Paged Out #9 [pdf] (pagedout.institute)
142 points by laurensr 8 hours ago | 20 comments

• zOneLetter 4 hours ago

`Baby Steps in C` is hilarious lol. I'll be buying the print editions going forward. They hooked me right in with that.

• blueSky1989 24 minutes ago

Simultaneously triggered my PTSD and made me laugh

• malfist an hour ago

That article triggered me to send it to my friends. C be crazy.

• Rendello 5 hours ago

I like page 30: The Subpixel Zoo. It must be hell for text rendering:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subpixel_rendering

• brainwad 2 hours ago

Desktop OSes just assume the vertical subtiles (at best with an option between RGB and BGR). TVs and mobile devices don't generally support subpixel rendering at all.

• gynvael 2 hours ago

Sorry, we moved this. It's on page 37 now - "Hardware" section works better for this one than "Food for thought".

https://pagedout.institute/webview.php?issue=9&page=37&artic...

• walrus01 an hour ago

It reminds me a little bit of a Phrack textfile, but if Phrack had raster image art advertising in it.

• gynvael an hour ago

What you've described is the printed version of Phrack!

• lubujackson 5 hours ago

I've never seen this before, it's like a modern 2600 - deeply technical, scattered topics and depth, all very hacker-curious - and beautifully designed to boot.

• Rendello 3 hours ago

For those interested, anyone can write a (one-page) article:

https://pagedout.institute/?page=cfp.php

• unprovable 3 hours ago

Fun fact - the computiles piece is an uncredited rediscovery of Wang's work from the 1960's on computable tilings. Specifically, he went as far to show that the halting problem is equivalent to the 'domino problem' - can we tile the plane using a given finite set of dominoes (aka tiles) where we have infinitely many copies of each and the tiling must preserve edge-meet criteria. Every tiling is a computer program, every computer program is a tiling.

• Graziano_M 3 hours ago

It’s credited in section 3

• bbayles 5 hours ago

Michał Zalewski's article on page 42 is very funny.

• mixedmath 5 hours ago

Would someone be interested in explaining what in the world is going on in that article?

• pillmillipedes an hour ago

I'll try to do the first one since I think it's the most illustrative:

  1  long typedef[[]]*($)(void*($),...);  
  2  int main() {  
  3   char* str = "Hello, world.";  
  4   $ $ asm("puts");  
  5   $:&&$&&$(str);  
  6  }

(1) is equivalent to "typedef long* $(void*, ...)". '$' is the name of the defined function type.

it's obfuscated as follows:

- typedef is a specifier and can go on either side of the type, same as int const/const int

- [[ ]] is an empty list of attributes

- "void*($)" is an argument named '$' of type void*, but parameter names are ignored in declarations.

- you can put parens in declarations since sometimes you need to group prefixes and postfixes in a different order

- dollar signs in names are allowed in many c compilers (and some other c-like languages)

- "..." are variadic arguments. puts doesn't have those, but the first argument uses the same register either way so it happens to work out in this case

(4) declares a function named '$' of type '$', shadowing the type, and links it to the assembly label "puts". calling $ calls puts.

normally it looks like `int call_foo(void) asm("foo");`

(5) is parsed as: "label $: address-of-label $ and function $ called on str. the address of a label is truthy, so the function also gets called.

unary && looks for the argument in the label namespace, but other operators don't, so the two dollars refer to different things.

that's about it. if you're familiar with the c standard and some common gnu extentions, you can deconstruct the examples into their basic elements easily enough

• q3k 4 hours ago

What do you mean? It's just simple beginner's examples in C. Should be easy enough to understand, C is famously very simple ('portable assembler' as they say!).

• FergusArgyll an hour ago

> In our experience, C has proven to be a pleasant, expressive and versatile language for a wide variety of programs. It is easy to learn, and it wears well as one's experience with it grows.

The C Programming Language K&R

• yu3zhou4 7 hours ago

My fav zine

• brcmthrowaway 4 hours ago

The anime avatar twitter people have finally created something beautiful.

• gynvael 3 hours ago

Ahaha thank you for this comment, it's peak internet meme culture. Made my day :D