Hacker News

Better off just using http://frogfind.com/

I‘ve recently tried implementing the Noise protocol on a 7.8 MHz 68000, while it runs in 10 seconds I don’t think there is a way to make it constant time without using addition and running an order of magnitude more slowly :(

MULU operations are not constant time but depend on popcount. That has an easy work around just also do the MULU of the bitwise inverse, both instructions sum to a constant cycle count.

The brick wall I hit is related to the Macintosh SE ram being shared between CPU and video system. Every few cycles the CPU stalls instruction fetching, which turns the both MULUs together take the same amount of time each time into there is slowdown depending on the popcount of the first instruction.

I don’t know if anyone has any solution for this, there is prefetching of one instruction so all should be well, but it seems like the cpu stalls the in progress instruction if the prefetch is stalled.

and with only 384 KB of RAM.

A 2048-bit RSA key is 256 bytes. A 256-bit symmetric key is 32 bytes and ECDH keys are roughly the same size. The state size of AES is 16 bytes and its S-box is 256 bytes. Efficient implementations use only a few KB of state. The vast majority of cryptographic algorithms just aren't that big, relatively speaking; although as you mention, they are very computationally intense. Hash states are in the dozens to low hundreds of bytes. For TLS implementation, the record buffers are probably going to use the most RAM; 16K each direction + additional overhead.

TBH Windows 1.0 (and to a lesser extent Windows 2.0) looked awful compared to Macintosh which is probably why the author decided to go with that. Digital Research agreed since they also made GEM at the time look very mac-like (and got sued by Apple for it :-P).

High resolution CGA, maybe? With only 2 colors copying the Mac UI would make sense.

Most likely because of AI slop.

Since you're here let me ask a question i had the last time i saw this project: how does your AI handle the ginormous SPEC.md file?[0] (last time i saw it Github was still able to display it :-P).

Are you feeding the entirety of it to Claude (i guess)? Doesn't that eat pretty much all context - and considering that (AFAIK) the spec file has everything about the OS, doesn't available context space put some sort of "hard ceiling" to what you can add to the OS?

[0] https://github.com/jggonz/os8088/blob/main/SPEC.md

Interesting project. Have you been able to try it on actual hardware yet? What’s the minimum RAM?

Yes, I'm old now and have learned all the foundational computer and hardware engineering topics the hard way over 30 years. I've earned my AI tokens of freedom. :)

AI code increases productivity and reduces understanding.

If it is a project like this, that's cool. If you are deploying the safety control system on a power plant, you had better have a damn good understanding!

My take is that "sovereign computing" will go from something 0.001% of the population cares about to over 1% in the coming three decades, i.e. three orders of magnitude. It will depend on how long we continue in the current survtech course. There is also the question of if we will see mandatory backdoors in hardware. For example, Country X could legislate that all CPUs sold in their territory need to have a latent command-and-control area for law enforcement to use. If that happens, I'll start converting my savings into a physical stash of old reliable CPUs.

In any case, it seems that CPUs have a very long shelf life; it's still possible to buy 8086 processors[^1].

[^1]: https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/rochester-electro...

Default esp32 still comes with built-in binary blobs for the radio though iirc

"Vibe-porting" has now officially become a thing, and I look forward to what other weird and fun ideas people will get to making because of AI.

Any working gopher to www proxy?

Using gopher client to load http data.