robotguy
Joined 5 years ago
Karma
373
Submissions
131
Member since
Jun 16
“When I became an adult I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
― C.S. Lewis
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Comment · 11 days ago
Fun story (at least I think so):
About 20 years ago we used to play BZFlag in the office during lunch, maybe 6-8 of us in a company of ~50. Someone complained that we were using up the network bandwidth, although I knew the BW for the game was tiny. I bought a bunch of USB Wi-Fi adapters from Woot! and we would place them on the tops of the cubicle walls when we played. We wouldn't actually plug them in. We played on and off for several more years without any network complaints. I even built a map of the office, taking pics to use as textures, so we could drive tanks around the office, jump on our desks and shoot each other.
Comment · 2 months ago
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).
or
((Buffalo buffalo) ((Buffalo buffalo) buffalo)) buffalo (Buffalo buffalo).
Comment · 2 months ago
Comment · 5 months ago
>The Best Engineers Write Less Code
That's because they are designing circuits. EE FTW!
Comment · 5 months ago
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:
Comment · 5 months ago
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.
Comment · 5 months ago
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.
Comment · 6 months ago
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.
Comment · 8 months ago
That's the philosophy behind Safety Third.
Comment · 8 months ago
> 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?
Comment · 9 months ago
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.
Comment · 10 months ago
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.
Comment · 10 months ago
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!
Comment · 10 months ago
I mean, this is the ultimate domain for Quantum Computers:
"Is it odd or Even?"
"YES"