Using Claude to build a complete Z80 emulator under clean room constraints — no existing emulator source code referenced, only the Zilog CPU User Manual. An LLM clean room implementation covering all official instructions, ACIA serial emulation, and CP/M support.
A response to Citrini Research's "The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis" scenario. Using Jevons Paradox and historical precedent, this piece argues that AI displacement models systematically undercount the demand expansion that follows when a critical input — in this case, cognitive labor — becomes dramatically cheaper. The article examines latent demand, competitive price dynamics, the speed of entrepreneurial response, and why the historical base rate favors expansion over permanent contraction.
A deep dive into the Lattice bytecode VM — a stack-based virtual machine with 100 opcodes, computed goto dispatch, pre-compiled concurrency sub-chunks, an ephemeral bump arena for string temporaries, a binary .latc serialization format, and a self-hosted compiler written in Lattice itself. Covers the instruction set architecture, upvalue-based closures, how structured concurrency compiles without AST dependency, and validation across 815 tests under AddressSanitizer.
A comprehensive review of Rue, a new systems programming language designed by Steve Klabnik and implemented primarily with Claude AI. Rue explores whether memory safety without garbage collection can be achieved more accessibly than Rust through affine types and mutable value semantics instead of a borrow checker. After a deep dive into Rue's features, type system, borrow-and-inout model, and the AI-assisted development story behind it, we evaluate what the language delivers today, what it's missing, and whether it points toward a real alternative for systems programmers frustrated by Rust's learning curve.
A review of "Crafting Interpreters" by Robert Nystrom, a book that guides readers through building two complete interpreters for the same language—first a tree-walk interpreter in Java, then a bytecode virtual machine in C. Nystrom's conversational writing style, hand-drawn illustrations, and incremental approach to complexity produce one of the best programming books in recent memory, transforming what could be an intimidating academic subject into an engaging, hands-on journey through scanning, parsing, scope resolution, closures, classes, inheritance, and garbage collection.
Step-by-step guide to upgrading from ROCm 7.0.2 to ROCm 7.2 on an AMD Ryzen AI MAX+ 395 system with the Radeon 8060S (gfx1151) GPU. Covers the full uninstall-reinstall procedure on Ubuntu 24.04, DKMS verification, kernel hold management, and post-upgrade PyTorch validation on Strix Halo hardware that isn't officially on AMD's support matrix.
How Lattice moved from a tree-walking interpreter to a bytecode compiler and stack-based VM — covering the architecture of a 62-opcode instruction set, upvalue-based closures, phase system compilation, and the subtle bug that taught me how deep-clone-on-read interacts with in-place mutation.
A deep dive into running FireRed-Image-Edit, a 57.7GB diffusion model, on two wildly different GPU platforms: four 10-year-old NVIDIA Tesla P40s from 2016 and a single AMD Strix Halo APU from 2025. Covers the precision and quantization challenges of Pascal GPUs, multi-GPU device orchestration, and the surprising performance parity between decade-old datacenter hardware and a modern integrated GPU.
Building a comprehensive ISA test suite for the Sampo 16-bit RISC CPU and running all 132 tests on the ULX3S FPGA with zero failures - after finding a pipeline hazard bug and a devious address-shifting patch bug along the way.
The final chapter: getting CP/M to boot correctly on the Arduino Giga R1 WiFi with a RetroShield Z80, debugging the "Bad load" error, achieving a 75x performance speedup through GPIO optimization, and playing Zork I on real Z80 hardware over WiFi.
