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LaurieWired

@lauriewired.bsky.social
7.6K followers 1 following 1.4K posts

researcher @google; serial complexity unpacker ex @ msft & aerospace

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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
My CppCon Keynote, “The Address is Not The Place” is now up on YouTube! It’s not often that we get new tiers added to the memory hierarchy of computing, but it sure is fun! You can certainly get ahead of the curve by thinking about the programmatic challenges (and possibilities) this will cause.
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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 10h
I stand by that some of the best ideas in Computer Science can be found from failed research of the late 90s. 

 DataScalar is no longer around, but they would have made a killing today. 

 They created an architecture which was, to put it simply, a memory centric execution model.
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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Imagine a computer that took so long to boot, the mean time to failure (MTTF) was…shorter than the boot time! ASCI Q, the supercomputer, failed every 6.5 hours from 2002-2003. It also, worryingly, took as much as ~8 hours for a whole-machine reboot!
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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
It’s surprising the first full 3D nuclear simulation wasn’t completed until…2002!

 Interesting computational dilemma here. Given a limited amount of FLOPs…how do you spend it?

 Assuming the same resolution, physical simulation dimensions (very roughly) translate to equivalent Big O complexity.
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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Say what you will about Windows (OS), but the NT kernel really is an engineering marvel that still puts Linux to shame in many ways. The quickest way to describe it for a programmer, is NT was more like an object-oriented language, with a strong security model from day one, whereas Linux is…not.
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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
You know what’s harder than performance optimization? …Deoptimization. It’s a pretty fun concept you use every day without realizing it. The *only* reason modern dynamic languages can “fly so close to the sun” is because they have a safety-net when they over optimize.
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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
If you’re a CPU architecture nerd, do yourself a favor and read FEX’s latest blogpost on emulating x86-TSO. Do you like reading Dolphin-EMU’s dev blogs? Then you’ll enjoy this. Apple has the huge advantage of being vertically integrated so Rosetta was able to “cheat” with dedicated x86 semantics.
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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
Had fun speaking with @bloopmuseum today at CppCon; if you’re here, swing by their booth while they’re around!

 I haven’t been yet, but they’ve apparently bought out a huge abandoned government building in Pittsburgh and are filling it with a ton of vintage computing equipment.
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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
My CppCon keynote went really well! Fun times talking about new memory hierarchies and the best ways we can programmatically prepare for them in advance.
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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
very cool dinner last night :)
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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
turns out compiler explorer isn't just a website
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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
If you’re a CS student, I’d suggest writing your thesis around SDCs (silent data corruptions) and efficient algorithmic fault tolerance.

 We’re quickly going to need to accept the (un)reliability of computing systems again!
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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
For the average consumer, would you rather have 2x RAM, or 2x CPU? It’s interesting how the answer changes over the decades. 1975: RAM, no question. Anyone with an Altair wanted to run 8K BASIC, 4k BASIC was super stripped (no string variables!)…AND slow.
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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
Physical Data arrangement is going to be so, so important in the future. Say you want to match an H200 in bandwidth (~4.8TB/s), but with the new kid on the block, High-Bandwidth Flash (HBF). (Keep in mind, HBF is *attempting* to compete in the same arena as HBM, as a cheaper alt).
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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
No one talks about how the DRAM density curve has basically…flattened.

 Maxed-out Server 2021: 8TB Ram 
Maxed-out Server 2026: …also 8TB Ram

 That’s insane! A five-year stagnation. If your working set exceeds 8TB, tough luck!
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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
How good could active noise canceling in headphones get?

 It’s really one of the tightest time constraints in computing. Obviously, sound hits the microphone first *before* hitting your eardrum…but that’s only about 10 microseconds.
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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
I’ve alway’s thought it’s a shame that WebAssembly has the word “web” in it. Gives it a connotation that it’s “only for browsers” or something.

 Meanwhile, NASA’s over here with a flight-compliant derivative (SpaceWASM) intended for spacecraft!
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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
Say what you will about Meta, but you have to admit the “software unlocks” over the lifetime of the Quest 3 have been ridiculous.

 How do you go from 120hz at launch to 207hz without hardware changes? Almost double the refresh rate.
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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
i think this is a sign I should call it a day 😵‍💫
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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
What was the world’s loudest computer? 

The answer is really “anything that used an IBM line printer in the 60s”. 

Instead of printing in any traditional sense, the only way IBM could offer 1,400 lines a minute performance was by slamming the paper with electronic hammers into a character chain.
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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
Projects promoting programming in "natural language" are intrinsically doomed to fail. - Edsger W.Dijkstra, June 18th 1975
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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
Dual-ISA CPUs are weird, but surprisingly common in IBM land. The 615 was one of their worst bets. In the 90s, the company deeply deeply thought PowerPC was going to win. The problem was, the existing corpus of software was all written for x86.
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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
You’ve heard of DRAM, HBM, probably SRAM, but RDRAM…now that was a weird one. Famously used in the Sony PS2, its RDRAM had ~3x the bandwidth of your typical high end PC. If you want more memory bandwidth in a dense die, there’s (roughly) two things you can do.
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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
Very commonly, new hardware will come out, and the initial batch of papers run benchmarks using workloads with current assumptions. …and the “new” hardware looks like garbage. Early SSDs were trash.
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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
even bjarne agrees
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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
how can anyone say CS is boring when we literally have computers SHARING memory between each other now do you realize how insane that is? boatloads of low hanging fruit and no one is quite sure the best way to do it.
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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
This might be the most widely distributed image on the internet. Pretty tragic too. Anyone who used forums in the late 00s will be familiar with TinyPic+Photobucket. The idea of course was free image hosting supported by ads…but specifically on the uploaders side.
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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
What’s the smallest amount of useful work you can get done? For CPU’s it’s kinda complicated. Call it the “minimum profitable scheduling quantum”. Say you hiccup for ~1 microsecond. Maybe a memory stall or something. It’s an eternity (~5,000 cycles), but it’s also kinda…not?
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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 05/08/2026
Excited to be giving a keynote at CppCon 2026 this September, go check it out!
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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 02/08/2026
Wild, but expected. AUR (Arch Linux User Repository) pushes completely disabled atm due to influx of malware. I predicted widespread temporary shutdowns of major package repositories earlier this year. looks like it's happening!
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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
This is gonna make Rust programmers angry. 

Reflection is one of the most powerful concepts in Computer Science. Unfortunately, not every programming language is blessed enough to have it.
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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 28/07/2026
having too much fun with my next video
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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 25/07/2026
Imagine getting a Computer Science degree, but you are otherwise restricted to the works published across a 10-year timespan.

 What decade would you choose?

 The 1960s? The 1990s? What would give you the most durable understanding?
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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 24/07/2026
How do you protect an immensely vulnerable system against a stronger, even God-like adversary? Well, you use a Shadow Server of course.  Power plants have lots of interesting ideas. The NIST published a “Situational Awareness For Electric Utilities”.
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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 23/07/2026
Physical Hardware is often (artificially) softlocked by firmware. 
One of the biggest “unlock” hacks in history happened on IBM’s POWER8.

 IBM Servers are kinda weird. They often ship with 40+ processor cores installed, but you only get to use whatever was licensed.
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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
In terms of “gimmicky programming conference stuff”, the Java Ring might be the coolest.

 You’d get your ring, write down your coffee preferences, and then use it to authenticate for free “Java” at JavaOne 1998.
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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 16/07/2026
A Scottish audio company, famous for their turntables, once invented a CPU architecture.

 Their internal software kind of sucked. Somehow along the way, the company became convinced that the problem was that all Von Neumann-style computers were WRONG.
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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 15/07/2026
Erasing (not writing!) is the main thing that kills SSDs. With the industry pushing towards HBF as a DRAM / HBM alternative, endurance is the name of the game. There’s two knobs you can adjust for NAND flash that make a huge difference:
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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 14/07/2026
The first state-controlled, distributed computing project, was the British’s Naval Almanac. Intended to advance the greater good of humanity, pre-computed mathematical tables for naval navigation. 35 human “computers” did the calculations.
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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 13/07/2026
I’m convinced that a large % of programmers don’t actually like computers. As a side effect, are also perfectly happy to throw away their reasoning to a model as soon as they can. I don’t get it, at ALL.
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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 12/07/2026
How interesting. Samsung dropped a paper a few days ago with little fanfare:

 KV-cache offload over a CXL memory pool.

 Really scrappy setup too. Early-gen CXL stack (2.0), old switches, yet simple interleaving of the KV Cache across CXL modules kept the GPUs as well fed as real DRAM!
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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 11/07/2026
I wonder what the world would look like if IBM won instead of UNIX. IBM’s i operating system is gorgeous (and still updated)! Everything is an object, no binaries are native (translated bytecode, almost JVM-y), and pointers all have an absurd amount of (useful) metadata.
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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 09/07/2026
Real Time Audio on general purpose operating systems is ridiculously hard to code.

 Unfortunately (and unlike the visual system!) humans are *really* good at noticing audio hitches. In video, you might have ~16ms to process a video frame, and if you miss the deadline, eh...
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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
the sentence: “I’m going to reflect on my concepts” could mean soo many things in the context of C++ haha
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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 06/07/2026
It’s so funny that computers used to be stinky when they failed. In the 60’s IBM used selenium rectifiers. If you look at a periodic table, group 16, you’ll encounter what’s referred to as the “stinkogens”. Starting with sulphur, as you move down the column things get exponentially smellier.
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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 05/07/2026
@TheCherno has such an excellent programming channel. Been a fan for a while now, figure it deserves a shoutout if you haven't seen it before!
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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 05/07/2026
Happy fourth!
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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 02/07/2026
i’m pretty convinced that LISP is the highest-IQ programming language

 absolute S-tier reflection. if you use a derivative like 3-LISP I’d say you can even hit SS+ tier with it’s meta-circular interpreters.
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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 02/07/2026
everyone has a miniITX SFF phase before growing up and buying the chonkiest possible towers with no branding (girl by server for scale)
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LaurieWired @lauriewired.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
Something that keeps me up at night is the amount of miscompiled software running in the wild. There’s a famous story, “the Core 59 problem” from Facebook where seemingly random files were missing in one of their Spark databases.
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