rdmsr

It’s probably implied by something deep in the TOS.

What does the phrase "blood sport" mean here? Giving up literal blood sports seems so obvious as to not be worth mentioning, but metaphorical ones so vague that there's probably a better way to phrase it.

Microcode updates have to be rerun every boot since the updates aren't stored. Modern chips use only signed updates.

I'd be pretty surprised if they were successfully attacking chips through this mechanism. There are so many other devices that are much easier to own.

I should really read that paper, since I'm sort of confused by the threat model. Arbitrary queries seem like they would defeat the point. So I'm assuming this "using a secure, authenticated channel to communicate out, while still being monitored by the OS" model. That's a high bar for software not designed for SGX.

I presume it's relying on the paging behavior of SGX? (Either page faults or dirty bits).

Not without CPU support. Intel SGX, AMD SEV (sort of), and ARM trustzone (if you want to do a lot of work) make this possible.

People fall all the time. Climbers test movements by doing them (and most don't work).

Honnold left chalk marks on key holds on freerider to ensure he grabbed the right pieces.

One of the big selling points of x86 is backwards compatibility. If you have some OS from 1990 you can still run it (without emulation or virtualization, so long as it doesn't depend on clock speed), which is pretty crazy.

Slight aside, there are a lot of reasons that Itanium failed, but certainly one of them was lack of backwards compatibility.

Probably because the perceived skill difference between this and many other modern jobs is small. I can imagine people being incredulous that this is skill rather than something less deserved (luck/situation/...).

The skill difference between your average SWE (or even average college basketball player) and an NBA player is pretty massive (and quite visible). I'd imagine it's much harder to find an someone that says 'yeah that's easy I could do that' about an NBA career...

All you need for constitutional reform is a 50% majority on a referendum. That seems way too easy.

It's a comic that oversimplifies philosophical arguments and (often) makes fun of them.

It's not that 'having' willpower is bad, it's that the concept is misleading. Pretty much any story where someone changes themselves (or tries to) can be coerced into an anecdote about willpower.

The point here is that the thing which decides whether or not someone succeeds at changing themselves is not the having/not having of willpower, it's everything else. And willpower as a concept is just one more distraction.