[stopads]

When I learned to program (before 9/11) there was a big emphasis on assembly language and using low level interfaces to communicate with other hardware. The idea was that everyone studying computer science should understand every aspect of the CPU down to the register and operation level, and then be able to design logic gates to replicate that functionality if needed.

Now we have CPUs that are fundamentally undocumented, unknowable, and untranslatable. The entire infrastructure of the network, the telecoms, and the cpu design itself has all been subverted to the needs of the national security complex or corporate advertising.

I'm not sure what computer science even means anymore. Everything I learned is completely useless.

[leggomylibro]

I'm with you up to the last paragraph.

It's not useless. FPGAs have plummeted in cost and there are now open-source toolchains for some of them. There's also a Free commercial-grade ISA that you can use in your personal designs (RISC-V). These days, it is not expensive to design your own well-understood computer which can run microcode generated by commercial-grade compilation toolchains such as GCC. Even hardware production is getting cheapER with shared wafer runs like MOSIS, although custom silicon is still out of reach for hobbyists.

Chin up, buddy. The US is not the entire world, and the pendulum of our generations' zeitgeist can still swing back towards the ideals of liberty and equality of access which the mavens of computing once stood for. You can already buy ARM application processors from vendors other than Intel/AMD, and I would be surprised if we lived in a world where every new computer comes with "management engine" spyware in its CPU for much longer.

[zadokshi]

I love your optimism, I’m not sure if I can see a path towards the public voting for a government that would make the necessary adjustments to reign in the ability of government powers to influence “management engine” code.

[tmotwu]

X86 was designed way back even before pre-9/11, so "now" is not any different from the past. We all know the rep X86 gets for poor documentation - poor design in general. Claiming that older ISA's were better documented and easier to understand will not get you very far.

Most if not all top computer science / computer engineering programs in the states teach digital logic design, x86 / x86-64, computer architecture, compilers, communication networks in very fundamental detail as required courses. The emphasis is still there.

[dfox]

The set of ~8 undocumented but well-known i386 instructions predates not only 9/11 but even 486.