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moosedevon NAND-16: a computer built from 277,248 NAND gates

The Elon analogy is good.

That said, some of the people posting slop projects as their own probably idolize him and would embrace the comparison!

moosedevon NAND-16: a computer built from 277,248 NAND gates

They don’t. Not any more.

moosedevon SIMD in the 90s: Programming Intel's Pentium MMX

(Code)named after https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coppermine_River , apparently.

POD was pretty rad :) Thanks for the reminder of it (and all the MMX marketing around it.)

moosedevon Turbo Pascal on CP/M, MSX-DOS and MS-DOS

I read those tutorials as well! Around the same age, in '96 or '97, when I first got online, in the UK. And it might have been someone's "translation" of them into C, although I do recall reading the Pascal originals as well.

Namedropping another contemporary reference, I probably downloaded them from the Hornet Archive or a mirror.

They were a major step along the short but satisfying road to my first 3D starfield using Borland C++ (acquired via a magazine coverdisc). I felt so l33t.

moosedevon Entanglement Builds Space-Time. Now "Magic" Gives It Gravity

> You’re conflating consciousness with intelligence. Consciousness is subjective experience

Indeed. Thinking is not the same as experiencing thinking.

> there’s no way to know if any other people, much less machines, are conscious.

Or even ourselves :D

"Consciousness is just an illusion" "If so, who's experiencing the illusion?" "Yes"

moosedevon Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says

Even those still halfway up said ladder: https://x.com/flowersslop/status/2058161240350794165?s=20

moosedevon An Apple (II) for Teacher

Aha, thanks!

moosedevon An Apple (II) for Teacher

> a single Apple (Packard-Bell) ][+

I'm curious what were you referring to here. Did Packard Bell make Apple 2 clones? I didn't find anything in a quick search.

moosedevon Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation

Please don’t post AI slop to HN. It’s against the guidelines.

moosedevon Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs

Apart from the Transformer architecture that enabled the AI boom/singularity/civilization-reshaping-event/whatever-this-is? Not much, I guess...

moosedevon AI Will Be Met with Violence, and Nothing Good Will Come of It

I must have missed the 8GHz CPU era.

moosedevon An AI agent published a hit piece on me

Right. It captures the destabilizing effect of stochastic terrorism, without the terroristic intent. It’s a neat phrase.

moosedevon Show HN: I made a memory game to teach you to play piano by ear

The earliest I've used was Protracker, which was the most popular tracker in the early heyday of the format (late 80s - early 90s), but the earlier Soundtracker was the OG "tracker", and probably used the same layout, but I'm not sure. https://www.exotica.org.uk/wiki/Soundtracker_History

But if FL Studio (formerly FruityLoops) and Renoise use the same layout, as others have said, then those are probably going to resonate with a wider modern audience :D Or maybe just call it "FL Studio / Renoise / tracker layout"?

I don't do computer keyboard note entry any more, but I still have the muscle memory for that 4-row layout from hours spent with it in the late 90s :D And I'd totally use it in your game. (My MIDI keyboards are kinda too far away from the mouse and monitor.)

moosedevon Show HN: I made a memory game to teach you to play piano by ear

This, but (or "and") use the 4-row layout that dozens of tracker programs used[0], to fit over 2 octaves on the computer keyboard.

On a US keyboard:

QWERTYUIOP[] is the white keys starting at middle C. (The row above is the black keys; the 2 key plays C#.)

ZXCVBNM,./ is the white keys starting an octave lower. (S plays a low C#.)

The two ranges overlap; e.g. Q and , both play C in the same octave.

Grew up composing music on a computer this way when my (musical) keyboard didn't have MIDI and I couldn't afford a better one :)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_tracker

moosedevon The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café

It’s a Zen proverb.

moosedevon Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles

I broadly agree with the author’s point there, but disagree with the specific language he used. In my view, engineering includes those pesky non-technical considerations, like the business context and the human factors, which bring their own tradeoffs and priorities to the engineering decision-making.

That is, his “pure engineers” are not really doing engineering, at least under my understanding of the term, whereas (some of) the impure engineers actually are! :)

moosedevon Cassette tapes are making a comeback?

> CDs never had any DRM

Oh, but they did, and quite infamously :D

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

https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2005/11/5549-2/

https://www.networkworld.com/article/715376/network-security...

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/240779158_Lessons_f...

moosedevon The Junior Hiring Crisis

They’re going to get promoted anyway. The “senior” title will simply (continue to) lose meaning to inflation.

moosedevon Load ZX Spectrum – first Museum dedicated to our first personal computer

I love vintage computers, have a vintage computer collection, and have enjoyed visiting computer museums, but does this computer museum website really need to send me desktop notifications?

moosedevon CS234: Reinforcement Learning Winter 2025

2024 lecture videos are on YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoROMvodv4rN4wG6Nk6sNpTEb...

moosedevon Google Antigravity

> I believe it is aimed at investors.

I think it’s more likely aimed at the (internal) promotion committee.

moosedevon A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator

And according to TFA, the AI slop results are also from Reddit!

moosedevon Young graduates are facing an employment crisis

Thread from 30 days ago (albeit without much discussion at the time) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44294488

moosedevon U.S. bombs Iranian nuclear sites

I assume it's Supreme Leader.

moosedevon Reverse engineering the 386 processor's prefetch queue circuitry

Another vote for the 68000 series :)

moosedevon The coming knowledge-work supply-chain crisis

Thanks, I like your framing in terms of the impact on "trust".

> Generating more complex solutions that are possibly not understood by the engineer submitting the changes.

I'd possibly remove "possibly" :-)

moosedevon The coming knowledge-work supply-chain crisis

Feeling this too. And AI is making it "worse".

Reviewing human code and writing thoughtful, justified, constructive feedback to help the author grow is one thing - too much of this activity gets draining, for sure, but at least I get the satisfaction of teaching/mentoring through it.

Reviewing AI-generated code, though, I'm increasingly unsure there's any real point to writing constructive feedback, and I can feel I'll burn out if I keep pushing myself to do it. AI also allows less experienced engineers to churn out code faster, so I have more and more code to review.

But right now I'm still "responsible" for "code quality" and "mentoring", even if we are going to have to figure out what those things even mean when everyone is a 10x vibecoder...

Hoping the stock market calms down and I can just decide I'm done with my tech career if/when this change becomes too painful for dinosaurs like me :)

moosedevon Exercise before bed is linked with disrupted sleep

That’s fair, I didn’t think about climates actively hostile to “gentle” exercise :)

moosedevon Exercise before bed is linked with disrupted sleep

Sample of one, but I find gentle exercise in evening (like walking) isn't a problem. A moderate-to-intense run in the evening does affect my sleep, though.

moosedevon The 8-Bit Era's Weird Uncle: The TI-99/4A

The ST very subtly so, even :)

> "ST" officially stands for "Sixteen/Thirty-two", referring to the Motorola 68000's 16-bit external bus and 32-bit internals.

via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_ST