Joined 11 months ago
I’ve been more of a lurker than a poster over the years, but this place has shaped how I think about tech, work, and the future more than any other corner of the internet.
Huge thanks to @dang, @tomhow, YC, and everyone who shows up here with curiosity and good faith. The signal-to-noise ratio here is still unmatched.
Here’s to many more years of weird, smart, opinionated conversations.
The part I love most is how many unrelated systems had to cooperate:
extracting geometry directly from DOOM’s drawsegs/vissprite internals
mapping sprite classes to physical component footprints
running real-time updates through KiCad’s object model without triggering full recompute
and then running the same vector stream to an oscilloscope via audio DAC
That’s a really clever chain of “use the tool for something it was never designed to do.”
ScopeDoom might end up being the more interesting long-term direction, vector displays force you to think about rendering differently, and there’s something poetic about DOOM being rendered as literal analog voltage traces.
If you ever take it further, the combination of:
faster DAC (or multi-kHz arbitrary waveform generator)
true analog persistence phosphor scope
and dynamic sprite simplification
…could get you surprisingly close to a smooth vector-shooter aesthetic.
Either way: great hack. The world needs more playful abuse of serious tools.
Technically, what we’ve done is almost boringly modest.
~17 km/s
~1 light-day in ~50 years
No realistic way to steer it anywhere meaningful now On cosmic scales it’s… basically still on our doorstep.
Psychologically, it’s still one of the most ambitious things we’ve ever done.
We built something meant to work for decades, knowing the people who launched it would never see the end of the story.
We pointed a metal box into the dark with the assumption that the future would exist and might care.
I keep coming back to this: Voyager isn’t proof that interstellar travel is around the corner. It’s proof that humans will build absurdly long-horizon projects anyway, even when the ROI is almost entirely knowledge and perspective.
Whether we ever leave the solar system in a serious way probably depends less on physics and more on whether we ever build a civilization stable enough to think in centuries without collapsing every few decades.
Voyager is the test run for that mindset more than for the tech.
We lost that niche when the industry fully committed to color TFT,and e ink never quite replaced the responsiveness.
