Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)

I have two projects that I'm hoping to release in the months ahead. These are both pretty pointless but fun projects.

One is a TRS-80 Model I emulator in JavaScript called Trash80. About 10 months ago I started this project just for fun while experimenting with what now seems to be called agentic loops. I got things working pretty well with the Z80 passing the ZEXALL suite and a lot of real TRS-80 software running fine. It sat for months untouched before I decided it is worth releasing and recently started it up again.

I didn't want to release it without a ROM, so I rigged up some agents to build a clean-room style L2 ROM w/ a fairly complete BASIC and even readline-style control commands, history, and a proper cursor. That went very well, but the agents cheated on floating point and implemented some weird Q5.2 like-thing. I told them to fix it, but I guess I didn't give clear enough instructions because they replaced it with a BCD hybrid monstrosity instead of proper floating point. The proper floating point is now underway, but I'm mostly using excess Codex credits before they expire, so it's only moving forward when I have credits I don't need.

I also built a silly ASCII fractal browser in Z80 assembly so that I can ship with a virtual disk that has software on it. The emulator works in the browser and the terminal. Unicode sextant block graphics map very well to TRS-80 Model I semigraphiccs/squots, so it really does run everything very well in the terminal, even games. I also added a line-mode for line-based applications, so you can use a readline-like interface and feel like it's native terminal app as well, though that has some issues I need to fix. And of course, you can shebang TRS-80 BASIC files and run them through the emulator too.

Another project was a demo of chromesthesia, a form of synesthesia where sounds trigger experiences of color. I thought it was done and ready to release, but then I had a new idea. The visualization while cool, was kind of boring. I decided to replace it with an attempt at a semi-physically accurate cymatics simulation with artificial coloring based on chromesthesia. Cymatics is the practice of making sounds visible by vibrating a surface, such as a plate with sand on it. As the sound changes, symmetrically interesting patterns form and evolve. I've got something working now with wave generation and microphone input, but sometimes it gets a bit stuck and stops evolving as it should, so I have to find time to figure that out.

Currently all unreleased, but when they do release it will be at www.leshylabs.com. I sometimes post updates on X, but not too often. (https://x.com/LeshyLabs)

It's very niche, but I have created a course for learning Cangjie 倉頡, which is a Chinese input system based on the visual appearance of characters (not necessarily etymologically correct). The advantage of this system is you can type most characters via unique output (there are a few collisions where you need to pick) and you do not need to pick the character from a list. This is particular useful if you work with specialized texts in Chinese.

You can find the tool at https://www.cangjieworkbook.com/ and there is a free demo linked inside. It should work on desktop and mobile web browsers.

I'm building a P2P distributed computing mesh that runs in the browser. It's a TS library that provides a few things:

- A WS + WebRTC mesh

- A request/response protocol incentivizing the closest or most efficient peers to respond to requests

- A WASM environment ensuring deterministic execution and supporting contract composition

- Collateralization around responses, ensuring invalid responses have amortized negative value

- A consensus and UTXO layer, focused on low-latency, low-finality micropayments (for request incentive and collateral), using WASM compute as the weight metric

The idea came out of me wondering a few years ago why a multiplayer game couldn't simply be run on the player's machines without a central server. It has grown since, but the focus has remained on low-latency and log(N) state consensus (unlike a blockchain).

It's wrapped up as a single fetch() method, mostly mirroring the browser's native fetch(). There's a lot more I could say; I love working on it and discovering elegant solutions to the problems that pop up. I'm hoping to release a prototype in a few weeks/months. If you're interested in trying it out, let me know (joel at scaffold.io); I'd love to have some other eyes on it.