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Dan Luu surveys public postmortems and finds that most severe outages stem from a handful of recurring causes—poor error‑handling code, risky configuration changes, hardware faults, manual processes, and missing monitoring/alerting. He backs the claims with study numbers and argues engineers should focus on testing, automation, and observability to cut these failure modes.
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This satirical essay argues that systems programmers are the most crucial engineers, especially for post-apocalyptic survival, due to their experience debugging low-level hardware and distributed systems. It humorously contrasts the brutal realities of systems debugging with the perceived softer challenges of fields like HCI and machine learning.
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Researchers used photon‑emission microscopy to locate the DEBUGEN register on a decapsulated RP2350, then applied focused laser pulses to flip its bits, re‑enabling Secure debug and extracting a secret stored in OTP memory. The attack needs physical access and a $250 k lab setup, showing that the chip’s permanent debug‑disable can be overridden.
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This post details a year of significant updates to w64devkit, a Windows development kit, including enhanced release security with code signing and immutability, and a multilib x64 toolchain. It also introduces new build tools like CMake, Ninja, and Ccache, alongside a custom C11 threads implementation and improvements to Binutils and GCC.
Why is there no Windows hot-patching support for other architectures like 32-bit ARM and MIPS?
Windows hot-patching supports x86 and 64-bit ARM, but not older architectures like MIPS because they predate the feature. 32-bit ARM lacks support because hot-patching is a Windows Server feature, and no 32-bit ARM Windows Server existed.
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