How do you search for low level content nowadays?

Question

Recently I've been messing around x86-64 assembly for fun. I can't help but notice that searching for relevant information online is much harder now that it was 10 years ago when I started with programming. It could be related to my particular topic, or I'm just getting old, but bare with me.Yes, SEO is a major reason for it; ad-infested and LLM-generated pages rank very high in search results. But even if I work around those (with Kagi, for example), it's harder still: Searching things like x86-64, POSIX, ABI's, etc, rarely yields results for me. Authoritative content is thin and spread out across disparate man-pages. Some things are left out completely undocumented. LLM's seems especially helpless dealing with low level topics.A large portion of this field feels like folklore knowledge, and I didn't even get outside x86-64 on Linux; I can imagine it's much less approachable in the embedded world.Can you relate? How do you deal with it?

drweevil · Accepted Answer

One way I've dealt with this is to identify books on the topic. I'll search on DuckDuckGo, Amazon, Archive.org (where you might even find a pdf), etc. If I can find one that suits I'll buy a used (hopefully inexpensive) copy, if possible.

sandwichsphinx · Answer

I noticed the same thing, especially with many of those old authoritative sources that seem to have disappeared or suffered from link rot. It reminds me a lot of the movie Soylent Green, where basic repairs had to be done custom because there were no replacements. Outside of academic journals and printed books, I don&rsquo;t bother searching for information because it&rsquo;s just not worth the effort given how hard it is to find reliable sources. The only way I&rsquo;ve been dealing with this is by relearning my fundamentals. There are only so many ways hardware and software can be designed correctly, so I rely on recurring patterns, motifs, improving my reverse engineering skills, and adopting a clean-room design approach.

not_your_vase · Answer

1. I rely more and more on official documentation alone, and the code itself, especially since SO went down the toilet.
2. Sometimes Copilot is actually useful. E.g. Zephyr frameworks[0] documentation is quite a hit and miss, and it's code is... well... it's a lot, made by a million people and it shows. When asking for example code for some arcane option, I found it frequently useful (something which I hate to admit).
[0] - okay, maybe Zephyr is not on the same low level as ASM, but you get the idea