kijiki

The primary focus is on RE, of course, but the folks there are generally curious, and a large minority of the talks are about forward engineering.

I gave a talk on work I had done with the Signal Foundation on building a binary->binary rewriting tool to secure their Intel SGX1 enclaves against the various Spectre and LVI vulnerabilities.

Oh, I almost forgot the Mountain View Reverse Engineering meetup. Very nerdy crowd.

Red Rock Coffee hosts recurring events. Not explicitly nerdy events, but the local demographics here mean that the crowd skews nerdy.

> So all traffic is routed over Shoreline and then enters downtown through Villa/Dana?

Yeah, they're planning to put a ramp from the Shoreline bridge over the tracks down to Evelyn to spread out the traffic, but right now people take Villa.

> Is there still pedestrian access from the northeast side of the Caltrain?

Yeah, all the crosswalks are still operational. The long term plan is to put a bike/ped tunnel under Central and to completely close off the Castro/Caltrain side.

> there've been times I've been stuck for 20 minutes trying to cross the 100 feet from Moffett to Castro in Mountain View, because the light timing never lined up with the train signals.

They've conveniently solved this by closing the Moffett->Castro side of that intersection entirely. You can still go Castro->Moffett, but they're planning on closing that to eliminate the grade crossing entirely.

qemu used to use that technique, but as you note, it was pretty brittle. They switched to the more traditional TCG backend.

Seconded enthusiastically. That dam tour is amazing. Did it in 2007 or so.

Expect potential weirdness though. My wife was wearing a (not particularly short) skirt, and the lady at the office selling tour tickets made her step back and spin around, then said she couldn't go in like that. There is a gift shop that sells dam branded pants, so she bought a pair and we were cleared to go in. After all that, one dude in the control room was watching soft-core porn on one of the control room computers.

The turbine shaft room is especially crazy, since they let you (at least back then) walk right up to a few inches away from the shaft mechanically transmitting 700 MW of power! You could reach out and touch it, but we didn't and I wouldn't recommend it.

Everyone?

Intel, at the time the unquestioned world leader in semiconductor fabrication was so unable to accurately predict the end of Dennard scaling that they rolled out the Pentium 4. "10Ghz by 2010!" was something they predicted publicly in earnest!

It, uhhh, didn't quite work out that way.

I arguably owe a successful career in tech to my dad seeing a $99 deal on a TI-99 after they were discontinued in the mid 80's and buying it just because he had had a shortwave receiver as a child and saw some weird similarity. Unbeknownst to him, it turned out my mother had been a FORTRAN programmer in the 70's (though she described it as working as a lab-tech in a bio lab), and taught me how to program it in its weird BASIC dialect.

I've never understood why Intel didn't just soft-disable AVX512 on P-cores until the OS writes a value to some MSR that means "I understand that only some cores have AVX512".

From the OS side, the change to support it is pretty simple. On the first #UD trap caused by an AVX512 instruction being missing, pin the process to just the P-cores and end the process's timeslice.

Lunar Lake Lenovo Carbon X1. If you get the IPS screen, you'll get even better than 12 hours.

I run kodi via OSMC on a Vera V.

It comes with a dedicated remote (though it does support CEC), which solves #1, at the cost of having an extra remote.

I mainly hit #2 when scrubbing, often (worse on some compression types than others), it'll just freeze frame for a minute before everything catches up. This may be because I'm serving the content via HTTP to the Vera V, I've been meaning to try NFS and/or SMB. Never had issues with playback itself, probably because the Vera V hardware and the OSMC/Kodi build are co-developed, so there is pretty much always hardware decode support.

#3 surprised me; Kodi supporting just using my directory layout is why I use it over something like Jellyfin! I just added the HTTP share, and then navigate Videos->files->my_http_share_name and I'm in my directory structure.

Most of the Intel cache partitioning things were driven primarily by Google. The holy grail was to colocate latency-sensitive tasks with bulk background tasks to increase cluster utilization.

> How do these guys get the data in order and we dont?

LAGs stripe traffic across links at the packet level, whereas QSFP/OSFP lanes do so at the bit level.

Different sized packets on different LAG links will take different amounts of time to transmit. So when striping bits, you effectively have a single ordered queue, whereas when striping packets across links, there are multiple independent queues.