koalahedron

Even greater is someone understanding my own sardonic sense of humor and putting it to good use.

I did have a nice half round of golf today with my wife. What a beautiful day to spend with such a wonderful person!

I'm out.

20 years later, looks like they are taking RFPs for re-engining:

[PDF] https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IN/IN11413

I guess he was right about the engines.

> I know that jokes aren't really welcome on HN

IMO, while I really don't come to HN to find dial-a-joke, or joke-of-the-day, I think some humor is essential in modern life.

Since we're talking about Matt Keeter, you will find he has a great sense of humor if you read his website or interact with him. Some of his jokes are ROTFL funny, but subtle.

I know Matt too, primarily from him rejecting my Libfive PRs for being "too 1337".

But seriously, Matt, I might have a project for an in-person event regarding printing robots. Stay tuned--to what channel I don't know.

Thanks! I noticed "PAiA" electronics sold kits of these--I remember that name from back then. Did they sell parts or other kits? Looks like they are still in business.

Also noticed "Scungy Video" :) (Do NOT search for this term in your favorite search engine.)

I worked at Boeing Wichita (which is no more), and an engineer told me that the B-52 was getting heavier over time because the old wires weren't removed for avionics upgrades. Of course, they were always trying to put one over on me as a newbie (I worked on avionics S/W in Ada for the tankers).

He also said a big problem was the expense of doing a modern engine upgrade. Anyone know if they ever re-engined it? Was he joking again?

Having one of these fly over my apartment on Rock Rd. was a dish rattler--I used to see B-2s every once in a while too (fairly loud too, IIRC).

My wife sent me these that she has read and recommends:

Textbooks:

Cephalopod Cognition by Anne-Sophie Darmaillacq (Editor), Ludovic Dickel (Editor), Jennifer Mather (Editor)

Cephalopod Behaviour 2nd Edition by Roger T. Hanlon (Author), John B. Messenger (Author)

Personal anecdotes:

The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness Paperback by Sy Montgomery

Taken further, you might argue that there might be condemnation eventually of the whole concept of pets and work animals too. I'm not sure I "condemn" these ideas, but I don't have a pet because I think animals should be wild. I make my own ethical comprimises, though, don't get me wrong.

Harry Harrison wrote a book I read many years ago called West of Eden, where the dinosaur extinction event didn't occur. An advanced species of lizard used modified lifeforms for their tech. I have it on my list to read again. It does make you think people might be more symbiotic towards the world rather than what we have now.

Thanks all, for these references! My wife is into cephalopod intelligence. I'll forward this to her and ask if she has any other recommendations.

I do know there are a couple of websites for cephalopod enthusiasts:

https://zapatopi.net/cephnews/ https://tonmo.com/

I've never heard of Rick and Morty, but take my advice, don't try to shop your screenplay to VCs. They took a dim view of my "Adult Stewie" concept last year (think "Young Sheldon" backwards). Try Hollywood.

Anyway, I think a fun cartoon would be the Flintstones with ceph, for example their screen could be a smaller ceph whose chromataphores are pixels.

[edit]

Old drawing, back of a napkin (apologies to MIT AI Memo 554):

https://github.com/koalahedron/ideas-for-models/blob/main/RE...

> Nevertheless simultaneous invention happens all the time.

Try telling that to Isaac Newton. :)

Or better yet Edison or the USPTO.

I had that book too, I just recognized it when I looked it up. I don't remember it as well, but apparently it was the display circuitry only.

> delicious recipes

Ha ha

He also did the TV typewriter:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_Typewriter

which allowed people to have something to hook their bare board micro to.

I had money to buy his green book, but not the computer or the TV. :)

I think I even discovered "intentional O(random)" complexity with this gem from Acey-Deucy:

  270 A=INT(14\*RND(1))+2
  280 IF A<2 THEN 270
  290 IF A>14 THEN 270

By the way, back to the original topic, a bare-bones machine like the KIM-1 also required a lot of hand assembly.

I guess everybody is gone from this post too, but I wonder if there is a fixed point corollary to Godwin's law--if you post enough off topic comments, you reach the original topic again. :)

Thanks again. Like you said it is fun to dream (ask the "Scheme Machine" guys sometime about how they would go about it now), but practically with technology like Julia's Zygote:

https://github.com/FluxML/Zygote.jl

the efficiency of autodiff might be similar to that of an opcode anyway.

So, how did DEC do on the Alpha processor? I always heard good things about it--IIRC (I didn't) it was ~~based~~ to replace the VAX, but 64 bit. I learned PDP-11 assembler at RPI, during their college program for high school students in about 1984. We hand assembled code and really got to know the architecture.

Everyone's probably way past reading this by now, but for the record I ported the first example to Common Lisp:

https://github.com/koalahedron/lisp-computer-games

Man that brought back the memories, and I had a blast doing it. Many thanks to Jeff Atwood.

Thanks for your thoughtful comment.

I'm afraid my DEC assembly language study ended at the PDP-11, but it is edifying to know the VAX had such an instruction.

In some domains like numerical programming, ML, and graphics using SDF having a Calc 102 operation like a gradient op might be considered useful enough to include in a RISC instruction set, and the RISC entry on Wikipedia says this about the RISC-V architecture:

> The ISA is designed to be extensible from a barebones core sufficient for a small embedded processor to supercomputer and cloud computing use with standard and chip designer defined extensions and coprocessors.

Maybe a derivative op belongs in a math coprocessor?

I was thinking an interesting (probably not feasible) opcode would be a derivative op for automatic differentiation at the machine level.

I wanted a KIM-1 or a COSMAC Elf in the '70s, but I couldn't afford one as a kid. I eventually built a ZX81 kit from the proceeds of a summer job as my first computer.

The KIM-1 had a 6502, the Elf had an 1802, and the ZX81 had a Z80 processor, all 8 bit processors which were approachable for beginners.

I recommend this MIT OCW for people interested in the math behind origami and folding problems:

https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-compu...

It really seems like it should.

Furthermore, to get an Emacs-like REPL (Edwin)

  1 ]=> (edit)

  ;Loading "/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/mit- 
  scheme/lib/prx11.so"... done

It's also interesting that QBasic (which I didn't use) is related to IBM Cassette Basic, the first language I used on the IBM PC. If the computer couldn't find a bootable floppy, it booted Basic from ROM:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_BASIC#IBM_Cassette_BASIC

no OS needed, like the Apple ][, TRS-80, etc.

Interesting idea! I had to think about what you were describing, but that actually is very similar in spirit to the experience back then.

It's kind of like discovering the assembly monitor on the Apple ][, which you could get to by poking a value in Basic. I remember typing in an assembly program I found in a magazine that sampled audio from the cassette recorder, and played it back on the speaker. It was gritty sounding, but an amazing discovery for me at the time (about 1982).

(I'm always doing Ctrl-Shift-C to copy text from the browser when I forget I'm not in the terminal anymore--which brings up the element inspector and the console. I've always wanted to explore it myself, but I'm usually deep into another project.)

I wonder what I could have done if I had Three.js?

Thanks for reminding me of these wonderful illustrations. Your comment made my day!

They were an essential part of the book, for engaging your imagination. They were also a gateway to books like Heiserman's "How to build your own self-programming robot":

https://archive.org/details/howtobuildyourow01heis/page/n5/m...

With some of the discussion recently about Fabrice Bellard, I was thinking a nice retro, minimalist PC OS could be made with TinyC, QEmacs, FFMpeg, TinyGL, TinyCore Linux, etc. I'm sure a lightweight Basic implementation could be found to complement those.

Fabrix?

I typed in a lot of these in the late '70s, it was "learning Basic the hard way" to get them to run. My access to computers was limited, so I read them more than used them at a computer. I later bought:

http://www.trs-80.org/trs-80-programs-32-basic-programs-for-...

I really liked "The Flying Walloons", simple as it was.

Here's one I never saw but would have been fun, I think:

http://www.trs-80.org/trs80-graphics/

I remember I had to hide them in my other books because kids would pick on me if they saw "nerdy" books like this, and teachers didn't like you reading anything interesting during their boring lectures.