Content here is by Michael Still, mikal@stillhq.com.
This book is a history of the Bell Labs run by AT&T for much of the 20th century. These are the labs which produced many of the things I use day to day — Unix and the C programming language for example, although this book focuses on other people present at the lab, and a…
I’ve been using virtio-serial for communications between Linux hypervisors and guest virtual machines for ages. Lots of other people do it to — the qemu guest agent for example is implemented like this. In fact, I think that’s where I got my original thoughts on the matter from. However, virtio-serial is actually fairly terrible to…
This is the fifth murderbot book and it’s a fun read just like the rest. Unfortunately, it’s also really short just like most of the others and I find that the story is therefore just a bit simple and two dimensional. It is nice that the story isn’t just a repeat of previous entries in…
This is the third book in this series, coming after Children of Time and Children of Ruin. While I really liked the first of the books in the series, the second felt weaker. While this one doesn’t review as well as the second I think it’s actually a stronger book. Whilst sometimes a bit repetitive…
The similarities and contrast between this book and AI Snake Oil are striking. For example, AI Snake Oil describes generative AI as something which largely works but is sometimes wrong, whereas this book is very concerned about how they’ve been rushed out the door in the wake of the unexpected popularity of ChatGPT despite clear…
I’m not really sure why, but I found it harder to get going on this book than the others in the series. It might have been that I was also reading a particularly good non-fiction book at the same time, or it might have been that the premise for these books is starting to wear…
Assuming anyone was paying attention, which I suspect they are not, they would have noticed that there are a lot of queued up pull requests for Shaken Fist right now. There are a couple of factors leading to that — there are now several bots which do automated pull requests for code hygiene purposes; and…
Nick recommended I read this book, so here it is. The book starts by providing an analogy for how we talk about AI — imagine that all transport vehicles were grouped by one generic term instead of a variety like “car”, “bus”, “rocket”, and “boat”. Imagine the confusion a conversation would experience if I was…
Noting that the Intel 4004 was normally sold as a chip set called the Intel MCS-4, the standard clock circuit used appears to be this (from this PDF, kindly provided by this vendor of MCS-4 test boards): Which means I want to work out what this circuit is doing. First off, let’s understand these flip…
Since about 2017, a group at Cisco has been working on an “OCI native operating system” under the title “project machine”, which is a terrible project name. I note that most of the people publicly involved in the project according to github commits no longer work at Cisco, so I cannot vouch for the health…