Arnaud Carré:

The Commodore Amiga 500 had a blitter chip. Its main function was to move bitmap graphics from one location to another while applying logical operations. The Amiga’s blitter could handle up to three bitmap sources at once and perform logical operations between them. To specify which operation to use, you needed to set an 8-bit value in the chip, known as the “minterm.”

Three bitmap sources and an 8-bit value to control logical combinations! Doesn’t that sound like a primitive version of the modern AVX vpternlogd instruction?

An unexpected correlation between a particular AVX-512 instruction and 35 year old Amiga graphics hardware.

Dion interviewing Julius Gustavsson, System Architect at Volvo Cars on the Tweede golf blog:

It turned out the low-power processor was a perfect fit for using Rust! It was not classified as a safety-critical component and it was an Arm Cortex-M processor, so there was no technical or bureaucratic blocker for using Rust.

And so it has come to be that, at this moment, EX90s and Polestar 3s are rolling off the assembly line that would not work without their Rust components.

Great to see embedded Rust see more industry adoption.

Jeffrey Starr:

In December 2022, Adobe, through the Computer History Museum (CHM), released the source code for PostScript®, version 1.0. PostScript is one of the foundational technologies of the desktop publishing revolution of the early 1980s, along with laser printers, the graphical user interface of the Apple Macintosh, and Aldus PageMaker. PostScript is a programming language and a page description format for translating visual content into printed documents.

Adobe immediately enjoyed business success through licensing PostScript to laser printer manufacturers and it became the de facto digital publishing format. While multiple histories have studied this event through a business lens, what historical questions may be answered through the source code? Further, as software practitioners, what can we learn from the source code to apply to present and future designs?

Detailed dive into the history and development of PostScript. Remarkable what was possible on the resource constrained computers of the time.

Laura Chambers, Mozilla CEO:

Because Mozilla’s mission is to build a better internet. And, for the foreseeable future at least, advertising is a key commercial engine of the internet, and the most efficient way to ensure the majority of content remains free and accessible to as many people as possible.

This feels like them throwing in the towel and declaring there is no viable way to make money online without embracing advertising.

We know that not everyone in our community will embrace our entrance into this market. But taking on controversial topics because we believe they make the internet better for all of us is a key feature of Mozilla’s history. And that willingness to take on the hard things, even when not universally accepted, is exactly what the internet needs today.

I can’t see how more ads makes the internet better, even if those ads are less creepy than those from the likes of Google and Meta. For some reason Mozilla continues to refuse to just let us pay for Firefox.

Emily Terrell and Patrick Nemeroff writing on the Cloudflare blog:

In the end, Sable agreed to pay Cloudflare $225,000, grant Cloudflare a royalty-free license to its entire patent portfolio, and to dedicate its patents to the public, ensuring that Sable can never again assert them against another company.

You love to see it. Cloudflare single-handedly controlling large swaths of internet traffic leaves me a little concerned, but I’m glad they’re using their size to fight back against patent trolling.