Tootfinder

Missing Link: Vor 50 Jahren eröffnet der erste Byte Shop
Im Dezember 1975 öffnet in Kalifornien der erste Byte Shop. Ohne diese spätere Computerhandelskette wäre Apple heute vielleicht in Vergessenheit geraten.

@… @… À propos uni: mein romanistik-prof (herausgeber eines kapverdischen wörterbuchs) hatte ein späteres modell (anfang der 1990er). Ich hatte das bis dahin nur in anzeigen in BYTE gesehen …

@… @… À propos uni: mein romanistik-prof (herausgeber eines kapverdischen wörterbuchs) hatte ein späteres modell (anfang der 1990er). Ich hatte das bis dahin nur in anzeigen in BYTE gesehen …

The Allen Institute of AI launches Bolmo 7B and Bolmo 1B, claiming they are "the first fully open byte-level language models", built on its Olmo 3 models (Emilia David/VentureBeat)
https://venturebeat.com/ai/bolmos-architecture-unlock…

Visualize All 23 Years of BYTE Magazine in All Its Glory, All at Once https://www.404media.co/byte-magazine-zoomable-map-archive/

OK so, I've started cleaning up the PCIe code but also took this opportunity to do some tests.
I'm just writing to a random old SSD I have lying around that I used for some tests a while ago, I have no idea what writing to a random address is doing (I haven't even set a BAR on it so it's probably ignoring me) but the goal is to test the SoC not do anything real.
Here's a 128 byte memcpy to the BAR. It turns into eight 16-byte TLPs, presumably each generated by…

My old HP laptop, 8470p is getting keyboard problems; I guess it's a hardware problem - I guess it could be software (on Debian trixie). Tricky to know where it is - could just be too many crumbs, but it seems more broken::
atkbd_receive_byte: 122 callbacks suppressed
atkbd serio0: Spurious NAK on isa0060/serio0. Some program might be trying to access hardware directly.
atkbd serio0: Failed to deactivate keyboard on isa0060/serio0
atkbd serio0: Failed to enable key…

@… is `ArgumentError: UTF-16 string byte length (51) is not a multiple of 2` something that should be handled in my PR or in TruffleRuby?
ArgumentError is semantically off but I vaguely remember that it was some encoding performance stuff or so?
It would be nice if it would act like the other Rubies though 😄

While the data still looked garbled it turns out that was my fault due to an endianess bug in my non-vibed #pico code: https://github.com/stsquad/mp-depth/co

See https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1975-12/page/n42/mode/2up for the full ad

NanoTag: Systems Support for Efficient Byte-Granular Overflow Detection on ARM MTE
Mingkai Li, Hang Ye, Joseph Devietti, Suman Jana, Tanvir Ahmed Khan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22027

NanoTag: Systems Support for Efficient Byte-Granular Overflow Detection on ARM MTE
Memory safety bugs, such as buffer overflows and use-after-frees, are the leading causes of software safety issues in production. Software-based approaches, e.g., Address Sanitizer (ASAN), can detect such bugs with high precision, but with prohibitively high overhead. ARM's Memory Tagging Extension (MTE) offers a promising alternative to detect these bugs in hardware with a much lower overhead. However, in this paper, we perform a thorough investigation of Google Pixel 8, the first production i…

endianness is just a plot by Big Endian to sell more byte swap operations

Guessing from the current RAM price increases we'll be back at 1976 prices in a few months!
16,384 bytes for $795 adjusted for inflation is $4,527, which is about 28¢ per byte.
32GB of memory would therefore be roughly 9.5 billion dollars.

New article on the blog!
This time, it's about how I optimized an algorithm which turns byte offsets into line/column numbers and UTF-16 offsets.
Most of the performance improvement came from the use of SIMD to efficiently count ASCII characters.
#rust #RustLang #SIMD #optimization #blog

"Two years later, the same BYTE Magazine asked on its January 1997 cover: “Can Java Replace Windows?” (Spoiler alert 2: it did not, and… seriously?) Reflecting the myopic insanity of the warlords commanding troops from the comfort of their bunkers, Scott McNealy’s interview on page 40 is just a puzzling diatribe against Microsoft PowerPoint instead of an actual argument in favor of Java."

Aftermath Of The Kernel Wars
During the 1980s and 90s, computer companies waged an open war for supremacy. We are witnesses of an age that could be described as post-apocalyptic. The dust has settled for the past 20 years, with a small ignition of hostilities around 2010, between members of the mobile duopoly and some late challengers. But to a large degree, we can say that the Kernel Wars are over, and we are privileged observers of their aftermath. But everyone was surprised to discover the winner emerging from the ashes…

Japan faces bottlenecks in data center construction due to labor shortages and more; DC Byte says Japan's capacity has tripled to 6.8 GW in the past five years (Tsubasa Suruga/Nikkei Asia)
https://asia.nikkei.com/business/techn

Bottlenecks in data center construction threaten Japan's AI ambitions
Labor shortages, rising costs and outdated building processes delay construction

Just released: embedded-io 0.7.{0,1}, along with its -async and -adapter siblings. These #RustLang crates help #embedded systems abstract over byte data input and output, similar to the standard library's io module.
If all goes as I hope, the embedded-io 0.7.x series can be followed compatibly …

crates.io: Rust Package Registry

„Ready for the Byte Fight“ by Vasyl
Platform: Atari ST/E
Released: 22 November 2025
Specification: 320x200px, 9 colors
Note: 1st in the Silly Venture 2025 WE Atari ST/STE Graphics competition
#GFX_Vasyl #YR_2025

You can read it here! https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1975-09/mode/2up

SAGE-Music: Low-Latency Symbolic Music Generation via Attribute-Specialized Key-Value Head Sharing
Jiaye Tan, Haonan Luo, Linfeng Song, Shuaiqi Chen, Yishan Lyu, Zian Zhong, Roujia Wang, Daniel Jiang, Haoran Zhang, Jiaming Bai, Haoran Cheng, Q. Vera Liao, Hao-Wen Dong
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00395…

SAGE-Music: Low-Latency Symbolic Music Generation via Attribute-Specialized Key-Value Head Sharing
Low-latency symbolic music generation is essential for real-time improvisation and human-AI co-creation. Existing transformer-based models, however, face a trade-off between inference speed and musical quality. Traditional acceleration techniques such as embedding pooling significantly degrade quality, while recently proposed Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) methods - though effective on single-track piano data - suffer large performance drops in multi-track settings, as revealed by our analysis. We pr…

Semantic-Aware Fuzzing: An Empirical Framework for LLM-Guided, Reasoning-Driven Input Mutation
Mengdi Lu, Steven Ding, Furkan Alaca, Philippe Charland
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.19533

Semantic-Aware Fuzzing: An Empirical Framework for LLM-Guided, Reasoning-Driven Input Mutation
Security vulnerabilities in Internet-of-Things devices, mobile platforms, and autonomous systems remain critical. Traditional mutation-based fuzzers -- while effectively explore code paths -- primarily perform byte- or bit-level edits without semantic reasoning. Coverage-guided tools such as AFL++ use dictionaries, grammars, and splicing heuristics to impose shallow structural constraints, leaving deeper protocol logic, inter-field dependencies, and domain-specific semantics unaddressed. Conver…

Spent way too much time chasing some confusing segfaults before realizing that I was 4-byte offsetting and aligning my stack pointer out of habit.
On aarch64.

Backing the Wrong Horse: How Bit-Level Netlist Augmentation can Counter Power Side Channel Attacks
Ali Asghar, Andreas Becher, Daniel Ziener
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04640 htt…

Backing the Wrong Horse: How Bit-Level Netlist Augmentation can Counter Power Side Channel Attacks
The dependence of power-consumption on the processed data is a known vulnerability of CMOS circuits, resulting in side channels which can be exploited by power-based side channel attacks (SCAs). These attacks can extract sensitive information, such as secret keys, from the implementation of cryptographic algorithms. Existing countermeasures against power-based side channel attacks focus on analyzing information leakage at the byte level. However, this approach neglects the impact of individual …

From the December 1975 issue of BYTE Magazine

DNABERT-2: Fine-Tuning a Genomic Language Model for Colorectal Gene Enhancer Classification
Darren King, Yaser Atlasi, Gholamreza Rafiee
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.25274 https:/…

DNABERT-2: Fine-Tuning a Genomic Language Model for Colorectal Gene Enhancer Classification
Gene enhancers control when and where genes switch on, yet their sequence diversity and tissue specificity make them hard to pinpoint in colorectal cancer. We take a sequence-only route and fine-tune DNABERT-2, a transformer genomic language model that uses byte-pair encoding to learn variable-length tokens from DNA. Using assays curated via the Johnston Cancer Research Centre at Queen's University Belfast, we assembled a balanced corpus of 2.34 million 1 kb enhancer sequences, applied summit-c…

Got some BYTE Magazine numbered and signed cover prints from my wife for my birthday! 🥰

Happy 50th birthday, BYTE Magazine!
#retrocomputing