Yes! Just started reading the table of contents, and already I'm feeling that joy of old-school creative computing. Revival of the culture of personal computers and programming as a technology of liberation. A better future is possible and the power is in our hands.
I like this magazine vibe, it reminds me of the good ol' l33t zines from the late '80s and '90s. However, if I can offer a suggestion, I'd also pair the technical articles with a little more punky, down-to-earth stuff. They were cheerful, informal, and full of that cheeky, irreverent, cocky smart-ass humor, plus this mysterious edge that made them absolutely magnetic to me. Life just wasn’t so heavy back then.
Thanks for the suggestion! I wouldn't mind having such articles in PO! tbh - let me think what can we do about it (or rather: let me pass this to the rest of the team so they think about it too).
It is a double edged sword of the single page layout that you really have to make one point briefly and get out of there. I had to pare down many details to fit the layout.
If you want to learn how to implement a query based compiler, I have a tutorial on that here: https://thunderseethe.dev/posts/lsp-base/ (which I also highly recommend but that might be more obvious since I wrote it)
Thanks! I also told Aga via email in the thread where I submitted my article.
Worth noting that the HTML tag in the title was stripped from the PDF table of contents as well, so the title for that article in the contents is missing a word. No big deal, but good to know for future submissions!
The one-page limit enhances the quality of this zine. It compels authors to simplify complex topics, which can be more challenging than writing a lengthy paper. I maintain a printed binder of past issues for quick reference during CTFs, and the reverse engineering articles have saved me hours of searching through documentation.
A couple of the stories where I feel I have expertise I found to be a bit objectionable. The title/headline was some clever or unexpected thing, but upon reading it turns out there is nothing supporting the headline.
E.g. "Integer Comparison is not Deterministic", in the C standard you can't do math on pointers from different allocations. The result in the article is obvious if you know that.
Also, in the Logistic Map in 8-Bit. There is a statement
> While implementing Algorithm 1 in modern systems is trivial, doing so in earlier computers and languages was not so straightforward.
Microsoft BASIC did floating point. Every 8-bit of the era was able to do this calculation easily. I did it on my Franklin ACE 1000 in 1988 in basic while reading the book Chaos.
I suppose what I'm saying is the premise of the articles seem to be click-baity and I find that off putting.
In general when selecting articles we assume that the reader is an expert in some field(s), but not necessarily in the field covered by this article. As such, things which are simple for an expert in the specific domain, can still be surprisingly to learn for folks who aren't experts in that domain.
What I'm saying is, that we don't try to be a cutting edge scientific journal — rather than that, we publish even the smallest trick that we decide someone may not know about and find it fun/interesting to learn.
The consequence of that is that, yeah, some article have a bit clickbaity titles for some of the readers.
On the flip side, as we know from meme-t-shirts, there are only 2 things hard in computer science, and naming is first on the list ;)
P.S. Sounds like you should write some cool article btw :)
Yes! Just started reading the table of contents, and already I'm feeling that joy of old-school creative computing. Revival of the culture of personal computers and programming as a technology of liberation. A better future is possible and the power is in our hands.
yes!
I like this magazine vibe, it reminds me of the good ol' l33t zines from the late '80s and '90s. However, if I can offer a suggestion, I'd also pair the technical articles with a little more punky, down-to-earth stuff. They were cheerful, informal, and full of that cheeky, irreverent, cocky smart-ass humor, plus this mysterious edge that made them absolutely magnetic to me. Life just wasn’t so heavy back then.
Sadly I don't know if that kind of 80s/90s irreverence would go well with today's sensitivities.
Thanks for the suggestion! I wouldn't mind having such articles in PO! tbh - let me think what can we do about it (or rather: let me pass this to the rest of the team so they think about it too).
like Mondo 2000 :)
TIL :D
Awesome! Was looking forward to the next issue. Paged Out reminds me a lot of the old-school 2600 Hacker Quarterly periodical back in the 80s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2600:_The_Hacker_Quarterly
> Query based compilers are all the rage: Rust, Swift, Kotlin, Haskell, and Clang all structure their compilers as queries.
I've never heard of this. It's a pity the article doesn't go into details.
It is a double edged sword of the single page layout that you really have to make one point briefly and get out of there. I had to pare down many details to fit the layout.
If you want to learn more about query based compilers as a concept, I highly recommend ollef's aritcle: https://ollef.github.io/blog/posts/query-based-compilers.htm...
If you want to learn how to implement a query based compiler, I have a tutorial on that here: https://thunderseethe.dev/posts/lsp-base/ (which I also highly recommend but that might be more obvious since I wrote it)
Old discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23644391
I love Paged Out -- it's basically the only modern equivalent to 1980s BYTE or Dr. Dobbs Journal today.
There's also Proof Of Concept Or GTFO edited by Pastor Manuel LaPhroaig https://github.com/angea/pocorgtfo
Boy, PoC||GTFO is my favorite "magazine".
No, not giving spoilers except there might be some polyglot files.
It has a little bit of a "2600 vibe" but with a more modern look and feel. This is the first issue I've read, and I like it.
Some nice art in there too.
Thank you. I love the wallpapers of Paged Out and always set it as my default wallpaper on MacOS.
I feel like this tweet suggests that the PDF is a polyglot or an embedded second PDF.
https://x.com/gynvael/status/2024180784064598134
Ah, no, sorry, no polyglots there yet. We'll get there one day, but so far our tooling doesn't allow for it yt.
Initial impressions says no about being that file a polyglot.
If you like polyglot files, see https://www.alchemistowl.org/pocorgtfo/
Oh yeah. I have the paperback 'bible'. I don't think that that one is a polyglot, though.
PoC||GTFO is the GOAT
They've got a new web viewer in this issue that can be used to link to individual articles and might be nicer than reading a PDF on some screens: https://pagedout.institute/webview.php?issue=8&page=1
The article I submitted has an HTML tag in the title, and seems to have broken the web viewer :(
Note that you can link to pages in a PDF with a hash like #page=64 (for example) in the URL.
https://pagedout.institute/download/PagedOut_008.pdf#page=64
Whoops. Looking into it.
EDIT: Fixed. It wasn't the tags - it was a trailing space we had in the "database". I honestly though I've handled that case, but apparently not .
Thanks! I also told Aga via email in the thread where I submitted my article.
Worth noting that the HTML tag in the title was stripped from the PDF table of contents as well, so the title for that article in the contents is missing a word. No big deal, but good to know for future submissions!
This goes to the "fix me" list. We're planning a rebuild in the next few days anyway, so it should get fixed then.
The one-page limit enhances the quality of this zine. It compels authors to simplify complex topics, which can be more challenging than writing a lengthy paper. I maintain a printed binder of past issues for quick reference during CTFs, and the reverse engineering articles have saved me hours of searching through documentation.
A couple of the stories where I feel I have expertise I found to be a bit objectionable. The title/headline was some clever or unexpected thing, but upon reading it turns out there is nothing supporting the headline.
E.g. "Integer Comparison is not Deterministic", in the C standard you can't do math on pointers from different allocations. The result in the article is obvious if you know that.
Also, in the Logistic Map in 8-Bit. There is a statement
> While implementing Algorithm 1 in modern systems is trivial, doing so in earlier computers and languages was not so straightforward.
Microsoft BASIC did floating point. Every 8-bit of the era was able to do this calculation easily. I did it on my Franklin ACE 1000 in 1988 in basic while reading the book Chaos.
I suppose what I'm saying is the premise of the articles seem to be click-baity and I find that off putting.
You're right.
In general when selecting articles we assume that the reader is an expert in some field(s), but not necessarily in the field covered by this article. As such, things which are simple for an expert in the specific domain, can still be surprisingly to learn for folks who aren't experts in that domain.
What I'm saying is, that we don't try to be a cutting edge scientific journal — rather than that, we publish even the smallest trick that we decide someone may not know about and find it fun/interesting to learn.
The consequence of that is that, yeah, some article have a bit clickbaity titles for some of the readers.
On the flip side, as we know from meme-t-shirts, there are only 2 things hard in computer science, and naming is first on the list ;)
P.S. Sounds like you should write some cool article btw :)
This is so awesome, do you have a mailing list, RSS, etc?
They have both, see the bottom of the home page: https://pagedout.institute/