Everything I've learned so far about running local LLMs

Windows paths have been WTF-16-encoded for decades, but module names in the import tables of Portable Executable are octets. If a name contains values beyond ASCII — technically out of spec — then the dynamic linker must somehow decode those octets into Unicode in order to construct a lookup path. There are multiple ways this could be done, and...

I’m 18 years late, but Slim Reader/Writer Locks have a fantastic interface: pointer-sized (“slim”), zero-initialized, and non-allocating. Lacking cleanup, they compose naturally with arena allocation. Sounds like a futex? That’s because they’re built on futexes introduced at the same time. They’re also complemented by condition variables with the...

Suppose you’re working in C using one of the major toolchains — that is, it’s mainly a C++ implementation — and you need regular expressions. You could integrate a library, but there’s a regex implementation in the C++ standard library included with your compiler, just within reach. As a resourceful engineer, using an asset already in hand seems...

I recently came across a take-home C programming test which had more depth and complexity than I suspect the interviewer intended. While considering it, I also came up with a novel, or at least unconventional, solution. The problem is to deep copy a linked list where each node references a random list element in addition to usual linkage —...

I introduced two new tools to w64devkit, vc++filt and peports (pronounced like purports), which aid manual symbol inspection and complement one another. As of this writing, the latter is not yet in a release, but it’s feature-complete and trivial to build if you wanted to try it out early. This article explains the motivation and purpose for...