iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Tim Misiak @timdbg.com · 29/09/2026

Wonderful google search feature I just discovered: Search for a TV show and the AI summary will helpfully give you a spoiler for the biggest twists.

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Tim Misiak @timdbg.com · 24/09/2026

I find it very funny that models like Opus are heavily trained on the idea of measuring coding effort in terms of "days" and "weeks" that correspond to human developers. Yes it *could* take weeks for a human to convert this code from WebGL to WebGPU, but I bet Opus does it in one prompt.

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Tim Misiak @timdbg.com · 10/09/2026

I used to have weird dreams like this while working on the windows kernel debugger team.

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Jason Scott @textfiles.com · 05/09/2026

You know, honestly, more than monetary donations, if somebody worked at a company that had access to a lot of 18 terabyte and larger hard drives and could talk to us, that's where we are really suffering. The internet archive has no special priority in buying hard drives and those things are insane.

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Tim Misiak @timdbg.com · 17/08/2026

Just got back from Texas. Really weird to land in Texas and have bluesky tell me "you need to upload your driver's license to keep using this app". How is anyone OK with that? Also, how is anyone OK with the temperature getting to 107?!

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Jason Scott @textfiles.com · 03/07/2026

I'll summarize this: Mamdani asked NYers to keep air conditioning at 78 degrees. A wave criticism hit online. A MSNBC broadcast pointed out the US Department of Energy recommends that 78 degree figure. Immediately after, the US Department of Energy deleted 6,000 web pages related to energy saving.

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Tim Misiak @timdbg.com · 26/06/2026

More vegetables need to have personality traits. Cool as a cucumber. Spiteful as a zucchini. Vengeful as a carrot. Angry as a radish.

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Tim Misiak @timdbg.com · 24/06/2026

Apparently this is what happens when you contribute code to a repository that goes to the "Arctic Code Vault" which then later gets disabled due to a TOS violation.

Image of a github "Arctic Code Vault Contributor" achievement saying that I have "contributed code to 0 repositories in the 2020 GitHub Archive Program"

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Tim Misiak @timdbg.com · 21/06/2026

Anna's Hummingbird at the arboretum this afternoon.

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Tim Misiak @timdbg.com · 15/06/2026

Cedar Waxwings this morning at Marymoor Park

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Visual Studio Code @vscode.dev · 09/06/2026

Mermaid diagrams are now built directly into VS Code. 🎉 No extra extension required. 🙌

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Tim Misiak @timdbg.com · 06/06/2026

The driver docs repo (including windbg documentation) got suspended for a TOS violation? So msft violated its own TOS and suspended itself?

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Tim Misiak @timdbg.com · 14/05/2026

Medina Park is quite a nice spot to get some bird pics. The heron nests can be seen from the walkway, and you can see the chicks with binoculars or a zoom lens.

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Tim Misiak @timdbg.com · 24/04/2026

Kind of impressed with Qwen 3.6, but it has this funny quirk where it's convinced it's the year 2024.

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Tim Misiak @timdbg.com · 24/04/2026

Oh wow, they've managed to turn my brain into an LLM.

User: Hello
Assistant: Thinking...
Here's a thinking process:

1. **Analyze User Input:** The user said "Hello" - a simple greeting.
2. **Identify Intent:** The user is initiating a conversation. No specific question or request is made.
3. **Determine Response Type:** A friendly, open-ended greeting in return, inviting further interaction.
4. **Formulate Response:** Acknowledge the greeting, respond warmly, and prompt for what they need help with. Examples: "Hello! How can I assist you today?" or "Hi there! What can I do for you?"
5. **Check Tone/Style:** Keep it polite, helpful, and concise. Match the simplicity of the input while remaining engaging.
6. **Final Output Generation:** "Hello! How can I help you today?" (or similar) -> This is appropriate and standard.✅
...done thinking.

Assistant: Hello! How can I assist you today?

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Tim Misiak @timdbg.com · 06/04/2026

This might be a hot take but I think anyone running a homelab should take the time to learn enough kuberenetes to run their stuff inside k3s. It has a slightly steeper learning curve compared to just using docker compose, but you can get a lot out of it.

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Tim Misiak @timdbg.com · 06/04/2026

My cell connection is 63x faster than this hotel wifi.

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Tim Misiak @timdbg.com · 04/04/2026

I set up a minimal ARM64 linux VM with IPv6-only networking on Azure (with a cloudflare tunnel for SSH access) and it took a FRACTION of the time compared to setting up on AWS. I haven't touched Azure at all since working at Microsoft and I'm honestly pretty impressed.

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Tim Misiak @timdbg.com · 28/03/2026

Anyone ride the 2 line today? Couldn't make a trip today but looking forward to seeing how the ride is sometime soon.

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Tim Misiak @timdbg.com · 17/03/2026

Is there really any point to JS frameworks anymore? I've spent some time experimenting with frameworks by using claude to sketch out similar ideas with different frameworks, and they pretty much universally make things worse compared to Web Components.

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Man in Business Suit Levitating @dfeldman.org · 08/03/2026

Oh it’s called shell scripting

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Tim Misiak @timdbg.com · 06/03/2026

Started using Claude exclusively instead of ChatGPT (for obvious reasons), and laughed out loud when I saw claude say "oh wait no my bad" in the middle of an explanation.

Screenshot of text from claude.ai:

Docker Compose integration:

There's no native Nix support in compose, but the cleanest approach short of a script is using compose's build with a custom dockerfile that just calls out... actually that defeats the purpose.

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Tim Misiak @timdbg.com · 01/03/2026

Anyone who made fun of the windows file copy progress dialog owes someone an apology. My rsync has been sitting at 95% for 12 hours and is still making solid progress copying to my new ZFS pool.

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Wil Wheaton ❌👑 @wilwheaton.net · 10/02/2026

If you still have a Ring camera, you may want to think about replacing it with something a little less Continental Panopticon. www.404media.co/with-ring-am...

404media.co

With Ring, American Consumers Built a Surveillance Dragnet

Ring's 'Search Party' is dystopian surveillance accelerationism.

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Tim Misiak @timdbg.com · 10/02/2026

Today I learned that not only could an enterprise drive be formatted with 520 byte sectors instead of 512 byte sectors (causing linux to shrug and give up) but also it could have special vendor firmware. It's been an ordeal, but it looks like openSeaChest and sg_format are going to save this drive.

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Tim Misiak @timdbg.com · 07/02/2026

This OpenClaw thing is amazing. It helped me corrupt my database in a fraction of the time it would've taken me to do it by hand.

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Tim Misiak @timdbg.com · 06/02/2026

If you've never played with server class machines, you'd never know some of the crazy stuff they can do. I learned today (from some drives I got on ebay) that multipath SAS is a thing. One drive connected to a single backplane talking to two HBAs. Like a little network for hard drives. Crazy

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Zach Weinersmith @zachweinersmith.bsky.social · 02/02/2026

Incidentally, I think reasonable people can still differ about whether this counts as thinking or understanding, but frankly either possibility is weird. Either a machine can think and reason really well, or you can somehow solve very hard open math problems without thinking/reasoning/understanding.

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Jen Gentleman @jenmsft.bsky.social · 31/10/2025

Parents - check your halloween candy carefully. Someone may try to teach your kids the C programming language

A snickers bar cut open with a basic example for how to swap two numbers using a temp variable in the C coding language

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Tim Misiak @timdbg.com · 18/10/2025

I'm switching to Anthropic for an app I'm building because OpenAI doesn't have an IPv6 endpoint... in 2025. Sorry, I'm not going to pay $45 a year extra just so I can have an IPv4 address to talk to your API.

A screenshot showing that api.openai.com only has IPv4 DNS entries, while api.anthropic.com has IPv4 and IPv6

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Tim Misiak @timdbg.com · 10/10/2025

If you just heard a really loud sigh, it's because I just saw the library book my son took home. It's about a kid who time travels to the distant past... to the year 1993

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GOTO Conferences @gotocon.com · 19/09/2025

🐞 Building a debugger = learning how computers really work. On today’s #GOTOpodcast, @timdbg.com & @tartanllama.xyz unpack: 🔍 The hidden complexity of stack unwinding & stepping 🖥️ Windows vs Linux debugging ⏳ Time travel debugging & the future 🎧 gotopia.tech/podcast

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Tim Misiak @timdbg.com · 29/08/2025

Feels strange cancelling my subscription to a VPS I used for some side projects, after being a customer for 20 years. Now I feel really old.

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Matt Godbolt @matt.godbolt.org · 17/08/2025

If you're like me and can't remember if it's RCX or R8 for the fourth parameter... Get the Compiler Explorer ABI Mug: actual calling conventions for x86-64 System V, Windows, and ARM64. Support @godbolt.org: grab yours here -> shop.compiler-explorer.com/collections/...

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The Onion @theonion.com · 13/08/2025

AOL To Discontinue Dial-Up Internet theonion.com/aol-to-...

“Hopefully it’s part of a broader plan to wind down the internet entirely.”

Michael Shim, Systems Analyst

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Gergely Orosz @gergely.pragmaticengineer.com · 10/07/2025

Microsoft: All-time high valuation All-time high revenue All-time high profits *Still does mass layoffs* (Sidenote: probably now is the single best time to hire, or try to hire from the company)

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Miguel de Icaza @migueldeicaza.bsky.social · 26/06/2025

There a gatcha machines for every interest group:

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Sy Brand @tartanllama.xyz · 10/06/2025

Building a Debugger is now officially released! It guides you through building a whole native x64 debugger from scratch, dispelling all the magic and teaching you a ton about operating systems as it goes. Even if you don't care about building a debugger, you can read it to your cat.

The book Building a Debugger, featuring a robot designing a complex debugging machine on a drafting board

The book placed in front of a tortie cat

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Tim Misiak @timdbg.com · 09/06/2025

I have a story about this. Arm kernel debugger would run the CPU at 100% when at an exception. Supposedly early WP hardware didn't have sufficient thermal protection so it could literally crash and burn. I don't know if it ever actually happened, but I was told to be careful when debugging.

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Tim Misiak @timdbg.com · 07/06/2025

100% accurate. I saw Dawson's first law many times working on WinDbg. With a few of them discovered by Dawson. The rest were discovered by the SQL server team using thread/module counts beyond what any sane person would expect. O(n^2) is the "works on my machine" of algorithmic complexity.

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Tim Misiak @timdbg.com · 05/06/2025

Looks like Google might be stepping up ad-blocking-blocking on YouTube. And considering they do absolutely nothing every time I report hateful and/or scam adverts, I guess it means I'm done with YouTube. Not that I needed much of a push.

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Tim Misiak @timdbg.com · 23/05/2025

Thank you, github copilot, for covering up part of the line of code I need to read with an offer to explain it to me, with no way to dismiss or scroll past the button.

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🇺🇦 Xorhex 🇺🇦 @xorhex.bsky.social · 16/05/2025

When emulating x86 shr, remember to apply the proper mask: “the count is masked against 1FH, essentially using only the lowest five bits of the rotation.2 If the REX.W prefix is used, the mask will be 3FH, meaning the maximum shift is 63 bits.” www.timdbg.com/posts/useles... Thanks @timdbg.com!

timdbg.com

Weird things I learned while writing an x86 emulator

If you’ve read my first post about assembly language, you might expect that this is another post on how to understand assembly language. I will write more about that at some point, but this post is no...

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Sy Brand @tartanllama.xyz · 13/05/2025

!!!!!! I have actually physical copies of my book

A view showing the spine, which is quite deep, as the book is over 700 pages ling

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Tim Misiak @timdbg.com · 08/05/2025

Really enjoyed interviewing @tartanllama.xyz about "Building a Debugger". This is a wonderful book for anyone who wants to learn more about how the OS, compiler, and debugger work together. It's not just for people who want to build a debugger!

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Tim Misiak @timdbg.com · 08/05/2025

Weird to see the logo I "helped" design pop up on a news site. But weirder to see why it popped up. Ai+windbg makes sense, but probably the biggest boost for most people is just fixing arcane interactions rather than deep insights. www.tomshardware.com/tech-industr...

tomshardware.com

AI taught to analyze Windows crash dumps, released to open source — 'like going from hunting with a stone spear to using a guided missile'

Brings crash dump analysis into the AI era by integrating GitHub Copilot with WinDBG.

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Tim Misiak @timdbg.com · 30/04/2025

Description of the PR that broke everything: "This PR should be noop."

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