One of the games of all time

You said they’re called octets because they’re supposed to be written in octal. I was saying why I don’t think that’s true.

That smells a little like folk etymology to me, are you sure about that? My understanding is that since the word is older than computers and can refer to any group of 8 things, “octet” in computing just came from the need to communicate a group of exactly 8 bits given that bytes aren’t always that size.

Slow depends on the use case. If your main bottlenecks are in code that people have written highly optimized lower-level libraries for, it could be slower to roll your own implementation or use a less mature library in a different language. And in some cases it might not matter if you take 1 ms or 100 ms to do something.

It works the other way too, and you have to weigh the pros and cons of your specific case when you choose a language. What level of abstraction do you want to work at, how stable do you need the toolchain to be, how familiar you are with the language, what’s supported in the language, how easy is it to do what you want, what’s the norm in the domain you’re working in, etc.

I’ve had some not so good pig intestine and some phenomenal, and the worse ones were similar to how you described it. If you ever decide you’d try it again, I think it’s so much better when crispy. The texture reminds me of bacon with a gelatinous, melt in your mouth center almost like burnt ends.

I wouldn’t buy a whole thing from the store unless you know you like it, but if you like cilantro and jalapeno, a banh mi with head cheese and pate is a good way to try it. It’s a delicious mix of fresh, savory, fluffy, crunchy, and chewy.

Canonical’s hiring process is wild. The number of stages is a deal breaker in itself, but the bizarre questions and the tests you mentioned don’t do them any favors either.

I lost interest in the first stage with them asking for an essay about things like what kind of student I was in high school. The full email was massive.

Slop, I think. Their replies smell like they came out of an LLM, and they have a Claude attribution in their commits. Comes off as grifting or cosplaying to me.

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I don’t think this paints all of atheism as a bad thing, just satirizes militant atheists who struggle with the fact that others can peacefully hold beliefs that are incompatible with their own. Reddit’s full of them, and they’re the equivalent of the evangelizing Christian that jumps on the “you need Jesus” spiel at the first whiff of non-Christian views.

In my (atheist) opinion, the two are equally obnoxious.

• How can iodéOS (Lineage fork) be installed on phones with bootloaders locked?

I just don’t understand how they can create an installer that works with bootloader locked phones, and then the OS remain completely secure.

Barring exploits, phones with a locked bootloader can’t be flashed with a different OS by design.

Thanks for calling out the bullshit, friend. Mainstream science literacy is in a sad state.

Not moving the goalposts at all, you’re just missing the forest for the trees. The main point is that there are plenty of use cases that can use pure C with no assembly. I went with a simple example because I thought you’d have an issue with more complex examples like sending a notification over SMS via modem or providing a serial interface for sensor data.

I don’t feel like arguing for the sake of arguing, though, and I feel like we’re in a pedantry spiral, so I’ll leave the conversation at that. Hope you enjoy your day.

Again, those aren’t universally required. You can make an embedded device that reads the ambient light levels and turns on an LED when it’s dark without thread stacks, privileges, or interrupts. Don’t make your system more complicated than it needs to be.

Not necessarily. Let’s say that…

• The stack pointer is defined in the vector table to point somewhere into RAM.
• The reset vector points to some function _entry(), with a linker script to take care of its memory placement.
• All other interrupt handlers are arbitrary C functions.

You can compile only your C source file that defines _entry() and interrupt vectors, then flash the resulting firmware. No assembly involved, no external linkage, and no stdlib required.

My point is that assembly isn’t strictly required. You can do memory-mapped reads and writes from C all you want, which is enough for plenty of I/O: storage, serial, sensors, GPIOs… You can build quite a few things with these without touching system registers.

I’m not saying we should abolish assembly. Just that it isn’t a universal requirement.

Yeah, if your bootloader is expected to handle that you’re going to need assembly. That can also be delegated to the kernel, RTOS, or bare metal reset vector later on in the boot sequence, though. I had to write a bootloader for an embedded system like this once and it basically just applied firmware updates, validated the firmware, and handed control over to the firmware.

Reminds me of not long after I started using Linux. I thought the kernel was “just a program” like cat and tried to run the kernel from the terminal, only to be disappointed when a new kernel in fact did not start running inside the terminal window.

A little hair-splicy, but an assembly-free bootloader is definitely doable on some platforms – Cortex-M processors load the stack pointer from the vector table, and the initialized memory setup can be taken care of with memcpy.