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.

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

When I drive the 24 Hours of Le Mans, I spend a total of about 6-9 hours in the car, divided into stints of roughly two hours at a time. It's intense. But talking with Lex Fridman in Austin on his podcast? Over six hours straight! We only interrupted the session for five minutes total to take three bathroom breaks. All that endurance training has clearly paid off! But the magic of a good conversation, like the magic of driving at Le Mans, is that time flies by. Those six hours felt more like sixty minutes. This is what flow does: it compresses the moment. Besides, we had plenty to talk about. Lex prepares like no other podcast I've ever been on. Pages and pages of notes. Deep questions, endless attention for tangents. We covered the beauty of Ruby for half an hour alone! But also the future of AI, small teams, why we left the cloud, Elon Musk, fatherhood, money and happiness, and a million other topics (which Lex mercifully timestamps, so listeners without six hours to spare can hop around). It was a privilege to appear. If you're interested, the conversation is on YouTube, on Spotify, on X, and as a regular podcast.

Exploring diagram.website, I came across The Computer is a Feeling by Tim Hwang and Omar Rizwan: the modern internet exerts a tyranny over our imagination. The internet and its commercial power has sculpted the computer-device. It's become the terrain of flat, uniform, common platforms and protocols, not eccentric, local, idiosyncratic ones. Before computers were connected together, they were primarily personal. Once connected, they became primarily social. The purpose of the computer shifted to become social over personal. The triumph of the internet has also impoverished our sense of computers as a tool for private exploration rather than public expression. The pre-network computer has no utility except as a kind of personal notebook, the post-network computer demotes this to a secondary purpose. Smartphones are indisputably the personal computer. And yet, while being so intimately personal, they’re also the largest distribution of behavior-modification devices the world has ever seen. We all willing carry around in our pockets a device whose content is largely designed to modify our behavior and extract our time and money. Making “computer” mean computer-feelings and not computer-devices shifts the boundaries of what is captured by the word. It removes a great many things – smartphones, language models, “social” “media” – from the domain of the computational. It also welcomes a great many things – notebooks, papercraft, diary, kitchen – back into the domain of the computational. I love the feeling of a personal computer, one whose purpose primarily resides in the domain of the individual and secondarily supports the social. It’s part of what I love about the some of the ideas embedded in local-first, which start from the principle of owning and prioritizing what you do on your computer first and foremost, and then secondarily syncing that to other computers for the use of others. Email · Mastodon · Bluesky