James Mickens has written one of the funniest things I've read in a while. Here's an excerpt:

	I think that it used to be fun to be a hardware architect. Anything that you invented
	would be amazing, and the laws of physics were actively trying to help you succeed.
	Your friend would say, “I wish that we 	could predict branches more accurately,”
	and you’d think,  “maybe we can leverage three bits of state per branch to implement a
	simple saturating counter,” and you’d laugh and declare that such a stupid scheme would
	never work, but then you’d test it and it would be 94% accurate, and the branches would
	wake up the next morning and read their newspapers and the headlines would say
	OUR WORLD HAS BEEN SET ON FIRE.

Original: The Slow Winter; and here's a mirror just in case.