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.

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!

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.

Here’s Jony Ive talking to Patrick Collison about measurement and numbers: People generally want to talk about product attributes that you can measure easily with a number…schedule, costs, speed, weight, anything where you can generally agree that six is a bigger number than two He says he used to get mad at how often people around him focused on the numbers of the work over other attributes of the work. But after giving it more thought, he now has a more generous interpretation of why we do this: because we want relate to each other, understand each other, and be inclusive of one another. There are many things we can’t agree on, but it’s likely we can agree that six is bigger than two. And so in this capacity, numbers become a tool for communicating with each other, albeit a kind of least common denominator — e.g. “I don’t agree with you at all, but I can’t argue that 134 is bigger than 87.” This is conducive to a culture where we spend all our time talking about attributes we can easily measure (because then we can easily communicate and work together) and results in a belief that the only things that matter are those which can be measured. People will give lip service to that not being the case, e.g. “We know there are things that can’t be measured that are important.” But the reality ends up being: only that which can be assigned a number gets managed, and that which gets managed is imbued with importance because it is allotted our time, attention, and care. This reminds me of the story of the judgement of King Solomon, an archetypal story found in cultures around the world. Here’s the story as summarized on Wikipedia: Solomon ruled between two women who both claimed to be the mother of a child. Solomon ordered the baby be cut in half, with each woman to receive one half. The first woman accepted the compromise as fair, but the second begged Solomon to give the baby to her rival, preferring the baby to live, even without her. Solomon ordered the baby given to the second woman, as her love was selfless, as opposed to the first woman's selfish disregard for the baby's actual well-being In an attempt to resolve the friction between two individuals, an appeal was made to numbers as an arbiter. We can’t agree on who the mother is, so let’s make it a numbers problem. Reduce the baby to a number and we can agree! But that doesn’t work very well, does it? I think there is a level of existence where measurement and numbers are a sound guide, where two and two make four and two halves make a whole. But, as humans, there is another level of existence where mathematical propositions don’t translate. A baby is not a quantity. A baby is an entity. Take a whole baby and divide it up by a sword and you do not half two halves of a baby. I am not a number. I’m an individual. Indivisible. What does this all have to do with software? Software is for us as humans, as individuals, and because of that I believe there is an aspect of its nature where metrics can’t take you.cIn fact, not only will numbers not guide you, they may actually misguide you. I think Robin Rendle articulated this well in his piece “Trust the vibes”: [numbers] are not representative of human experience or human behavior and can’t tell you anything about beauty or harmony or how to be funny or what to do next and then how to do it. Wisdom is knowing when to use numbers and when to use something else. Email · Mastodon · Bluesky