undocumented instructions

A family comedy video in which kids write instructions for making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and a parent follows them with exact literalness, producing chaos. This is the classroom-friendly version.

Christopher Domas presents at Black Hat 2017 how page fault analysis and processor fuzzing can exhaustively search the x86 instruction set. The talk uncovers undocumented instructions and hardware bugs and shows limits of disassemblers.

A family video in which kids write instructions for making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a parent follows them exactly as written, with comic results. It demonstrates how precise instructions must be.

Christopher Domas presents research at DEF CON 26 showing a hidden alternate instruction set and undocumented hardware backdoor in some x86 processors, found on a third-party CPU. He uses it to ask how feasible wider hardware backdoors are.

A short clip of George H. W. Bush and Ronald Reagan answering an audience question on illegal immigration at a 1980 Republican primary debate. Both take notably sympathetic positions, including on schooling for undocumented children.

A 2018 vlog showing how to use the windshield wipers on a Tesla Model 3, including auto mode, manual settings and voice commands. It is labeled outdated.

Christopher Domas's Derbycon 2015 talk on the M/o/Vfuscator, a compiler that emits only x86 mov instructions, showing mov is Turing complete. It explains how a full machine is built from mov and why the output is a nightmare to reverse engineer.

Andrew "bunnie" Huang examines how realistic hardware supply chain attacks are, from rogue insiders to nation states, in the wake of the Bloomberg Businessweek report. He explains how undocumented components could be hidden on boards and how hard they are to spot.

CGP Grey explains that postal codes are routing instructions for mail rather than geographic regions. He looks at the quirks and problems this causes.

The first lecture of Stanford's CS107 Programming Paradigms, taught by Jerry Cain, giving an overview of the course. The course goes from C and assembly through C++, concurrency, Scheme and Python.

Matt Godbolt, creator of Compiler Explorer, tours surprising optimizations modern compilers perform, such as turning loops into closed-form sums and using popcount instructions. He explores what the compiler does behind the scenes.

Bill Dally of NVIDIA gives a University of Washington lecture on trends in deep learning hardware. It covers numeric formats, specialized instructions, energy per operation and co-design of hardware and software.

Vox's Joe Posner, with help from 99% Invisible, explains why bad doors are everywhere. It covers Don Norman's long-running complaint about doors and the idea that good design should not need instructions.

A 36C3 talk on the AMD Platform Security Processor, an undocumented ARM core inside AMD CPUs that runs before the main processor. The speakers present their reverse engineering of its internals.

John McCutchan of Google explains how Dart and the Dart VM expose SIMD instructions to speed up web software. He covers what SIMD is and how it applies to graphics and games.