CPUs, memory hierarchies and the low-level performance behind them.
6 items
Apple says decoding is memory-bandwidth bound. I checked that on my own machine, then fit Apple's tables: a fixed 9 to 16 ms per token explains why more Macs help less each time.
The BIPM made UTC continuous from 20 May 2027, citing the risk of a negative leap second. I fed 23:59:60 to six runtimes, and none turned it into a moment of its own.
A popular note says tiny Git commits cost kilobytes and big ones about 10% of the file. I repeated the tests: the kilobytes are filesystem blocks, and the 10% is only the first copy.
A blog post says WSL 3 beats WSL 2 by 5 to 60%. I upgraded my own machine from WSL 2.4.12 and repeated its tests: syscalls and first-touch memory got slower, not faster.
I measured the performance claims behind 'push ifs up and fors down' in C. Hoisting an if is free at -O3, batching a lock saves 44x, and collecting into a batch made one loop slower.
I re-ran Igor Ostrovsky's 2010 processor cache experiments in C on a 2026 laptop CPU. The cache cliffs survived. The famous 'skipping is free' result did not.