HackerTrans
トップ新着トレンドコメント過去質問紹介求人

drivers99

no profile record

コメント

drivers99
·18 日前·議論
It's a weird coincidence to me I just remembered Henry Darger again today, within the last hour actually. I had watched "In the Realms of the Unreal" (2004 documentary) in the theater when it came out. (I know it's only a coincidence because it's something I'm interested in thinking about, but it feels meaningful anyway.)
drivers99
·18 日前·議論
Does that not lead you to situations where you have to guess the last letter on each round? Or do you choose words to avoid getting trapped in that situation in the first place?
drivers99
·20 日前·議論
Even then. During a recent storm, they went off erroneously in Denver. (Looks like the other two erroneous alerts were via phone though.)

> Denver emergency officials say they are working to rebuild public trust after a mistaken tornado siren activation Monday became the third improper emergency alert issued in the city this year.

https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/denver-tornado-alarms-...
drivers99
·25 日前·議論
Looks like "PHY layer" means physical layer.
drivers99
·先月·議論
Jef Raskin called those "quasimodes" in The Humane Interface (2000) and was in favor of them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_(user_interface)#Quasimod...
drivers99
·先月·議論
> On that last point, this technology is horrific for attention. It's a thermonuclear ADHD amplifier and I have seen the same effect in every single one of my adult friends. Folk running 3 screens simultaneously working on totally unrelated "projects" they have little hope of maintaining, and such little commitment to the outcome that the time is obviously wasted.

This part reminded me of a recent article and it’s interesting that he brings up ADHD because that’s probably the bigger issue then. Because what I got from the article and the related conversation, specifically the top comment:

> > Sometimes, tools don’t move the needle because there’s no needle to move.

> It reminds me of something my old CS mentor, now elderly, had said about LLMs a few months ago: "it's a force multiplier, but there has to be some force to multiply."

From: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48254336

The fact that it turned out that “Human Bottlenecks” post was written by the same person who wrote “Notes on Managing ADHD” which I had printed and studied for tips not that long ago made sense.

So, to connect the dots, the fact he made all of those things without them being part of a bigger plan is, I think, the problem. In the framework of the above quote, there’s no needle there, nothing to multiply.

I’ve been trying to think more about whether what I’m doing is going somewhere, or if I can skip it and simplify things.
drivers99
·2 か月前·議論
It doesn’t. I posted a reply to the same comment before I saw your question. Even the books I mentioned didn’t really get into it. I tried a search for some that did and ran across Constructing a Microprogrammed Computer by O.J. Mengali which looks interesting. It says it has you implement the microcode for 4 different architectures. I’m going to check it out.
drivers99
·2 か月前·議論
I did nand2tetris a couple times, but it emphasizes simplicity in every level of abstraction. That in itself is an amazing lesson and has been an inspiration, but that also means it skips things like microcode. In college (in the 1990s) I took a EE class as part of my CS degree that went through how an 8086-like[0] CPU is made, a lot like nand2tetris but without necessarily making each part an assignment. It did cover how microcode worked where there was an internal program counter that stepped through a table of control words whose bits directly orchestrated each controllable piece of the CPU. We each got an instruction to implement on a simulator that the teacher had made previously. (I got DEC, decrement.)

In a way I guess the instructions in nand2tetris are the microcode. The bits of the instructions directly control the hardware with the first bit choosing 2 instruction types, so there’s only 1 step of code per instruction, unlike with microcode where an instruction can have any number of microcode steps.

In Ben Eater’s series of videos building an 8-bit CPU on breadboards he has ROMs that are indexed by the opcode (4 bits of the instruction) + a step counter to determine the control word. The ROM stands in for what could be done with sufficiently complicated logic gates. I like it as a next step on the hardware side as you get hands on experience with electronics and having to troubleshoot it.

It’s disappointing how it only has 16 bytes of RAM so you can’t really build higher levels of abstraction like you can with nand2tetris. But at that point you could (I should) either redo it with a better design (and put it on PCBs) or move on to the 6502 project, and then since that puts together a timer, CPU, ROM, RAM, I/O, UART, etc. mentally group those together and move on to microcontrollers that already have them together.

Anyone interested in reading about how a CPU could be made out of logic gates could also read Code by Charles Petzold (moves slower, recently updated) and/or Pattern on the Stone by Danny Hillis (moves faster).

Edit: I just checked Code (2nd edition) and that uses a 4 bit cycle counter and hard logic gates to determine what to do each cycle. But then it uses an array of diodes for part of the logic. Would that be considered microcode?

[0] there were classes that covered more advanced (pipelined) CPUs in another CS class but not at quite a low level where you felt like you could make one yourself
drivers99
·2 か月前·議論
But evolution doesn't make those developments improbable or coincidental. I recently read a book called Time's Second Arrow about how selection, when present in systems that can create many combinations, naturally evolve more functional information, which is the number of bits it takes to identify specific combinations that are (in a certain contexts) more functional. (log base 2 of the number of possible combinations divided by the number of combinations that "work" for a given function). They argue that the number of functional bits has been increasing since the big bang and is basically a law of nature in itself.

Hopefully I stated that correctly. You sound like you'd be interesting in this type of book too, but here's a shorter article about it I randomly searched for and read to make sure it was a good representation of the book (ignore the clickbait title of the article): https://nextbigideaclub.com/magazine/new-theory-upends-150-y... But I think the book itself is even better, even just the first chapter that has a quick history and summary about the discovery of the known laws of nature we have so far.
drivers99
·2 か月前·議論
Some terminal software would use a function key that would be labelled "Execute". You'd usually have a template to put over the function keys to tell you what does what.
drivers99
·2 か月前·議論
That's an interesting idea: if you're thinking of having an accessibility option, consider just making it the default.
drivers99
·2 か月前·議論
I remember the book saying something like "a person's name is the most beautiful sound in the world to them." The book may say to say their name back to them (I don't remember right now), but that's not what I took away from it. It reminded me of when people would make fun of my name (first and/or last) or bring up someone famous who has the same first ("Donald Duck") or last name ("are you related Joan Rivers?"), or someone famous who sounds like my first and last name put together (Doc Rivers), and I never thought it was funny. When I see people make fun of other people's names, the recipient never seemed to enjoy it either.
drivers99
·2 か月前·議論
> one by one I put each book back 20 minutes before it closed

If your library is like mine, it makes more sense to put it on a "to be shelved" cart, because they often track circulation even by the ones that didn't get checked out.

I've been going the library most weekends, and one thing I love about it is the random discovery of things that isn't driven by a personally-customized algorithm.

(I suppose I just contradicted myself a little bit. They'll keep the books that statistics show people are interested in, although I assume that is not the only criterion. But it's still not customized to me specifically.)

> I don't wanna read about [...] Marcus Aurelius!

One of the books I ran across and checked out was a graphic novel (book length comic book) about Marcus Aurelius.
drivers99
·2 か月前·議論
> Apple’s gray on slightly-lighter-gray UI standards

It's a tangential point, but I turned on System Settings -> Accessibility -> Display -> Increase Contrast (the on/off option, not Display Contrast) and now at least the windows are outlined sharply.
drivers99
·2 か月前·議論
Similarly, I still have my HP-42s but I usually use Free42[0] on my phone and tablet. They also have it for desktops. It's great if you like RPN calculators. Or if anyone wants to learn about them, you can use that program and follow along with the original manual(s)[1]. It's nice to be able to handle the order of operations without parentheses.

[0] https://thomasokken.com/free42/ I should send them a donation.

[1] https://literature.hpcalc.org/community/hp42s-om-en.pdf followed by https://literature.hpcalc.org/community/hp42s-prog-en.pdf
drivers99
·3 か月前·議論
Oh that does look awesome!
drivers99
·3 か月前·議論
> Recently a Clojure documentary came out and the approach of Rich Hickey was seemingly the opposite: Deep research of prior art, papers, other languages over a long period of time.

That was also on my mind thanks to the documentary. Then I followed up with "Easy made Simple" and "Hammock Driven Development", and it makes me want to learn Clojure.

Clojure documentary on CultRepo channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y24vK_QDLFg

Simple Made Easy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxdOUGdseq4

Hammock Driven Development: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc
drivers99
·3 か月前·議論
See Technology Connections' video about Brown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh4aWZRtTwU

He says brown is perceived when you see an orange-wavelength light that is significantly darker than its surroundings, providing the necessary context for your brain to interpret it as brown.
drivers99
·3 か月前·議論
> I'm not smart enough to intuit NAND from transistors. I'm also not sure I will be alone in that. It's such a weird difficulty wall.

I agree with you, because I feel like I only got that one because I happened to get curious about CMOS (PMOS + NMOS) logic earlier this year, and remembered the general idea from before. Otherwise, I don't think I would have figured that out either. Google image search for CMOS NAND basically shows the solution, but the game doesn't tell you that's what it is until after you beat the level. I think seeing the answer, then immediate trying to reproduce it from memory is a good way to learn. Then if you try again the next day/week/month and are still able to remember it, then you've learned it.

I also looked up a solution for the full adder since I couldn't quite remember how it worked.

Tangentially, I've gone through similar material over time repeatedly in the games nandgame and Turing Complete, going through the Nand 2 Tetris course (on Coursera), building Ben Eater's breadboard 8-bit computer, reading "Code" by Charles Petzold and "The Pattern on the Stone" by Danny Hillis and "Digital Computer Electronics" by Malvino since that was what Ben Eater partly based his computer design on, and going over digital logic in CS-related EE courses up through how a CPU is made. But most of those barely cover anything below the logic gate level and I don't think any of them covered CMOS/NMOS/PMOS specifically which is why I got curious about them this year.

It's pretty fun though (my type of fun anyway), and I'm really curious to see how the rest of it goes since it's building a GPU instead of a CPU for a change.
drivers99
·3 か月前·議論
They had the longest reaction shot of some people filming it with their phones (maybe they got a good shot) and when they switched back to after the booster separation I said at the time, “that would have been cool to see.”