Cool stuff I found on the web
2024-11-02
llama.cpp but in Rust; doesn’t
work on my Jetson yet, so I can’t say whether it’s any
faster
Memory: the forgotten history 🌐
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 📃
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
The Secret Life of the Radio 📺
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