JoeDaDude

Me too! I couldn't find one so I cobbled one together. I wrote enough python for all the parts to work together. I can speak Japanese into it, it gets recognized, and - all too eagerly - the chatbot corrects my mistakes.

My stack, running locally on a Windows 10 machine: - Vosk STT augmented with vosk-model-ja-0.22 for Japanese - Gemma4 LLM running in Ollama and with customized model card to act as a Japanese tutor - Kokoro TTS using Japanese voice jf_alpha.pt and augmented with the unidic Japanese dictionary

It's just a guess, but he could be referring to the stop motion animation movies that were popular in the 60's. Ray Harryhausen famously made a career out of the technique.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkLEZSWe5u4

Even the most casual anime watcher is bound to notice the frequent appearances of power lines. Some folk at Tumblr have been collected them at a dedicated Powerlines in Anime page. Contributions welcome!

https://powerlinesinanime.tumblr.com/

IIRC (read the book ages ago when much younger) , the theory was that by using the 56 Aubrey holes to count, say, by moving a pole from one hole to another once a year, an eclipse could be predicted to occur every 18th or 19th year. I always wondered why this was never simulated, and I guess the answer is that it would not work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_holes#Archaeoastronomy_...

The Racter book, "The policeman's beard is half constructed" is also available on the net as a pdf:

https://www.ubu.com/media/text/racter/racter_policemansbeard...

What about his contributions to human civilization? ;)

He got a world record score on the Tempest arcade game [1], then developed an AI which beat his own record[2]. His biggest failure was, that after rebuilding TEMPEST from arcade machine ROMS, he added levels to the game but never made them public [3].

[1]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuSMCWu02hA

[2]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdbpoDjIvPk

[3]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjsVSEbXDOM

Nifty little project! It doesn't seem to be much of a leap to have this on one's web page so it runs when the page is loaded. It does require knowledge of the viewers' position though.

I remember hacking GORILLA.BAS code, which was on our office computers, to randomize gravity for my opponent, the result being they could not accurately predict where their bananas would go. I was an unbeatable legend for a while.

For a while I worked at what was then the Sperry Rand Corporation (now Unisys) which had some pride in their heritage as the descendant of the Univac Corporation founded by ENIAC inventors Eckert and Mauchly. In a glass case there was a vacuum tube circuit said to be a memory unit of the original ENIAC. No one seemed to know much about it, casting doubt on the claimed provenance of the device. The tube circuit resembled the ones shown in the photo linked below (although none of those in the photo are from ENIAC).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Women_holding_parts_of_th...

(This is a repost of an older comment I made)

FWIW, a glimpse of the sole surviving Paige machine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWW8rjuikXE

I have an LLM running locally on my machine complete with STT and TTS. While I don't expect much, it will be fun to get my LLM to play the game.

In the video it claims the date is December 31, 2026 at the 4:02 mark. I wonder why the animation changed the date from the short story.

We'll see this post again on that date!

The "human connection to the artist" is believed to be important by some, but I disagree. People tend to create an image of a musician and are too often disappointed because, for example, they disapprove of the musician's lifestyle (the expression sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll exists for a reason), or because of disagreement with the social or political causes the musicians support. Occasionally, fans follow an artist for their commitment to their art later to discover they sell out, like their style changes to pursue mass appeal, or they sell their work to become a jingle for sugar pops or similar.

I think it is best to appreciate an artist's creation and leave it at that. To quote a film, I think it is best to "separate the art from the artist".

LED segments may be nice, but why not go full out Nixie tube? There are several kits out there, but for the DIY ethic, you can add WWV sync - and even watch the synchronization process - with this fellow's project:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smUwbzA9SEo

When they said cardboard VR, I thought they meant...

https://imgur.com/gallery/what-people-really-really-really-r...

The almost universal opinion is that AI chatbots are damaging, misleading, dangerous, etc. etc. but I suspect there are under reported stories about how AI chatbots helped people deal with depression, grief, addiction, loneliness or some mental health condition. Ideally, the people afflicted improved their lives and no longer felt the need for an AI chatbot.

Are there any such stories or, better yet, academic papers? If so, please post.

I always like to hear about ancient board game reconstructions. Like music and religion, games are something every culture creates. Another recent example is the case of Liubu, a game from ancient China for which the rules were lost. Still, a reconstruction is being attempted by Carnegie Melon:

https://projects.etc.cmu.edu/liubo-lab/

I had a notion to make a 24 hour clock with just one hand. There is actually a watch company selling such a device and their tagline is that the watch "will change your conception of time". I'd like to see if that is true.

Making a 24-hour clock looks to be relatively straight forward. Most clocks rely on pulses from a piezo electric crystal. Divide the pulse frequency by two with a D-flip flop and the clock goes half as fast.

Was just thinking of making exactly that. I have made Kokoro the voice of my local LLM (qwen 3.6). What do you use for a Japanese tutor app?

For those interested in the subject, animation has quite a history before Disney came onto the scene. I suggest this book:

Before Mickey: The Animated Film 1898-1928 by Donald Crafton

Personally, I remain impressed to this day with the pioneering work of Winsor McCay, the cartoonist who created Little Nemo. Perhaps the best example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uW71mSedJuU

* Must be willing to perform human sacrifices during select astronomical events?

The article states that "Lamarck, on the other hand, used French terms" to describe the clouds unlike Luke Howard whose Latin names such as cumulus, nimbus, cirrus, etc., which stuck and are still with us.

What were Lamarck's names for the clouds?

Cool! How would navigation actually work? Dead reckoning? Inertial? Stellar reference? Pulsar navigation?

Also, the dashed red line is --- SPOILER ALERT! ---- only part of the trajectory in the film, as there is another leg of the voyage not shown.

Coincidentally, I just started on Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch), a repo/book/course by Sebastian Raschka [0][1][2]. Maybe it is a good problem to have to have to decide which learning resource to use.

[0] https://github.com/rasbt/LLMs-from-scratch

[1] https://www.manning.com/books/build-a-large-language-model-f...

[2] https://magazine.sebastianraschka.com/p/coding-llms-from-the...

This "human connection" is over rated IMHO. We create an image of a human musician and too often become disappointed fans because, for example, we disapprove of the musician's lifestyle (the expression sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll exists for a reason), or because of disagreement with the social and political causes the musicians support. Occasionally, fans follow an artist for their commitment to their art later to discover they sell out, like their style changes to pursue mass appeal, or they sell their work to become a jingle for sugar pops or similar. I think it is best to appreciate their creation and admit the person creating it may not be someone to place undue adulation on. To quote a film, I think it is best to "separate the art from the artist".

I realize this museum is more about hardware but software that implements the game also deserves its place in history. To that effect, here is a writeup on Microchess made for the Kim-1 microcomputer:

https://www.benlo.com/microchess/index.html

Very cool! Wouldn't it be even cooler if the museum could score a couple of the very oldest machines? I'm talking about the El Ajedrecista machine (1912)[1] and Caissa [2][3] (named after the goddess of Chess[4]) built by Claude Shannon.

[1]. https://www.chessprogramming.org/El_Ajedrecista

[2]. https://www.computerhistory.org/chess/stl-430b9bbe92716/

[3]. https://mitmuseum.mit.edu/collections/object/2007.030.005?qu...

[4]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ca%C3%AFssa

Technically, these electro mechanical machines may not qualify as computers, but still, what a scoop it would be to get them!

One more meme: Missed the chance to call it Multi-Pass

This "human connection" is over rated IMHO. We tend to create an image of what a human musician is like and we forget that they are, well, human. Too often human musicians have disappointed fans because of their lifestyle (the expression sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll exists for a reason) or because some do not agree with the social and political causes the musicians support. Occasionally, fans follow an artist for their commitment to their art later to discover they sell out in some way, like their style changes to achieve greater mass appeal, or the sell their work to become a jingle for sugar pops or similar. I think it is best to appreciate their creation and admit the person creating it may not be someone to place undue adulation on. To quote a film, I think it is best to "separate the art from the artist".