It's turtles all the way down: from high-level programming to CPU microcode

It’s turtles all the way down: The following anecdote is told of William James. […] After a lecture on cosmology and the structure of the solar system, James was accosted by a little old lady. “Your theory that the sun is the centre of the solar system, and the earth is a ball …

Out-of-memory while trying to free it: into virtual memory

I recently came by this fun story on getting an out-of-memory error on Linux when trying to free memory: Production postmortem: ENOMEM when trying to free memory That error made absolutely no sense, as you can imagine. We are trying to release memory, not allocate it. Common sense says that you …