Ricardo Nabinger Sanchez

Photo of the ruins of ancient Assur with a ziggurat rising in the distance and low remains of walls in the foreground. It looks like sunset or sunrise with the soft, orange lighting. Photo by Mahmoud Fakhri

How to make perfume in 1230 BCE in the heartland of ancient Assyria.

First, you need to mix cane with cleansed water from the palace well of the city of Aššur (pronounced Ashur).

Second, you need to pour this mixture into a special vessel before adding...

Book cover of "Designing Data-Intensive Applications, 2nd edition". It has a similar wild boar on the cover as the first edition, but it uses O'Reilly's new cover design, and the boar is now slightly colourised.

The second edition of Designing Data-Intensive Applications, by myself and @chris.blue, is finished and sent off to the printers! Ebooks should be available in the next week, and print books in 3–4 weeks. Sigh of relief. 😅

(BTW, this is a good opportunity to support your favourite local bookshop!)

Fuzzing software becomes much more effective if you can generate _valid_ inputs. We have now built the first approach to _statically_ extract complete and precise input grammars from parser code, producing syntactically valid and diverse inputs by construction. Enjoy! dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

A die photo of the 8086 microprocessor. The image shows a tan square with complex patterns of beige and dark lines showing the circuitry. Thicker light lines distribute power across the chip while black bond wires are attached around the edges. Various regions with different patterns are labeled with their function including a large rectangular region in the lower right that holds the microcode and the 16-bit ALU in the lower left. The ALU Control circuit at the bottom is highlighted.

The arithmetic/logic unit (ALU) in the Intel 8086 processor (1978) is more complicated than you might expect, performing 28 different operations from addition and logical AND to shifts and BCD adjustment. A special control circuit reconfigures the ALU for each operation. Let's look closer...

Brewster Kahle stands in front of a row of servers at the Internet Archive.

If you've ever wondered about the infrastructure behind the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine, check out this teardown ➡️ hackernoon.com/the-long-now...

Tessellations, Escher-style Discover great tessellation art, understand how it works, and create your own.

Tiled.art: “Discover great tessellation art, understand how it works, and create your own.” [tiled.art]

Linux 6.18: All About the New Long-Term Support Linux Kernel The newest version of the Linux kernel offers two years of long-term support, plus upgrades to the slab memory allocator, security hardening and more.

Linux 6.18: All About the New Long-Term Support Linux Kernel: thenewstack.io/linux-6-18-a... via @thenewstack.io & @sjvn.bsky.social

What exactly is Long Term Support #Linux, and what's in the latest LTS Linux kernel?

Parents, choosing button meme Send kids to dark web Talk to children

13) What if… just throwing out ideas here… what if… *you* didn’t sign up your pre-teens for social media sites?

What if *you* made a signal group chat with grandma instead?

No? Nuke privacy for everyone in society instead? I see. You clearly had no other choice.

A photo of the 8087 die under a microscope. The die is rectangular, with complex patterns in purplish-brown. The patterns consist of rectangular regions, striped regions in the bottom half of the chip, and other more irregular regions. At the right, two regions are highlighted in red: the registers and the stack control circuitry. Around the edges of the die, you can see the hair-thin bond wires that connect the chip to its 40 external pins. The complex patterns on the die are formed by its metal wiring, as well as the polysilicon and silicon underneath. The bottom half of the chip is the "datapath", the circuitry that performs calculations on 80-bit floating point values. At the left of the datapath, a constant ROM holds important constants such as π. At the right are the eight registers that form the stack, along with the stack control circuitry. The chip's instructions are defined by the large rectangular microcode ROM in the middle.

In 1980, Intel announced the 8087 Math Coprocessor, a chip that made floating-point 100 times faster. I opened up the chip, took photos of the silicon structures, and analyzed its circuitry. It's a very complex chip for its time. Let's take a look inside...

RAGE feat. Jen Majura - Lord Of The Flies (Wacken Open Air 2009) YouTube video by thegothictale

Maybe this vibe?
www.youtube.com/watch?v=vh56...

This...is Programming Like a Fighter Pilot.

A single unhandled exception destroyed a $500 million rocket in seconds.

The F-35 wasn't going to make the same mistake.

By carefully slicing C++, engineers created one of the strictest coding standards ever written.

TU Delft lecture: Security of Science - Bert Hubert This is a mostly verbatim transcript of my lecture at the TU Delft VvTP Physics symposium “Security of Science” held on the 20th of November. Audio version (scroll along the page to see the associated...

Recently I presented over at TU Delft on the Science of Security. Learn all about radar, stealth, penicillin, hydrogen bombs & my thoughts on how in Europe we have no good avenues for doing military tech research & how this could end up badly + some ideas how to do better:
berthub.eu/articles/pos...

Modern X86 Assembly Language Programming • Daniel Kusswurm & Matt Godbolt • GOTO 2025 YouTube video by GOTO Conferences

“Assembly isn’t dead - just specialized.” Matt Godbolt and Dan Kusswurm explore modern x86 coding, when assembly is worth it, and how it can deliver up to 100x speedups for critical tasks.
youtu.be/L2Qu9rk05rE?...

On the bright side, a good moment to check if "low toner", "printer open" LEDs are properly lit. Extra bonus if there is a "made a mess" LED, lit as well.

Bingeing TikTok reels may be hazardous to your well-being.

71 studies, >98k people: The more short-form videos teens and adults watched, the more they struggled with attention, self-control, and stress and anxiety.

Read a book. Watch a movie. Long live longform.

The world’s first microprocessor is *NOT* from Intel.



But you won’t find it in many textbooks.



It was a secret only declassified in 1998; for good reason. 



The Garrett AiResearch F14 Air Data Computer was 8x faster than the Intel 4004, and a year earlier!

This December, I'll be posting an article & video each day until Christmas in the Advent of Compiler Optimisations! #AoCO2025
Each day we'll explore a fun optimisation in C or C++; some low-level, x86 or ARM-specific, some high-level. Hope you'll join me!
YT: youtube.com/mattgodbolt
Blog: xania.org

Possibly a carpenter bee, feasting on a drop of honey placed on a small tree branch, over grass.

Brought up some honey to a (possibly) carpenter bee, that looked pretty exhausted. Quite uncommon for me to find them on the ground; lots of woodpeckers and other predators visit the garden.

Hope it can fuel up quickly and return to its nesting log soon enough!

Herbie will march triumphantly in 2050.

Modern cars are dangerously relying on software for trivial things such as starting the engine, for absolutely no good reason.

Frank Klepacki, particularly Command & Conquer (1995). It was an "AWE32" moment where a great game could have a soundtrack as good as the game/gameplay itself. In my opinion, Klepacki's soundtrack was on a different level, becaming an instant favourite for many years (decades!) to come.

#Intel released the 89th edition of the Software Developer’s Manuals with a new SEAM, and completely rewritten CPUID (with domain info) section:
All-in-One:
cdrdv2-public.intel.com/868137/32546...
Changes v81:
cdrdv2-public.intel.com/868136/25204...
UDB (opcode D6h) canonized

Colleges do a terrible job of teaching C++.



It’s not “C with Classes”. Injected into curriculums as a demonstration of early CS concepts, it leaves many with a sour taste.



Students later immediately fall in love with the first language that *doesn’t* feel that way.

An image with P99 CONF speakers

P99 CONF is next week! Which talks are on your "can't miss" list?

If you ever get a chance to inspire, do it! ... as great day had at #CyberGirlsFirst event at Aston Uni, inspiring 13yo girls to pursue tech careers by sharing my journey & passion for tech. Loved their energy & curiosity! Let's keep encouraging the next gen of women in STEM! #WomenInTech

Color coded display of a zlib compressed version of this post's text, rendered by the flateview demo

lynn.github.io/flateview/
Impressive. Visualizer of zlib (gzip) - paste in a paragraph or two of text.

Reminds me of @angealbertini.bsky.social's binary file-format illustrations (google 'corkami').

Everyone knows that the x86 ISA is big.


Modern CPUs have ~1000+ mnemonics. Guess how many make up 90% of compiled C/C++ code?

TWELVE. I'm not kidding.

The question is…what if we shrank it?

Panel 1. image of a huge nuclear plant. “Reactor Overheating” 2. A worker in a hazmat suit works at a computer. The screen reads: “Press cancel to avoid critical overload” 3 - 9. The worker continues to type at the computer. The screen changes in each panel and reads: “Enter password to confirm” “Incorrect password” “Incorrect password” “Do you want to reset your password?” “Reset link has been sent to your email” “Please choose a new password” “New password can't be the same as old password” The colour gets hotter in each panel. Starting blue in 1 and ending in red in 9. Panel 10. Wide view. The entire earth is blown up.

My latest cartoon for @newscientist.com

p.s. this week I am on a USA/Canada tour with my new book. Details and preorder links at tomgauld.com

Code Complete is one of the most enduring books on software engineering. Steve McConnell wrote the 900-page handbook just five years into his career - decades later, Code Complete is still a best-seller.

Steve rarely gives interviews, so I hope you enjoy this special one.

Our technical deep-dive about AppSuite PDF Editor backdoor is out 📝👇

www.gdatasoftware.com/blog/2025/08...
#GDATA #GDATATechblog #AppSuite