LaurieWired
researcher @google; serial complexity unpacker
ex @ msft & aerospace
- A fun quirk of modern languages is variable names aren’t restricted to ASCII. Most compilers won’t let you use emojis as identifiers in C++, but we *can* be pretty funny (notice cout). A legitimate use case is replicating scientific paper notation in code.
- today’s one-sentence horror: sudo has been largely maintained by a single person for ~30+ years
- Some of the most interesting software bugs involve Astral Planes. Yes, you heard that right. It’s slang for unicode characters beyond U+FFFF…aka above the standard memory space. MySQL, for example, used to be allergic to poop.
- if you’re a CS/EE student write your thesis on JIT compilation of eBPF for NVMe controllers there’s huge career alpha in computational storage; the standards are *just* starting to exist (TP4091)
- someone built a Linux CPU scheduler that makes scheduling decisions based on planetary positions and zodiac signs it actually works haha:
- how's your saturday going
- You’ve heard of bits. Maybe even Trits. What about Quats (base-4)? It’s actually heavily used in VRAM, high speed networking (think 800G ethernet), and the PCIe 6.0 spec. PAM4 is a neat little physics trick to squeeze out more bandwidth.
- really looking forward to giving this keynote! imo the best reverse engineers also deeply understand compilers; I’ll be getting into the weeds with LLVM for this one
- There’s only one place where code must be flawless, and unreadable. The International Obfuscated C Code Contest. Every year the entries are absurdly good…and there’s still room for more! You’ve got until March 13th to enter.
- This might be the most difficult CPU to program. The Intel i860 was useless for general operating systems. Context switches took ~2,000 cycles. *You* controlled the floating point pipeline. But, if you’re a genius, it was one of the most powerful chips that existed.
- new article I posted!
- An undergrad accidentally beat a Turing Award winner. A dog outperformed IBM's quantum computer. And Valve's video game code is now running Meta's datacenters. These are the wildest CS papers from 2025.
- This string is the spammiest possible email you can get. A typical spam threshold triggers at a score of 5. GTUBE (Generic Test for Unsolicited Bulk Email) tests at 1000. It's so, unbelievably strong, putting it in your email can ruin your sender score permanently.
- Dolphin’s dev blogs are some of the best technical writing on internet and not enough people read them. My favorite is their “Ridiculous Ubershader”. Pre-Compilation of the GameCube’s graphical effects is impossible: 5.64 x 10^511 possible states! So what do you do?
- It’s impossible to regex HTML. It also created the most famous StackOverflow post in history. Regular Expressions are a Chomsky Type-3 Grammar. Perfect for linear patterns…but no ability to “count”. HTML is a Chomsky Type-2 Grammar. AKA, it relies on nesting.
