> To not leave you hanging: Intel has an official x86 encoder/decoder library called XED. According to Intel’s XED, as of this writing, there are 1503 defined x86 instructions (“iclasses” in XED lingo), from AAA to XTEST (this includes AMD-specific extensions too, by the way). Straightforward, right?
Hopefully this will have either saved you a click or validated your time in reading the article.
For me the article was well worth it; where else but in ISA discussions can you find gems like the following?
> Does a non-instruction that is non-defined and unofficially guaranteed to non-execute exactly as if it had never been in the instruction set to begin with count as an x86 instruction? For that matter, does UD2 itself, the defined undefined instruction, count as an instruction?
Curious, does anyone actually care about the actual number primarily? I thought pretty much everyone who clicks on an article with that title would do so because they are interested in the insights gathered when getting to that number.
I doubt most people reading the article coming from HN are writing disassemblers, and all such people would have to read it anyway because the number itself isn't sufficient to validate that you've enumerated all of them (because as my sibling points out, it's more complicated than that). The specific number is the least interesting part.
@denvercoder9 had a good comment that might assuage your concern:
> It's not a ban on people, it's a ban on the institution that has demonstrated they can't be trusted to act in good faith.
If people affilated with the UMN want to contribute to the Linux kernel, they can still do that on a personal title. They just can't do it as part of UMN research, but given that UMN has demonstrated they don't have safeguards to prevent bad faith research, that seems reasonable.
+1
Lost Art Press is an awesome company and publishes some great books, both in terms of content and quality.
If anyone is looking to make a workbench, they released their workbench book creative commons:
https://blog.lostartpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/AWB...
There are no vetoes in a consensus system. One or more members may have a "concern". Until those concerns are successfully addressed there can be no consensus. And only with consensus can anything be advanced to policy or law. The Society of Friends makes use of this form of governance:
That is exactly how a veto works. In other words, a consensus-based decision make system is a special case of a decision making system with a veto, in which everyone has equal right to veto.
The Friends are more popularly known as Quakers. My wife is one. We were married almost 20 years ago in a Quaker ceremony.
There's a lot to like about their approach to things but consensus is difficult to deal with. Unreasonable people cause great stress on people who are trying to get simple things done.
There are different flavors of Quakers: my wife attends an "unprogrammed meeting" which means that there's not a minister. Instead, members sit in a circle (pre-COVID) and those who are moved to speak do so. But there's also programmed meetings, which have a minister. There's probably more variations.
Around the time the US was founded the Quakers were seen as good people to do business with, since they strove for honesty and transparency in business. There were many prosperous Quaker merchants. These days they seem to be more anti-capitalist.
