gottebp's comments

Nostalgia and Claude Code makes some interesting hard things possible. Five of us wrote this as our ECE291 final project at UIUC in the summer of 2002. It's a Middle Earth space shooter in pure x86 assembly, fully software rendered. It has hand-tuned SSE memory ops, Mersenne Twister RNG, toroidal physics, 10,000 particles at 60fps. We were pretty rough after those two weeks and probably didn't smell great either.

The code sat on a CD-ROM for 24 years. I had Claude Code burn a bunch of tokens to port it from x86 asm to C to WebAssembly (via Emscripten), wrapped it in tests, and got it running cross-platform in the browser/mobile/desktop/everywhere. It's 98% faithful to the original, however I did tune the difficulty a bit; and by that I mean best of luck!

Playable Link: https://particlefield.com/projects/alan-parsons/game.html

This started as a two-week final project for ECE 291 at UIUC in 2002. A space (or sky) shooter written entirely in x86 assembly. Hand tuned SSE memory ops, Mersenne Twister RNG, toroidal map physics, 10,000 particles at, all software-rendered.

Twenty-three years later I burned a pile of Opus 4.6 tokens to port the assembly to C, then compiled to WebAssembly via Emscripten. The first attempt was a direct x86 to WASM transpiler; it passed hundreds of unit tests but kept crashing. The second approach through C worked well.

github: https://github.com/gottebp/alan_parsons_project

story: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/some-projects-stick-you-longe...

Ah this is sad news. I came to know of him by way of UIUC's Engineering Open House. Back in 03' or 04' a rag tag group of us put together an "asymmetric capacitor" exhibit -- a sort of simple ion thruster. A kind hearted TA put our project in for an award Bitzer had sponsored, and it went in our favor.

It was not a large amount after dividing it up, but it was so rare in the college days to have any spare change for anything, and it sure meant a lot at the time. https://ece.illinois.edu/academics/ugrad/scholarships-and-aw...

Here is a personal anecdote that I cannot help but extrapolate on this sad day:

Back in 2016 I made an impossible to get replacement part [0] for the Breville BCG800XL SmartGrinder and sold it through ShapeWays. It paid for all my coffee up until ~2022 when another company popped up and began selling an injection molded copy of my part on Amazon, Walmart, etc. ShapeWays' marketplace always let you easily see the top sellers in each category. I somewhat wonder if outside firms simply caught on, bought one of each, copied it, and made an injection mold to mass produce everything cheaply. This is great for the consumer but I have no idea how ShapeWays could have defended against it. I am thankful it lasted the few years it did. 3D printing was a fun way to make a little while helping folks keep their stuff out of the landfill.

[0] https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/BCG800XL+Grinder+Jamming+due+to...

Every idea seems obvious to add to the OS in hindsight, yet we all lose. For a small shop these apps are their lifeblood and so they get constantly nourished. For a large corporation, this taking candy from babies moment constitutes a blurb in a keynote followed by minimal attention or innovation from then on.

Copyright and patent law were intended to prevent this, but software has no real moat from this. The little plants in the garden get to prove the concept just before the giant redwoods draw all the water from the soil and block the light -- and the legal system is setup to favor this.

Radioactive Polonium-210 is the most potent carcinogen within tobacco, and it is not intrinsic to the plant. It is a result of past use of phosphate fertilizer [0].

[0] https://www.epa.gov/radtown/radioactivity-tobacco

I have occasionally wondered if they were fingerprinting users based on that mouse jitter. Most likely certain aspects of the mouse motion and timing would be unique.

I really wish there was a feature to lock the phone upon rapid movement, such as when a thief snatches the device while it is in use. It seems like an obvious mitigation to a common problem by way of the built in accelerometer.

Before it was called "local first" it was known as "subsidiarity". Seeing the principle applied to food, politics, software is exciting to me.

"Subsidiarity is an organizing principle that matters ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest or least centralized competent authority. Political decisions should be taken at a local level if possible, rather than by a central authority".[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity_(Catholicism)

Does the FDA not randomly sample and test for this sort of thing? Why does it take a university study to discover it?

Well, I do not. It is one of the most popular grinders on Amazon though. Many of us are already stuck with it!

Breville coffee grinders. The company does not sell parts, and so 3D printing was necessary to bridge the gap when mine broke a few years back. It ended up being one of the small victories over entropy for me, and I wrote it all up on iFixit here[0]

[0] https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/BCG800XL+Grinder+Jamming+due+to...

Breville coffee grinders fall into this category, and were impossible to get OEM internal parts for. When mine failed a few years back, I designed a 3D printed upgrade for the main wear-part in their BCG800XL SmartGrinder and it was not too much extra effort to document it on iFixit[0] with ShapeWays[1] as an easy way to get the part. I think there is a lot of room to do this for all kinds of stuff that would otherwise go to waste, and make a little bit of passive income on the side (enough to cover coffee indefinitely in my case).

[0] https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/BCG800XL+Grinder+Jamming+due+to...

[1] https://www.shapeways.com/product/NASLAGCCP/impeller-replace...

At the international level, it is debate-able. It depends on the goodwill nations have towards one another. At the individual and family level though, atomization is incredibly destructive to culture and community. Reliance on others is needed more than ever. To be absolutely independent, is to be without love (given or received). Family, community, and nation cannot exist without love — it is the vital glue that holds it all together and makes it worth holding together. Arguably if this was healthy at the local and national level, it makes sense then to extend it internationally as well.

We need a better way to reward the contributing artists making the diffusion models possible. Might we be able to come up with a royalty model, where the artist that made the original source content used in training the diffusion model, gets a fractional royalty based on how heavily it is used when generating the prompted art piece? We want to incentivize artists to feed their works, and original styles, into future AI models.

Incredible. Like a reverse Turing test: "Can the human tell if the virtual console the AI created is a real computer?"

When all elections are split 50%/50%, even the slightest bias in censorship could swing it to one side or the other.

The automotive firmware industry has had a strong preference historically for stable, old dependencies. With the advent of connected firmware, arises a strong force pushing in the other direction — towards frequent updates, built from latest and greatest dependencies. How they balance verification and validation for safety purposes with frequent and more volatile updates, will be interesting to watch.

It is so realistic too. I know a Prior (similar to an Abbot) who speaks exactly like this at times.

“Defiant”…Interesting editorial choice for a woman insisting that her marriage was quite valid. Henry’s actions merely showed himself a serial adulterer. Defiant might describe him, but not Katherine. She was the victim here and Sir Thomas More, friend of Henry, lost his life standing up for that same truth.