zh3

"Let there be light".

I encourage those who have never heard of it to at least look it up and know it was John Carpenter's first movie.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carpenter

In the UK we have in fact discovered an alarming weakness in the concrete used to build schools, hospitals and other public building (in one case, the roof of a primary school collapsed without warning). The response was basically "Everybody out now".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_United_Kingdom_reinforced...

https://www.theconstructionindex.co.uk/news/view/raac-crisis...

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/aug/31/what-is-ra...

Fortuitously before the Unix date rollover in 2038. Nice.

And of course the Ping of Death (which I thought was windows-only, but according to the linked article also affected linux and mac).

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

It's pretty easy to do, a Pi (of any kind) and an IR LED that sends the power button codes for the common TV brands will do it (since it's often a toggle, it'll also turn TV's on if they are off).

RF remotes are harder to hack together but similar principle. Whether IR or RF, the codes are common across all devices of the same model/protocol.

In a similar vein, many years ago I helped someone with a similar problem with a neighbour who had the volume too loud. As the aerial cable was accessible, I suggested he stick a pin through the neighbour's cable whenever the volume got too loud, and pull it out when the volume went down.

Sure enough, after a while the neighbour learnt their TV only worked if they kept the volume down in the evening.

A spinning mirror is certainly an option, there are many projects around using them as projectors e.g. [0]. It would need precision faces and be a larger volume than the flapping mirror approach. Because the mirrors are spring-mounted and designed to resonate at ~50Hz they actually take very little power to drive - there's an optosensor on the back used to stabilise the oscillation amplitude, which is why the VB and Private Eye display widths vary during startup.

Can't see the video from this location, so may be just restarting stuff in it.

[0] https://hackaday.com/2018/04/20/laser-projector-ditches-galv...

Unfortunately you can't get the LEDs any more - they were originally from LED printers and those all now use infrared LED arrays. I'm actually working on something similar, and am even using a few VB scanner mechs in development (driven by a raspberry Pi).

For further background, they were developed from an earlier system called the "Private Eye" - still a few references to them on the web e.g. [0]. I've built a circuit to drive one from a Pi Zero - amazing gadgets for 90's tech.

[0] https://www.loper-os.org/?p=752

NP, and the exact definition of vibe-coding is, I think, yet to be determined. This wasn't a yolo, it was read all the prompts and generally accept them. Overall I'd say the code and web page are at least of a quality I've seen in many commercial settings; the code itself looks reasonable and if I was to do anything to it for a real 'release', I'd update the documentation which has suffered due to the extensive scope creep during implementation.

Far short of a proper review, however I have scanned the code. Bear in mind this was a purely personal project, never intended to see the light of day and initially just done to create a small but operable chunk of dbus/blueZ glue code for another project.

I have no doubt that a C developer with sufficient knowledge of dBus, bluetooth, the HRM profile and linux could have written the C code in a day. Adding the HTTP server again would be easy if the developer also had experience of that (n.b. there was a minor compiler error when I tried it on another system due to a slightly different version of libmicrohttpd). Adding the API would be straighforward (but tedious) and similiarly the web page (the web page was an one-shot after Claude wrote the API, vis. "Create a web page to display a real time plot with history using the API").

So overall I'd answer that that human developers would could have pulled that off in a day are few and far between (and likely to cost a lot more than $25 plus a day of my time).

And do I think the code is good enough? Yes, more than good enough. I could take it and run with it, against that because it ended up 100% AI-generated I feel a bit like leaving it as a monument to "pure AI".

After all, I never intended to release it - it was this thread that made my throw it up on Github as an example for the OP.

Fair enough, I did ask for "inspiration" through rather than "motivation" - mainly because I recall a comment on here a few days ago that LLMs are carefully trained to never reveal where the training material came from. So the prompt was aimed at working around that.

Yes, I haven't even read most of the files, just threw it up there as an example for the OP (I too am tired of the lack of examples, so stepped up to the plate on this one).

As a personal bit of development last weekend. I can see inconsistences myself, some of which result from scope creep during development (starting with the idea of a text-only app and then grafting on the web side) - it literally only started because I wanted a working example of bluetooth and dBus in C, the rest of it just joined the ride.

As for the SSE, no expert on that myself, however if you watch the messages in the browser console it appears to push updates with sporadic notes about using polling instead.

I didn't ask for a style, it's just what Claude came up with by default. Here's what happened just now when I asked it:-

   What was the inspiration for the CSS styling of this web page?                                                                    

  ● Looking at the CSS styling in live_plot.html, the inspiration appears to be Tailwind CSS and modern minimalist design trends.

I'll bite.

Here's my realtime Bluetooth heart rate monitor for linux, with text output and web interface.

   https://github.com/lowrescoder/BlueHeart

This was 100% written by Claude Code, my input was limited to mostly accepting Claude suggestions except a couple of cases where I could make suggestions to speed up development (skipping some tests I knew would work).

Particularly interesting because I didn't expect this to work, let along not to write any code. Note that I limited it to pure C with limited dependencies; initial prompt was just to get text output ("Heart Rate 76bpm"), when it got to that point I told Claude to add a web interface followed by creating a realtime graph to show the interface in use.

Every file is claude generated. AMA.

edit: this was particularly interesting as it had to test against the HRM sensor I was wearing during development, and to cope with bluetooth devices appearing and disappearing all the time. It took about a day for the whole thing and cost around $25.

further edit: I am by no means an expert with Claude (haven't even got to making a claude.md file); the one real objective here was to get a working example of using dBus to talk to blueZ in C, something I've failed at (more than once) before.

Same solution here - keep a base diskless image on the server, copy it to the diskless area, pxeboot the machine. Works for Windows too (iscsi).

Could do the same thing on EC2 of course.

AI following the Libet ([0]1983) paper about preconscious thought apparently preceding 'voluntary' acts (which really elevated the question of what 'freewill' means).

* [0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6640273/

Bertrand Russell: "The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt."

That's actually from "The triumph of stupdity" [0] rather than Conquest of Happiness but perhaps more appropriate to this particular discussion.

* [0] https://russell-j.com/0583TS.HTM

In some early computers, the bootstrap was actually a matrix of diodes where you'd remove a diode to get a one and leave it in for a zero. I had a bunch of these boards sometime in the mid 1970's and found you could program a fully populated board with a 9V battery - basically connect it across a diode in a bit position where you wanted a '1', there would be a small but pretty flash from inside the glass case as a zero turned into a one.

When things like the 74S188 were available, we had so much fun squeezing bootstrap code for PDP11's into 2 of them; 32 words by 16 bits was more than enough (later I got code that would boot five different devices into 256 words).

Debian works fine without systemd (at least for now) though Devuan does indeed make like easier.

Having had a twiddler since they came out, seeing this topic the first ting I did was search the thread to see who mentioned it first :) Not sure of the timeline, probably a little after that the Playstation Glove looked like a great idea but the reality sucked.

Decades on now but still trying to find wearable computing stuff that can drag modern computing back to the early 90s (spending years trying to recreate the original Private Eye [0] display). Checking that out on wikipedia right now just fired a harmony of so many nostalgia neurons:-

>The Student Electronic Notebook consisted of the Private Eye, Toshiba diskless AIX notebook computers (prototypes), a stylus based input system and a virtual keyboard. It used direct-sequence spread spectrum radio links to provide all the usual TCP/IP based services, including NFS mounted file systems and X11, which all ran in the Andrew Project environment.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wearable_computer#1980s

Fairly obviously a 1Gbps network is not going to compete with 5Gbps SATA or 20Gbps NVME. Having said that, for real performance we load stuff over the network into local RAM and then generally run from that (faster than all other options). On the internal network the server also has a large RAM disk shared over NFS/SMB, and the performance PC's have plenty of RAM - so really it's a tradeoff, and the optimum is going to depend on how the system is used.

It's down to the mount options, use 'soft' and the program trying to access the (inaccessible) server gets an error return after a while, or 'intr' if you want to be able to kill the hung process.

The caveat is a lot of software is written to assume things like fread(), fopen() etc will either quickly fail or work. However, if the file is over a network obviously things can go wrong so the common default behaviour is to wait for the server to come back online. Same issue applies to any other network filesystem, different OS's (and even the same OS with different configs) handle the situation differently.

Don't know about FreeBSD but hard hanging on a mounted filesystem is configurable (if it's essential configure it that way, otherwise don't). To this day I see plenty of code written that hangs forever if a remote resource is unavailable.

On a smaller scale, I run multiple PC's in house diskless with NFS root; so easy to just create copies on the server and boot into them as needed, it's almost one image per bloated app these days (server also boots PC's into Windows using iSCSI/SCST and old DOS boxes from 386 onwards with etherboot/samba). Probably a bit biased due to doing a lot of hardware hacking where virtualisation solutions take so much more effect, but got to agree NFS (from V2 through V4) just works.

Andy Grove, "Only the paranoid survive":-

Quote: Business success contains the seeds of its own destruction. Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.

- Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel

From wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Grove#Only_the_Paranoid...

Takeaway: Be paranoid about MBAs running your business.

Or even the similar story on CNN - "The media is learning what happens when you give a mouse a cookie" (as the article says: "Spoiler alert: The mouse has some more demands")

* https://edition.cnn.com/2025/09/19/business/media-business-t...

Similar to the Massive Attack gig that used facial recognition on the crowd - they put the captured faces (with labels against them) up on the big screens. Discussed a day or so ago on here:-

https://www.gadgetreview.com/massive-attack-turns-concert-in...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45255400

Also on CNN etc

You can also get GT730's with 4xHDMI - not fast, but great for office work and display/status boards type scenarios. Single slot passive design too, so you can stack several in a single PC. Currently just £63 UK each.

[0] https://www.amazon.co.uk/ASUS-GT730-4H-SL-2GD5-GeForce-multi...

Ref. the UK ('British people'), there's currently a thing where peacfully protesting a ban will get you arrested (I have a lot of sympathy for the police in this case, whatever they do will be wrong in the eyes of one side or the other).

[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8rvly00440o