Welcome to my ongoing series on x86-64 assembly programming, designed for programmers who want to peel back the abstraction and understand how code really runs at the machine level.

In the early 1990s, three companies pioneered online transactions, facing challenges of security and user accessibility. They are hardly known today. The post Three attempts at making payments secure appeared first on The History of the Web.

A hands-on guide to general-purpose registers and data movement in x86-64

Any person who has used a computer in the past ten years knows that doing meaningless tasks is just part of the experience. Millions of people create accounts, confirm emails, dismiss notifications, solve captchas, reject cookies, and accept terms and conditions—not because they particularly want to or even need to. They do it because that’s what the computer told them to do. Like it or not, we are already serving the machines. Well, now there is a new way to serve our silicon overlords. LLMs started to have opinions on how your API should look, and since 90% of all code will be written by AI comes September, we have no choice but to oblige. You might’ve heard a story of Soundslice adding a feature because ChatGPT kept telling people it exists. We see the same at Instant: for example, we used tx.update for both inserting and updating entities, but LLMs kept writing tx.create instead. Guess what: we now have tx.create, too. Is it good or is it bad? It definitely feels strange. In a sense, it’s helpful: LLMs here have seen millions of other APIs and are suggesting the most obvious thing, something every developer would think of first, too. It’s also a unique testing device: if developers use your API wrong, they blame themselves, read the documentation, and fix their code. In the end, you might never learn that they even had the problem. But with ChatGPT, you yourself can experience “newbie’s POV” at any time. Of course, this approach doesn’t work if you are trying to do something new and unique. LLMs just won’t “get it”. But how many of us are doing something new and unique? Maybe, API is not the place to get clever? Maybe, for most cases, it’s truly best if you did the most obvious thing? So welcome to the new era. AI is not just using tools we gave it. It now has opinions about how these tools should’ve been made. And instead of asking nicely, it gaslights everybody into thinking that’s how it’s always been.

According to Statcounter, Linux has claimed 5% market share of desktop computing in the US. That's double of where it was just three years ago! Really impressive. Windows is still dominant at 63%, and Apple sit at 26%. But for the latter, it's quite a drop from their peak of 33% in June 2023. These are just browser stats, though (even if it's backed up by directionally-similar numbers from Cloudflare). There's undoubtedly some variability in the numbers, by the season, and by what lives in the relatively large 4% mystery box of "other". But there's no denying that Linux is trending in the right direction in the US. As a Dane, though, I find it sad that Denmark is once again a laggard when it comes to adoption. Windows is even more dominant there at almost 70% (with Apple at 15%). Linux is just under 2%. Interestingly, though, ChromeOS, which is basically a locked-down Linux distribution, is at almost 5%. I guess I really shouldn't be disappointed because this is how it always was. It was a big reason why I moved to the US back in 2005. When Ruby on Rails was taking off, it was in America first and foremost. Danish companies were too conservative, too complacent, too married to Microsoft to really pay attention. There are early indications that a willingness to change this laggard mentality might be sprouting, but we've yet to see any evidence that a shift has actually taken hold yet. It's hard to change culture! So while the Danes continue to fiddle, the Americans continue to push forward. Linux is on the up and up!