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robotguyon That Disgraceful, Disreputable, (Wonderful) Form of Punctuation: The Parenthesis

I've always wanted to use parentheses in prose the way we do in math, to make grouping explicit:

The (small business) owner. The small (business owner).

((Buffalo buffalo) ((Buffalo buffalo) buffalo)) buffalo (Buffalo buffalo).

robotguyon SETI@Home was the coolest thing

https://boinc.berkeley.edu/

robotguyon The Best Engineers Write Less Code

>The Best Engineers Write Less Code

That's because they are designing circuits. EE FTW!

robotguyon A nicer voltmeter clock

I love using analog meters in digital projects. Here's a few different places I've used them.

Minecraft Server Meter:

https://imgur.com/a/minecraft-server-meter-QHpVbY1

Mini Model of a Minicomputer:

https://imgur.com/a/mini-model-of-minicomputer-UTaqI0i

https://imgur.com/a/erniac-u9YVa7K

robotguyon Accelerando (2005)

The Long Run by Daniel Keys Moran takes place in 2069 but was written in 1989 and the tech still holds up decently (to me at least). Sort of a Snow Crash vibe but less satire. AI's exist on the network (called the Crystal Wind) but haven't taken over or anything. Many Players (hackers) use "Image" software that are essentially AI agents.

robotguyon Rumors of my death are slightly exaggerated

This is pretty much the plot of the Daemon book series by Daniel Suarez. I always thought this series was a decent example of starting with somewhat realistic tech (well, maybe realistic to a non-expert like me) and extrapolating it exponentially. I'm going to need to read the series again because I'm guessing what I would consider "realistic" extends quite a bit further into the plot than it did 20 years ago.

robotguyon Most people can't juggle one ball

I grew up in the boonies back in the 80's. The only real contact I had with juggling was probably cartoons like described above. I really wanted to learn though and would walk around the woods for hours trying to juggle oak galls in that "circle style" only able to keep it up for a few seconds at a time.

My first day at college, before classes started, I was in the dorms. Everyone was getting to know each other, and I saw someone juggling the right way. It instantly clicked. All the hand-eye practice the 'wrong' way actually helped. That's why I always tell people that the first thing I learned in college was how to juggle.

robotguyon I'm reluctant to verify my identity or age for any online services

That's the philosophy behind Safety Third.

robotguyon Inputlag.science – Repository of knowledge about input lag in gaming

> it can say that it’s a controller and it will give the bus address to talk to and a polling rate.

Many moons ago (over 25 years) I was an EE hobbyist working with an inventor, working adjacent to a major game controller manufacturer. The controllers I was prototyping weren't getting polled by the OS. I was just using the USB HID Class and sending "Button Up" and "Button Down" messages using Interrupt Transfers. Are game controllers using Isochronous transfer now or is there some other method that's developed in the last quarter century?

robotguyon Digital Red Queen: Adversarial Program Evolution in Core War with LLMs

I was under the impression that Core War was pretty much a solved problem with multiple optimal warrior types in a rock-paper-scissors circular dominance. I have been somewhat interested in Core War for decades now, but I admit I haven't done any real deep dives into the history/evolution of the game. Does anyone have any suggested reading on how Core Warriors have progressed over the years and what the current status is? I follow /r/corewar but it seems pretty dead.

I am currently working on my own ALife simulation partly because of my (possibly mistaken) belief that progress on Core War had dead-ended. Discovering that there may still be more to do in this realm with Core War probably won't stop me working on my project, but I'd be interested to hear what is still going on.

robotguyon Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)

I’m learning git and it’s on a private GitHub, but since I’m not a “real” programmer, I’m a bit reticent to make it public.

robotguyon Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)

I'm working on Mutacortechs, an ALife simulation where "organisms" each have their own emulated 16-bit processor with 64K RAM. Like Core Wars for the 21st century. It's a small project compared to what some others here are working on, but it's an order of magnitude larger than anything this embedded EE has ever written. I have the ISA designed, assembler complete, emulator stage 1 complete (160/204 instructions implemented), and the start of the simulation working. Last night I wrote a program in custom assembly for an "organism" that looked around, found food, moved toward it, and ate it. I'm pretty excited by the milestone!

robotguyon 4 billion if statements (2023)

I mean, this is the ultimate domain for Quantum Computers:

"Is it odd or Even?"

"YES"

robotguyon RoboCrop: Teaching robots how to pick tomatoes

They're called "processing tomatoes" and it's a very interesting crop and industry. Bred for a narrow ripening window, to be machine harvestable, and shippable in massive bulk.

https://ctga.org/tomato-facts/

robotguyon Be Like Clippy

If you're reading this far down this comment chain, you might find this interesting:

  The paperclip maximizer is a thought experiment described by Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom in 2003. It illustrates the existential risk that an artificial general intelligence may pose to human beings were it to be successfully designed to pursue even seemingly harmless goals and the necessity of incorporating machine ethics into artificial intelligence design. The scenario describes an advanced artificial intelligence tasked with manufacturing paperclips. If such a machine were not programmed to value living beings, then given enough power over its environment, it would try to turn all matter in the universe, including living beings, into paperclips or machines that manufacture further paperclips.

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

Universal Paperclips (2017) - https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/

robotguyon NTSB report: Decryption of images from the Titan submersible camera [pdf] (2024)

>What's with the entire dev board crammed in there? Is that... normal?

Yep. I designed boards for cameras like this (and the vehicles they are mounted on) for 20 years. When you're only going to sell ~30 a year, and it's going into a $7k enclosure, the extra $7 for the dev board you used during prototyping isn't even a consideration. Go ahead and design around the breadboard, at this low volume it's WAY cheaper than the time to re-design the support circuitry from scratch and it gives you time to start working on the NEXT project that has already been sold to customers with a delivery date quickly looming.

Many times I have heard the tech stack for the subsea industry called "Shop & Glue."

robotguyon The Death of Arduino?

Here's the chance for the Basic Stamp to make a comeback!

robotguyon WeatherNext 2: Our most advanced weather forecasting model

Not affiliated, just thought it was a neat idea when I stumbled upon it during some hobby weather research last year:

ForecastAdvisor will show you the accuracy of the major weather forecasters, including AerisWeather, Foreca, Microsoft, the National Weather Service, OpenWeather, The Weather Channel, Wetter.com, WeatherBit, World Weather Online, and others. They also provide links to your city's weather forecast from all the other weather forecasters, so you can compare for yourself.

https://www.forecastadvisor.com/

robotguyon My favorite cult sci-fi and fantasy books you may not have heard of before

For anyone (like me) who likes their sci-fi fun and a bit cheesy I have a few recs:

Dream Park - Larry Niven & Steven Barnes: A group of pretend adventurers suit up for a campaign called "The South Seas Treasure Game." As in the early Role Playing Games, there are Dungeon Masters, warriors, magicians, and thieves. The difference? At Dream Park, a futuristic fantasy theme park full of holographic attractions and the latest in VR technology, they play in an artificial enclosure that has been enhanced with special effects, holograms, actors, and a clever storyline. The players get as close as possible to truly living their adventure. All's fun and games until a Park security guard is murdered, a valuable research property is stolen, and all evidence points to someone inside the game. The park's head of security, Alex Griffin, joins the game to find the killer, but finds new meaning in the games he helps keep alive.

The Long Run - Daniel Keys Moran: Years after the massacre of the Castanaveras genies, Peaceforcer Elite Commander Mohammed Vance still searches for the survivors. Now the gene-altered children have come of age. Denice – the world’s most powerful telepath – and Trent the Uncatchable – hacker, thief, and revolutionary – are about to come out of hiding. The world will never be the same. (It's book 2 in the series, but I'd recommend this as a stand-alone, or starting here.)

robotguyon Tinnitus Neuromodulator

There's some really neat stuff that can be done with automation and Custom Super Generators. I call this one "Frequency Drift": https://mynoise.net/superGenerator.php?g1=custom.php%3Fc%3D1...

robotguyon Titan submersible’s $62 SanDisk memory card found undamaged at wreckage site

As someone who was on the product team for a 6000msw video camera, it's probably not filled with mineral oil. I doubt anyone makes subsea camera bodies/optics completely from scratch, and off-the-shelf units are not designed for pressure. In ours we used Sony camera internals, the enclosure was atmospheric, filled with dry nitrogen to reduce condensation, and the sapphire lens was designed to resist 12500psi and reduce distortion from the air-->sapphire-->seawater interface.

robotguyon Selling numbered rocks, you get whatever's next in sequence

You should get Twisted Sister for your marketing campaign.

robotguyon I regret building this $3000 Pi AI cluster

A junior EE can build the circuits from the examples in the datasheet. A mid-level EE can build configurations NOT shown in the datasheet. A Senior EE can tell you where the datasheet is wrong.

robotguyon I should have loved electrical engineering

Quick search. Yup, it exists. "The Hammer Source: 100's of Hammers"

Reminds me of Hank Hill "I sell hammers and hammer accessories."

robotguyon The arcane alphabets of Black Sabbath

Someone who finds that interesting might also like: https://typesetinthefuture.com/ Typography and Design in Science Fiction Movies

robotguyon Cats as Horror Movie Villains

You remember that super popular kid (+5 CHA) in middle or high school who wouldn't acknowledge your existence in a group, but would suddenly somehow make you feel like the center of the world when there was no one else available and they deigned to turn their attention to you? That's a cat. My theory, anyway.

Also, have to mention a relevant quote from the beginning of Dungeon Crawler Carl which features an awakened cat as one of it's protagonists:

"I get it cats are assholes, but you know why people like cats despite their assholeness? BECAUSE THEY CAN'T F*$#ING TALK! If cats could talk and they were all like you, they'd be extinct because we'd have killed them already!"

robotguyon Ask HN: Advice for Starting a Hacker Space?

I'm from Sac also. In ~2012 (just a bit before Hacker Lab) I remember some of the people from Parallax Inc in Rocklin getting together to start a hacker space (Dweeb Den[1]). I went to 4 or 5 meetings with attendance of around 20-40 people and I was really impressed with the community-oriented spirit that was forming. We had plans to get a booth at the state fair, distribute puzzles and cards[2] to attract attention, and were working on getting a 501c3. Just about that time, we heard about Hacker Lab getting started, and it was better funded and further along, so we pivoted to supporting Hacker Lab. It turns out Hacker Lab was SIGNIFICANTLY more entrepreneur-focused (which is fine, just not what I was looking for). I ended up disappointed that Dweeb Den got dropped and we lost that nerd/maker/artist community feel. I'd love to see something like that come back around. Unfortunately, my Charisma score is low enough that I'd have to be behind-the-scenes assistance in starting anything of the sort.

[1]Dweeb Den entry on Hackerspaces.org: https://wiki.hackerspaces.org/DweebDen

[2]Here's a png of the card I found: https://imgur.com/a/dweeb-den-card-S027r5I

robotguyon A brief history of hardware epidemics

I definitely witnessed this firsthand with dry-mate subsea connectors back in the 2010's. I called them "contagious hardware faults."

robotguyon Polyhedra Viewer

Can I put letters and numbers on the faces? https://imgur.com/qlLl434

robotguyon I'm starting a social club to solve the male loneliness epidemic

I am very sad that my local hackerspace seems to eschew any of the social aspects and focuses (at least outwardly from what I can see) solely on entrepreneurship.