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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 2h

  Being stuck in class with a crappy calculator is one of the few times a mass of students ever experience a super limited computing device.  

Even if the motivations are just games, speedups, or trying to cheat; it’s not often you get that “compute camaraderie”.

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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 2h

In the modern era we don’t really have a Commodore 64, or even a Motorola 68000 equivalent.  

You start with absurd amounts of power.

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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 2h

People will overlock the CPU 10x for the fun of it. 

I had the (superior, heh) Casio FX-9860GII. Limited C support, but that thing flew with an OC.

 It ate through batteries like mad, but that was part of the fun.

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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 2h

Graphing Calculators like the TI-83 receive a lot of hate for perceived obsoleteness.

Unironically, it’s one of the few times that younger generations experience a limited computing system.

The creativity from boredom, no phone, etc makes for some interesting programming.

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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 1d

Actually, later in the video, I talk about XcodeGhost, which was a very real malware that used some of these techniques, compromising a significant % of the iOS App store!

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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 1d

Full Video:
youtu.be/Fu3laL5VYdM

The Original Sin of Computing...that no one can fix

YouTube video by LaurieWired

youtu.be

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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 1d

Open Source isn't going to help.

There's a way to invisibly compromise all software.

A perfect, self-replicating "sin" passed down for generations of compilers.

It's not just theoretical, and Ken Thompson showed us how.

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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 2d

There’s a good textbook on the subject from MIT press, as well as an associated programming language.

Go check it out!  

www.cs.mun.ca/~banzhaf/AC-...

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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 2d

 So what is it good for?

  Basically, imagine you want a programmatic process, but at a bacterium / molecular level.  

We can’t get CPUs down there…but you can *sorta* turn your python code into an AC or genetic circuit.  

Thus, the computation occurs in-cell.  

It’s an insanely wild concept.

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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 2d

It get’s even weirder.  

You can *compile* Artificial Chemistries (ACs) to actual DNA molecules.  

Thus, the logic of your fake universe can be executed by real chemical systems via strand displacement.

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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 2d

There’s no main() function, loops, if-then statements.  

You literally dump a soup of artificial molecules into a virtual beaker.  

Then, they collide according to the rules of your made-up world.

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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 2d

Artificial Chemistries (ACs) are the weirdest kind of “programming” you’ve never heard of. 

Imagine being a chemist; but in an alternate-reality fanfiction where the elements that make up the world are wildly different.  

Here’s how you write it.

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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 3d

Mobile Data bandwidth is another rough one. I do think it will +10x, but the spectrum is pretty crowded.  

When performance is related to a thermodynamic, quantum, or perception limit (displays), tech progress is linear.

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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 3d

It’s easy to predict how tech will change in your lifetime based on which mechanisms are already near theoretical limits.  

- Battery energy density
- Display Resolution
- Datacenter Cooling
- Drone Endurance
- Skyscraper height 

 All very unlikely to 10x.

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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 4d

how did anyone seriously code in FORTRAN 

i just got an error for incrementing a variable in a loop??

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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 6d

I can suggest taking a look at Level1Techs for a more server-y perspective on DDR5.   

BuildZoid is an expert at DDR5 timings on more of a prosumer / overclocking side.

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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 6d

Some of you will remember how bad DDR2 was.

It really feels like the latest generation is a return to that “flaky” era.

  I know I’m ranting, but if you care about memory performance, manual tuning in this era is a nightmare.

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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 6d

DDR5-4800 was the baseline. 

Day one kits were pushing 6000+. Today, even 8000+. 

On-die error correction is masking chips that would have been binned as trash in the DDR4 era.

The gap between JEDEC spec and retail has never been wider.

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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 6d

More than ever, manufacturers have been pushing memory to the absolute limits. 

JEDEC, the standards committee, is pretty conservative. 

Yet the moment DDR5 launched, everyone threw JEDEC out the window.

Intel + AMD's memory controllers were *not* ready to handle it.

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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 6d

DDR5 is unstable garbage.

 Max out your memory channels? Flaky.
Temperature a bit too hot? Silent Throttle with no logs.
Too “Dense” of a stick? Good luck training.

Last gen was rock solid by comparison. Here's what happened.

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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 7d

In any case, it’s an interesting rabbit hole.

Check out the full ISA here: 
developer.apple.com/fonts/TrueTy...

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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 7d

The actual binary structure of a TTF font is pretty similar to Mac’s Mach-O executables.

Apple posts the full instruction set on their developer page; it’s pretty comically complicated.  

If I didn’t tell you this was a font, you’d likely guess it’s a (bit weird) CPU Architecture.

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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 7d

  Fontemon is a fun one, a pokemon-style game packaged as a TTF. 

llama.ttf is even more insane. A 60MB font that runs a 15M parameter llama model to generate stories. 

Seemingly normal at first, when you use excessive exclamation points it starts to generate text!

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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 7d

Anytime you can run code (albeit very limited code), someone will take advantage of it. 

TrueType (TT) is unfortunately famous for many Windows Kernel zero days. 

TT is memory bound, therefore not Turing-complete…but you can still do crazy things with it.

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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 7d

Virtual Machines render fonts. It’s kind of insane.  

TrueType has its own instruction set, memory stack, and function calls.  

You can debug it like assembly. It’s also exploitable:

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