Sam Trenholme’s blog
RISC-V will eventually take
over
August 16, 2026
I explain why the future of computing is the RISC-V.
RISC-V
RISC-V
is an open
source ISA (an ISA, or instruction set architecture, is the language a
given chip understands) which, unlike x86_64 and ARM, is free for
anyone to implement and use.
I believe there will come a day when RISC-V has comparable or better
performance than ARM and x86_64.
This is based on history: I remember when x86 performance compared to
the DEC Alpha, PA-RISC, SPARC, etc. was a joke. There was a time when,
if you wanted real performance, you needed to pony up $20,000-$50,000
for a workstation with a MIPS/PA-RISC/SPARC/Alpha/whatever processor.
All these workstations smoked the x86 computers of the era.
However, people were buying x86 computers at a far higher rate,
giving Intel (and AMD) the money needed to invest in better chip
designs and better fabs. Linux was, at the same time, gaining traction
and, around the time the dot-com bubble popped and there were no longer
companies with the money needed to get Sun SPARC workstations (or what
not) at $50,000 or more a pop to start up a web business, x86 computers
running Linux had nearly the same performance at a much lower price.
Once the Itanium sank and x86_64 was mainstream, x86_64 was the ISA of
choice for performance workstations and servers, and the RISC ISAs that
survived were now mainly used in the embedded space. Indeed, ARM was
never a high performance RISC processor, and it was the one that took
over the embedded space while PA-RISC, Alpha, and SPARC died.
The ISA for what were cheap computers became the highest performance
ISA around.
It has been only in the 2020s that RISC processors have gotten x86_64
levels of performance, notably in the the Apple M series of processors.
So now ARM, an ISA which was geared for cheap embedded devices, has
become a high performance processor, in line with x86.
Right now, RISC-V is mainly being used in cheap embedded components.
Considering that x86 and ARM also were made for cheap computing, until
becoming the dominant high end processor, history tells us that the
cheapest ISA is the one which will become the highest performance one.
RISC-V currently has about the same performance as a high end
Raspberry Pi. I predict it will have medium-level PC performance by the
end of the 2020s.
Further reading
“Hacker news” has a thread
about the RISC-V in response to another thread
based on an article criticizing RISC-V. This blog
entry is based on a response I wrote at Hacker News.
Facebook and Reddit
August 14, 2011
Facebook and Reddit have both, to use an expression popular in the
first 2000s decade, “jumped the shark”.
Fixing Facebook’s timeline
I am now using a project called Facebook clean my feeds
to remove the typical social media slop
from my feed. Now my Facebook is like the Facebook of 2010: What I see
on my timeline is only what my friends post and, yes, ads—I’m not
trying to rob Facebook of their revenue stream, but I also think it’s
downright evil for Facebook to pollute my timeline with a
bunch of “suggested for you” AI Slop, video reels from people I don’t
know, and so on.
One could make the argument Facebook deserves to have their ads
blocked because they have made it difficult to keep in touch with my
friends, but I feel it’s important I take the high ground here.
Now that my feed is cleaned up, I can see why Facebook started
polluting my feed with so much “suggested” content (usually AI slop):
People aren’t using Facebook anymore they way they were in 2010, and
Facebook is trying to hide this fact by filling timelines with AI slop.
Or, as we would had said in 2010, Facebook has “jumped the shark”.
The only problem I see with this plugin is that it is a Greasemonkey
script, so I have to trust it to not do anything nefarious.
Reddit is now a walled garden
Reddit is now a walled garden. Going to old.reddit.com
now shows a notice that “To keep Reddit safe,
accounts are required to access old Reddit.” Probably for the best;
while there still is useful information on Reddit, it has also
become a feed full of flamebait and posts low on useful information
designed to make left-wing people really angry.
Locking down old.reddit.com to stop anonymous surfing is the last
straw for me: Reddit has now fully jumped the shark. Not that Reddit
was ever great; it was always full of stoners and losers. I remember in
2015 Reddit users comparing synthesizers to the amount of weed you
could buy for the same amount of money.
Grab bag
August 10, 2026
I discuss ideas for a universal cross-platform filesystem, and how
the manosphere/
RedPill movement is a profit making industry.
A universal file system
What is the best filesystem to use for an external hard drive? For a
while, I have been using FAT32 for fairly small filesystems which
anything can mount (FAT32 can support a filesystem up to two terabytes in size;
I use FAT32 for my car stereo which
doesn’t support exFAT), and NTFS for anything bigger.
FAT32 doesn’t support journalling and has a four gigabyte filesize
limitation. exFAT has issues with patents
(but, yes, Microsoft gave open source software
a free license to use exFAT) and doesn’t have journalling. NTFS has
only readonly support on MacOS unless one buys a third party program.
Probably the best universal read-write filesystem which all
mainstream operating systems support (including some BSDs) is UDF, the
filesystem DVDs used. It’s a read-write filesystem, it’s a
log-structured filesystem which means the entire filesystem is a
journal, it’s supported for both reading and writing in Windows, Linux,
and MacOS, among other operating systems, and filesystems can be up to
16 terabytes in size.
There is some hacking to make a UDF drive cross-platfom, but there is
a utility
which
handles the corner cases and documents all of the UDF compatibility
wrinkles.
The manosphere greed machine
Wired has an article
about the manosphere movement, i.e. the kinds of guys who
believe the lie
that 80% of the women
sleep with only 20% of the men. It argues that this movement is fueled
by greedy men who spread lies online to hook men in to the movement and
sell them things.
Getting men to believe 80% of the women only sleep with 20% of men is
a great way to make money: Convince men they can become part of that
imaginary 20% if they buy your $20 dating guide which supposedly
teaches you to become a “real man” (whatever that is) who attracts all
the girls.
ObHack7 release
July 25, 2026
I have made what will probably be my only release of ObHack7 today.
This is a random map generator (procedural generator) for Doom, Doom2,
and Heretic that runs in Windows. It can be downloaded by clicking (or
tapping on)
this link,
and
source code
is also available.
OhHack
ObHack
is a fork of
Oblige 2 which I mainly worked on back when I didn’t have Internet at
home and wanted to be able to play unlimited Freedoom and Heretic
levels.
There was interest in me doing a version of ObHack for later versions
of Oblige, something I never did until a couple of years ago, when I
started using Oblige 7 to generate Heretic levels.
ObHack7 2026-07-25
Compared to Oblige 7, ObHack7 has the following changes
-
Town theme enabled (this looks like maps in E1 with classic Heretic).
-
New theme: Egypt (which ObHack had), which makes very sandy “desert”
levels.
-
“Episodic” levels start out smaller and get much bigger.
-
“Small”/“Medium”/“Large”/“Extreme” levels are now smaller.
-
Heretic: More tomes, more mega-armor.
-
We now make Episode 6 levels for Heretic (see discussion below).
-
Heretic: Level starts usually have backpack, often mega-armor.
-
Heretic: The only liquid we have is water.
-
CONFIG.TXT updated.
-
Added note that, because of a bug in Oblige7, levels using a date for
the seed should have the seed be in MMDDYYN000 format, where MM is
month, DD is day, YY is year (2000-2099), and N is a number from 1 to
9; the final three digits of the seed should be 0. Example seed:
0725261000 (or 725261000) for a seed with today’s date.
Playing Heretic in 2026
Now that Heretic + Hexen
has been released, finally giving the E6 levels
official names, here are my thoughts on playing Heretic here in 2026:
-
Heretic + Hexen opted to have a mid-1990s pixelated look for the
game. There is a reason why Quake added support for hardware
acceleration to get rid of that ugly pixelated look, and why people
quickly in the late 1990s added graphic cards to their computers to
have things look much more smooth.
-
The best way to play Heretic here in the 2020s, in my opinion, is
with the final release of Dengine,
which is Heretic with modern graphics, and uses Quake-like “mouse look”
and WASD gameplay, the way a modern FPS (first person shooter) game
should be played.
-
I also like to play using the mid-first-2000s-decade 1.8.6 release of
Dengine, which also supports mouse look, hardware acceleration, is tiny
(only 2.2 megs in size), and runs great even on an ancient N455 Netbook
from 2010. I have a mirror
of this old version of Dengine.
Episode 6
Heretic’s “Shadow of the Serpent Riders” release included three
secret levels in Episode 6; these maps were for deathmatch play. E6M3,
“American’s Legacy”,
doesn’t have an exit.
Oblige 7 handled episode 6 by ignoring it. ObHack7 handles Episode 6
by having E6M3 have an exit; ObHack generates not only E6M1-E6M3, but
also E6M4, E6M5, and so on, even generating E6M9.
The way Heretic + Hexen handles E6M3 having an exit is by having a
“You’re not supposed to get here, but hurray, you won the secret
levels” message after exiting E6M3, then ending the game. E6M4 and so
on are not accessible.
Dengine (Doomsday) 1.8.6 had a bug: It would take one to E6M4 once
one exited E6M3, and so on until E6M8. Switching the exit in E6M8
causes the exit to “click”, but otherwise nothing happens. Exiting E6M9
puts one in level E6M0. While it’s not possible to load a game saved in
E6M0, exiting E6M0 puts one in E6M1 again.
ObHack2 in fact generated an E6M0 level so one could exit the secret
E6 level and continue playing maps. ObHack 7 doesn’t generate E6M0; not
only isn’t there a way of getting to E6M9 without using the Doomsday
console, but exiting E6M9 will, since there isn’t E6M0, crash Doomsday
1.8.6.
This is a non-issue for source ports with UMAPINFO
support, but ObHack7 is made for Doomsday 1.8.6, which came
out well over a decade before UMAPINFO existed, and doesn’t generate
UMAPINFO lumps.
Obsidian
I mention Obsidian, another fork of Oblige 7. Obsidian is available
here:
https://github.com/GTD-Carthage/Obsidian-Content
My impression is that Obsidian has a lot of features Oblige 7 doesn’t
have, but the code is a lot more buggy and unstable than Oblige 7 and
ObHack are.
Download
ObHack7 can be downloaded by clicking (or tapping on) this link,
and source code
is also available.
Note that both files are compressed using 7-zip. Windows 11 comes
with built-in 7-zip support; users of Windows 10 or earlier can use 7-zip
to extract the files.
More Marshall Memories
July 24, 2026
In today’s blog, I go over some more memories of Marshall, who was a
father figure to me at a very key point in my life. I wrote about him
previously in
a blog from last year.
Marshall and God
When I worked for Marshall, he would read to me from the Bible.
Marshall was from the deep south; the Bible belt. The state he was
from hasn’t given their electoral votes to a Democrat since 1976. He
came from a world and a set of values that are very conservative
Christian.
I was, at the time, an atheist. I wasn’t just any old kind of
atheist; I was an intolerant atheist who got annoyed by people reading
and talking about the Bible in front of me.
Marshall started wanting to read the Bible to me during our breaks
from work in the office. I would object most loudly “I don’t want you
reading that book to me!” Marshall was insistent, and since he was the,
you know, president of the company, he got his way.
So he would sometimes read me some passage from the Bible. This would
invariably lead to me complaining that God was just a myth. We would
have long arguments about this.
I finally capitulated and told Marshall I was willing to agree that
there is a God. This wasn’t good enough for him. He told me I had to
have a Christian faith. When I asked him why, he told me because I was
born and raised Christian, so that is the only faith I could have.
Marshall and myself had various spiritual debates. These debates
would often get heated; I had a lot of intolerance in my atheism, and
Marshall was, at this point, so frustrated with his life he was looking
for any reason to get in to an argument.
One of the our productive debates was when I told him about a dream I
had many years before, where I met someone named Peter who guided me to
a magical place. He was impressed with the dream; when I mentioned the
person who led me in the darkness was named Peter, he told me Peter was
one of the important apostles in the New Testament, and that maybe it
was that Peter who I saw in the dream.
My final conversation
with Marshall
Decades after moving on from Marshall, I talked to him one last time.
He told me he didn’t even want to remember that part of his life, and
with good reason: He lost his car, his house, and the girlfriend he had
at the time ended up divorcing him.
I told him it was a pleasant memory for me and that being with him at
that time in his life was key to my spiritual growth and becoming an
adult.
We said “I love you” to each other before ending the call. That was
the last time I ever talked to Marshall; I didn’t find out he died
until a couple years after he passed away.
Remembering Marshall today
When I take a daily walk around sunset, something about the light in
the air reminds me of my time with Marshall. It is a very pleasant and
peaceful feeling today; being with Marshall planted the seed for having
a relationship with God that I have to this day. I became a man because
Marshall mentored me at a very key moment in my life. This is something
I am glad I experienced.
Grab bag
July 19, 2026
Some quick thoughts.
Writing code in 2026
A blog titled Why write code in 2026
has come out. I am glad I retired from
writing code just before human programmers were replaced with AIs; I
get to concentrate on interacting with people instead of machines today
and have a lot more deep meaningful friendships than I had when I was
making a lot of money writing code for countless companies, most of
whom are failed
and forgotten
today.
I still write code the old-fashioned way, by hand, here in 2026, but,
I do use AI to answer programming questions which I used to have to dig
through Stack Overflow arguments to find the answer to.
Daylight savings time
There is a bill running through congress right now
to make daylight savings time be
year-round; people in the US would no longer have the annoyance of
“spring forward” and “fall back”.
Mexico used to follow daylight savings time, having their clocks
change time when they did in the United States, but stopped observing
DST in 2022. So now central Mexico is, depending on the time of year,
in Mountain Daylight Time (during the summer) or Central Standard Time
(during the winter); should this bill pass the senate, then central
Mexico will always be in Mountain Daylight Time, which means its hour
will not shift relative to the US depending on the time of year.
People’s economic future
Well over one generation ago, I worked at a gas station (today’s blog
picture is a picture of me from this era). It was a lot of work, and I
had to work graveyard two nights a week (making doing anything during
the day, such as going to college, impossible), but I kept doing it
because I knew once I saved up enough for a car, I would be able to get
out of the trap and start a career path. And, indeed, that is exactly what happened.
In today’s generation, that does not appear to be viable anymore.
Back when I was working
at the gas station, the exit path was clear: Since I was very talented
with computers and the then emerging Internet, I just needed to start
working in Silicon Valley. And that’s exactly what I did.
AI has greatly reduced the number of jobs in tech, so the exit path I
had so many years ago is no longer viable. Indeed, I know people under
crippling student loan debt who just cannot make enough money
to chip away at their debt or even own a car, much less start a family.
Re-watching Terminator 2
July 11, 2026
I re-watched Terminator 2 today.
Rewatching Terminator 2
I saw “Terminator 2” when it first came out, and just re-watched it
in light of the fact that AI is now real. In the movie, they were about
25 years more optimistic about AI becoming real than what happened in
the real world; AI was viable in 1997 in the movie, but in real life it
didn’t become viable until 2023 or 2024, when people starting using
ChatGPT as a free therapist.
Also, AI was developed by the military in the movie,1
but while the military has helped fund AI development, it has been
created by and funded in the private sector.
Yes, this movie describes one risk of AI: It may decide to kill us.
Whether or not that is a real risk is still up in the air, but what
has happened is that AI is causing massive economic damage,
completely destroying the tech industry and highly paid computer
programmers.
I remember being a kid working at a gas station, slowly saving up
enough money to buy a car, and being on the internet for hours every
night, learning computers and technology to get out of the trap of only
being able to work in a gas station. Finally, I saved up enough to buy
an old car, had a friend of a friend who worked for a place that was
hiring, and got my foot in the door by working as tech support for the
then nascent internet industry in Silicon Valley. From there, I slowly
became a highly paid software developer.
With AI taking over everything, people these days no longer have that
opportunity. AI is eating away at the middle class, and today’s
generation of talented artists, musicians, and computer programmers are
having their jobs being taken away from them by AI agents, forcing them
to stay in low paying service positions.
Picture credits
The picture for this blog is a waxwork of the Terminator at
Madame Tussauds, London. The picture was taken by Daniel Jurena
from Prague, Czech Republic. The picture has been
altered (resized and cropped), and is CC-BY-SA 2.0
licensed.
Footnote
1: The details are more complicated, but in the interest in having no spoilers, this is a reasonable description of how Skynet was created.
