MMIXdb — a Tiptoe through the Tangents

Posted on Sun 09 August 2026 in tech • Tagged with mmix, rust, debugger, checksmix

Meet mmixdb, part of checksmix — a Unix-style debugger for MMIX. It lets you approach your program from the point of view of the machine state and that's how MMIX is meant to work.

MMIX

MMIX is Knuth's 64-bit RISC machine, the one that replaced MIX throughout the current edition of …


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Dispatch a Claude Prompt Straight from Emacs's Kill Ring

Posted on Sat 01 August 2026 in tech • Tagged with emacs, claude, ai, productivity

Engineers write prompts as part of the job now, and being able to refer to them in an efficient manner is a valuable improvement to your workflow. Skip pasting file contents into Claude entirely: open find-file (C-x C-f) to surface the path Emacs already knows, select it and cut it …


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Save 40% on Input Tokens with This Prompt Hack

Posted on Sat 01 August 2026 in tech • Tagged with ai, claude, llm, promptengineering

When Claude delegates a prompt to a sub-agent, it pastes the whole prompt text into that sub-agent's context by default — thousands of tokens, duplicated, every time. Tell it to hand over a file reference instead of the copied text, and that one change alone can cut input tokens 25-40%.


A Fix is not a Plan

Posted on Sun 05 July 2026 in tech • Tagged with rustlang, parsers, pest, unix, parsm

The Loop

Are you the victim of a finite automation? You could be entitled to compensation!

A finite automation is a driven process that forces an outcome. An engineer is both an orchestrator and a facilitator. Facilitation always has an answer ready, orchestration has to be known. Left alone, facilitation …


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Advent of Code 2025

Posted on Sat 27 December 2025 in update • Tagged with rustlang, mmix, emulator, assembler, adventofcode

I got my ⭐️...

I am not committing to the Advent of Code 2025 this year. I'm working on too many side projects checksmix, snipren, emomtimer. In fact I don't even have time to write this blog. On the other hand, I used some holiday downtime to work through Day 1 …


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Checksmix - Blazing Fast MMIX

Posted on Fri 26 December 2025 in tech • Tagged with rustlang, mmix, emulator, assembler

Blazing Fast MMIX Emulator

I like learning computer architectures by running code. MIX is good fun, but it’s dated and awkward for writing anything beyond small examples. MMIX, on the other hand, is a complete computer architecture—much closer to machines that were genuinely pleasant to program, like MIPS …


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