I will say that this is a surprisingly deep and complex domain. The amount of flexibility, variety and scalability you see in DC architectures is mind-boogling. They can span from a 3kW system that fits in 2U all the way to multiples of 100kWs that span entire buildings and be powered through any combination of grid, solar and/or gas.

I'm currently building a full-blown OpenAPI toolchain at work, where the OpenAPI document itself is the AST. It contains passes for reference inlining, document merging, JSON Schema validation, C++ code generation and has further plans for data model bindings, HTML5 UI...

Why? Because I'm working on a new embedded system which has a data model so complex, it blew past 10k lines of OpenAPI specifications with no end in sight. I said "ain't no way we're implementing this by hand" and embarked on the mother of all yak shavings.

I want all of the boilerplate/glue code derived from a single source of truth: base C++ data classes, data model bindings, configuration management, change notifications, REST API, state replication for device twins and more. That way we can focus on the domain logic instead, which is already plenty complex on its own.

I'm not designing all of this to be simple to develop. I'm designing it so that it's simple for the developers. Even with the incomplete prototype I have currently, the team is already sold ("you mean I just write the REST API specification and it generates all of the C++ classes for me to inherit?"). The roadmap of features for that toolchain is defined, clear and purposeful: to delete mountains of menial, bug-prone source code before it is ever written by hand.

Sometimes, it takes complexity to deliver simplicity. The trick is to nail the abstractions in-between.

It handles interrupts/traps and targets the aarch64 QEMU virt platform. It also features a HAL.

The Windows decompilation community is far more fragmented than the console one, as it hasn't coalesced around a common set of tools like splat or decomp-toolkit.

Even then, a full DB is quite achievable, even on large projects. The biggest public project using ghidra-delinker-extension out there is the FUEL decompilation: https://github.com/widberg/FUELDecompilation

The executable is 7 MiB, has over 30,000 functions and has more than 250,000 relocations spots. The user made the game relocatable in six weeks (with four of them debugging issues with my extension). They then managed to replace code in spite of the fact that the artifact was built with LTO by binary patching __usercall into MSVC.

There's a write-up about all of that that is well worth a read: https://github.com/widberg/fmtk/wiki/Decompilation

I've also had one user manage to fully delink the original Halo on the Xbox in one week. To be fair, they were completely nerd-sniped and worked non-stop on it, but it still counts.

I've done a case study where I've ported a Linux a.out program into a native Windows PE program without source code: https://boricj.net/atari-jaguar-sdk/2023/11/27/introduction....

Another case study was ripping the archive code from a PlayStation game and stuffing it into a Linux MIPS program to create an asset extractor: https://boricj.net/tenchu1/2024/03/18/part-6.html

It's a relocatable object file exporter that supports x86/MIPS and ELF/COFF. In other words, it can delink any program selection and you can reuse the bits for various use-cases, including making new programs Mad Max-style.

It carved itself a niche in the Windows decompilation community, used alongside objdiff or decomp.me.

This is the point where I'm supposed to describe my self-hosting solution on my so-called homelab, where my blog lives. I won't, because it's both stupid in smart ways and smart in stupid ways, therefore it sucks all the way.

Self-hosting is like any hobby. Half-ass it and you'll half-like it.

Basically, if you define a data model with bindings, you can inject data into it or extract data from it by running SAX-style visitors. You can use serializers/deserializers for standard formats like JSON/BSON/CBOR/CSV, or you can define custom formats for formating structured data however you want to. You can also run a serializer visitor on a deserializer to convert between formats. You can compose filter visitors to extract a subtree or filter out keys. And it's designed to fit on microcontrollers with very limited dynamic memory allocations, because it either streams data on-the-fly or works directly with the underlying data format in a big preallocated buffer.

I worked with libraries that offered a subset of these features before in my professional career (even built one myself), but recently I've had an epiphany (a document can also be used as a data model) that makes me think I can create something elegant and unique.

Shipped out of the box with Android 2.3, Samsung supported it up until Android 4.1, then I switched to CyanogenMod until my father rage-bought me a new phone in 2016 because it crashed so much he had trouble contacting me. I still kept it up to date with LineageOS and then unofficial versions for fun (it's at Android 13 last I checked).

Do I expect a Samsung Galaxy SII to do as well with 2026 software as it did in 2013? No, but I can run a 2013 computer with 2026 software without needing to track down dodgy homebrews on xdaforums.com and that reflects badly on the smartphone ecosystem.

Ask the Department of State if they'd like a European-sized French attitude and strategic autonomy.

[1] https://www.tritondatacenter.com/blog/a-new-chapter-begins-f...

Also, our nuclear doctrine says that it's a nuclear warning shot, meaning that the next step on the ladder is French-delivered Armageddon by SSBNs. We're not supposed to keep lobbing them in case of a persistent problem.

Except for France's ASMP-A nuclear warning shot (which is not a tactical option by the way), all other independent European nuclear options (French or British SSBNs) are not only strategic, but they imply wiping entire countries off the map. All options also depend on whether the French President or the British Prime Minister decides that this course of action is warranted.

If Trump indeed invades Greenland, shoving a French-made nuclear fireball in front of an American carrier battle group off the coast of Greenland would probably not be our first option. Besides the massive political cost of breaking the nuclear taboo, if kinetic actions are deemed necessary, deterrent also comes in conventional varieties.

Also, while the British nuclear deterrent might be operationally independent, it relies on American-supplied Trident missiles.

Besides that, there are plenty of resources to learn particular topics/techniques out there. For drawing people with any degree of realism, you'll need at least drawing proportions at first and then anatomy later on.

While you can brute-force it from zero on your own like I did, I wouldn't recommend it. You'll learn faster if you study it like a proper discipline.

As for the subjects, being a horny teenager at the time I mostly drew scantily clad women. Sometimes portraits/caricatures of teachers or other students, mostly on request. All together, that led to an unfathomable number of hijinks.

Thankfully, the one time that a teacher came across their caricature, it ended well. A fellow student requested it while in class (of handwriting Java of all things). She then took my handout and brought it to the teacher, proudly stating with glee "look at what boricj drew!". Cue the laughter. Then the teacher stated flipping pages and stumbled upon the rest of my usual bodywork, so to speak. Cue the laughter again. By that point, I was rolling on the floor, my sides hurting.

I don't think I'll ever top that, but the reception of my doodles at the conference by academics reminded me of that past. Hopefully I'll manage to rekindle it.

I used to, when I was in a classroom or at a bar. Actually managed to get quite good at it through sheer boredom in grande école. Then life happened and that faded away, alongside my mental health. Recently I've rediscovered doodling while attending ACM CCS 2025 as an independent (long story) and I want to improve my mental health in 2026, to the point where I can draw regularly again.