • 24 comments

When you first learn about the fork() syscall, it can seem magical. How can a single system call produce two different return values at the same time?! In my latest article, I demystify the hidden magic of fork and also show how it is implemented in Linux. blog.codingconfessions.com/p/the-magic-...

submitted 92 days ago • 1 comment

Visualising transformers and attention - by none other than 3bluebrown youtu.be/KJtZARuO3JY?...

submitted 93 days ago • 1 comment

Hacking on some code while Cooper is occupied watching a movie.

submitted 97 days ago • 0 comments

Recently, I discovered a hidden Easter egg inside Cpython and I wrote a very short post about it which is trending in a few forums. blog.codingconfessions.com/p/cpython-hi...

submitted 99 days ago • 0 comments

Ben Affleck's interview on his views on LLMs is going around. I wonder if Matt Damon is somewhere saying this to someone:

submitted 99 days ago • 0 comments

I felt I needed to do something to keep my reputation as "The Turtle Guy"—funnily enough, I rarely post about `turtle`, but when I do, people seem to notice… Anyway, for the latest article on The Python Coding Stack, I revisited an old project… www.thepythoncodingstack.com/p/python-tur...

submitted 102 days ago • 0 comments