nategri

I've got a big text file of 6502 machine code I wrote a few years back that I pull out and marvel at from time to time. One of those things that you have to be fully in the "zone" to pull off, so it seems like magic to present-day me.

When all you have is a hammer everything looks like an IBM clone, I guess.

Ugh that namesake story is maximum Wall Street culture cringe.

Sounds like it might be a good pick as the energy source for an extremely long haul interstellar probe?

Defender is probably one of the hardest games ever made, if only because of the wacky controls (a 1D joystick that only moves your ship up and down, and a button for reversing your direction).

Would expect this to clock in somewhere in the neighborhood of $80 using my preferred fab of OSHPark, but their min. order is 3 boards. So if you find two other people who want one, you get one from there for under $30 or so.

Would posit that HN is well into its "endless september" at this point.

Learning about multiple wonderful things at once here. This is pretty much catnip for 6502 fans.

While we're still perfecting the renewable situation we need to shut down all this coal bullshit ASAP and patch in nuclear. I guess people would rather be definitely killed by particulates and climate change rather than almost never killed by radiation---just because it sounds scarier. Madness.

Author here.

They’re not actually that radioactive so they’re very easy to get ahold of. Amazon and eBay might work (I got mine from one of those sources, I think), but I also put a more specialized supplier in the parts list.

Author here.

Not a dumb question! I tried this approach using 4-microsecond ticks and was surprised to catch a (subtle) bias. So I in the end I basically used two different RNG algos (both with slight biases) and XOR’d them together.

Would love to isolate why these on their own appear to have a bias but testing is a super laborious process (takes roughly 3 days to generate a 1 megabit file).

Of course, I could always speed up the testing cycle by using a more radioactive sample ;)

Author here. Even though its proximity puts it pretty far above background, the marbles are still a fairly weak source, so from the "electronics logic longevity" side it's not something I've really thought about. But the Geiger-Muller tube does have a finite (though very large) number of events it can record, so I cut the voltage to it when the device is in "clock mode" and not functioning as an RNG.