I have fond memories from the late 1980s of trying to get the assembler contained within this book working, typing line after line of the MLX listing in. Unfortunately I never did finish it back then.

A week or so ago I got the urge to complete this project and I literally just finished getting the source in it to a point where it can be compiled online and then within an emulator: https://github.com/jlmcgraw/LADS_DOS33

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John Carmack on mutable variables 9 months ago

For what it's worth, I was experimenting with this idea for Python (in an almost completely vibe-coded fashion) here: https://github.com/jlmcgraw/pure-function-decorators

Whether it's of any actual utility is debatable

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RustGPT: A pure-Rust transformer LLM built from scratch 10 months ago

Some commentary from the author here: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1nguv1a/i_built_an_ll...

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Microsoft’s original source code 1 year ago

I wonder who the handwritten notes on page 98 are by?

Starts with "confirm plane reservation on Tue. Sept 2 or Wed. Sept 3" which is correct for 1975

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The Washington Post kills off its "Democracy Dies In Darkness" slogan 2 years ago

“Democracy drowns in dollars” seems sadly more accurate

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Say less in your emails, get more replies (2017) 2 years ago

A style I picked up from a relative, who is a lawyer, is to make bullet points with minimal other fluff:

  Addressee,
   - Do this
   - Then that
   - Be sure to be aware of this

I found it impersonal at first, but it's very effective in calling out the things that need attention

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Hiding messages in x86 binaries using semantic duals 6 years ago

:You’re thinking of A86:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A86_(software)

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Passwords: Using 3 Random Words Is a Really Bad Idea (2017) 8 years ago

I wrote a perl script a while back to create random passphrases based on a random mnemonic word

It seems like a good idea to me but I’m not knowledgeable enough about cryptography to know if that’s really true and would be very interested to hear from anyone who does know

https://github.com/jlmcgraw/mnemonic_passphrase

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Permanent Daylight Saving Time? Florida Says Yes, but It’s Not So Simple 8 years ago

Since devices that automatically set their own time are so common now I’ve sometimes wondered why we don’t try moving the time forward/back by some smaller increment each day instead of a full hour twice a year.

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How Long Is Long Enough? Minimum Password Lengths by the World's Top Sites 8 years ago

I did something very similar but had the thought that making the passphrase be based on an existing word would make a good balance between security and ease of remembering without a password manager.

Of course it isn’t as strong as a purely random passphrase but hopefully it would be strong enough and still better than choosing your own password

https://github.com/jlmcgraw/mnemonic_passphrase

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