Cool stuff I found on the web
llama.cpp but in Rust; doesn’t
work on my Jetson yet, so I can’t say whether it’s any
faster
Recounting of early computer memory tech; added a few of these to my project list; torsion memory is a new one for me
Bad Apple! but it’s a slice of a volume
One of many contributions to the Bad Apple!! paperclip maximizer
Cute way to acknowledge the season; lately it seems that Halloween is becoming a month-long holiday, which I guess is okay
Reverse engineering perhaps the least consequential electronic device; proof that getting deeply interested in the apparently uninteresting is a good way to spend a life
The Space Shuttle and the Horse’s Rear End
Brisk walk through the history of technology with a special focus on measurement, standards, and laziness, as viewed from the early 2000s
Addition is All You Need for Energy-efficient Language Models (13p)
Luo and Sun propose an efficient approximation of floating point multiplication using only integer addition; seems approachable and useful, particularly on edge devices
Math, Physics, and Engineering Applets
Lots of little whizbang thingamabobs for simulating this and that; same fellow who made the lovely circuit simulator
Booting Linux on a 4-bit microprocessor that Intel released around the time Linus was born; it takes several days; several other cool projects from the same author
Remastered version of a 1987 TV episode, part of a larger series called The Secret Life of Machines; cute introduction to a lot of radio history and principles (however, at one point the program depicts the suicide of Edwin Armstrong)
How to keep an open secret with mathematics.
Accessible introduction to Shamir’s secret sharing; also a reminder of that odd period in history when everything on the internet was sponsored by a VPN company
Funky fixed point algorithm; no matter where you start (in base 10), you end up at 6174
Connected Fermat Spirals for Layered Fabrication
Zhao et. al. present a method for converting arbitrary planar shapes into space-filling curves with favorable manufacturing properties; notably, the curves can be continuous and start and end at arbitrary locations (like right next to each other); they demonstrate their technique’s applicability to 3D printing, but I also think it would be useful for pen plotter art
Surprisingly simple solution to an old networking problem; early systems sent small packets too often, which was inefficient due to comparatively large headers; Nagle’s answer is: don’t send anything new until the other host acknowledges your previous packets; the extra data waits in a local buffer and goes out all at once when its time comes; feels kind of similar to how most people don’t open a new package of cookies until the old one is empty
GIMPS Discovers Largest Known Prime Number: 2136,279,841-1
New prime just dropped; this is the first time that the largest known prime has been discovered using GPUs (although volunteers have used GPUs to verify probable primes for several years)
(no title) — Early Euclid Data
Astonishing video showing early data from the Euclid space telescope
Writing a Linux executable from scratch with x86_64-unknown-none and Rust
Hello world without libc; clear, comprehensive, and
cool; lots of unsafe and asm!, which is a
little disappointing, but also how else would you do it?; makes me want
to build a kernel, emulator, or homebrew processor; this article helped
me realize that all programming languages are declarative to
some extent, even assembly; the only truly imperative representation is
machine code
A truly incredible fact about the number 37
Quite approachable for me in spite of my general struggles with pure
math; I want to try out sage sometime,
although I have no idea where I’d use it
Maybe my favorite short story; gives me vertigo for time; also interesting to see an imagined future of computing technology and compare it to reality so far; lovely ending
Hippy’s Happy Resistor Calculator
Given an arbitrary target electrical resistance, this page finds candidate arrangements of standard resistor values that approximate it and computes their error; I used this for an attenuator design, and I expect to use it again
Capt. Grace Hopper on Future Possibilities: Data, Hardware, Software, and People (Part One, 1982)
Presentation to the NSA that was recently released in two parts (second part here); first-hand history of computing and informed predictions about its future, many of which seem reasonably accurate 40 years later; positive, direct, well-spoken, and witty