Totally off-topic, and I may be wrong, but I immediately loved the non-LLM writing-style and felt glued to the content just through the writing alone. It's getting rare.
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Conway's Game of Life, in real life
51–60 of 97 posts
Re: Conway's Game of Life, in real life
#52This is fantastic.
I happen to own a physical pong table. Everyone loves it. [0] There is something magical about material and only-does-one-thing instantiations of digital things.
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I am really looking forward to a flat table top screen consisting of millions of magnetically-controlled vertical-extruding rod pixels, with actual color controlled pixels along their length. For an amazing table display/extrusion of D&D dungeons and terrain, for miniatures.
A little sensor ability, and when the extrusion "scrolls" laterally, it could create little lips that move the miniatures too, so they stay "in place". And move NPCs around at the DMs direction. Now turn of the room lights, and use the light pixels not just for color, but for lighting effects like wall lamps flickering, add spooky position-distributed sounds...
That has to be coming soon, right?
Some part of me wants to describe it Claude, iterate, and say "Now polish that design, economically optimize the parts, link in the supply chain, and ship me the first review unit." That has to be coming soon, right?
The lines separating planes of reality, they are a blurring, quickly.
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Re: Conway's Game of Life, in real life
#53Totally off-topic, and I may be wrong, but I immediately loved the non-LLM writing-style and felt glued to the content just through the writing alone. It's getting rare.
Personally, I can barely stomach reading LLM writing. I find myself closing lots of articles after a sentence or two. I wonder how this plays out longer-term regarding engagement.
In probably another year or two I expect the metrics will show that it is a positive turn off. Unfortunately we're on the cutting edge of this particular movement and there's still a lot more "value" to be "extracted" from the general public before they all get wise to it too.
The next problem we'll face after that, with the 1-2 years newer AIs of the time, is that the default LLM voice is just a particular affectation created by the training, not "the voice of LLMs" or anything. It's trivial to kick them into a different style. I just used AI to do some architecture design documents this week, and prompted it to first look at about 1-2k words that I wrote myself all organically for the style. The good news is the resulting documents almost, but admittedly, not quite entirely, lack that LLM style. They're still prone to more bullet lists than I use directly; then again, in this context they were fairly appropriate, so I'm not too triggered by the result.
The bad news is, that's all it takes to make AI writing that isn't in that default tone. It's not that hard. Students cheating on essays have already figured it out, the spammers really can't be that far behind. Probably more stuff than we realize is already AI output, it's just the stragglers and those who don't really care (which I imagine is a lot of spammers, after all) who are still failing to tweak the style. They'll catch up as soon as engagement falls off.
Re: Conway's Game of Life, in real life
#54When I was a teenager, I read a book about assembly language for the commodore and implemented the game of life in a really simple way. I just used the text screen. To switch on a cell, I would put an asterisk ('*') in it. Then I could run my machine code program and it would evolve according to the rules of the game of life.
The answer to a lot of "wow, how did the 8-bit machine pull that off? it seems like that would eat a lot of RAM" is that the framebuffer is the data storage. You were literally looking at the primary data store itself, because when a full-resolution framebuffer was 1/4th your addressable RAM (and slightly more than that for your actual RAM since you couldn't ever quite use all 64KB no matter how you mapped it), you need to get the most bang for the buck out of that RAM usage as you can.
Re: Conway's Game of Life, in real life
#55Great idea and execution. I like your thinking.
Re: Conway's Game of Life, in real life
#56Eh. I thought they had somehow created a physical realization of Conway's Game of Life.
Re: Conway's Game of Life, in real life
#57I wonder if going for keyboard switches with RGB could bring the price down, if you then either print the keycaps yourself, our use a 3d printing service. 23 Cherry MX switches cost 20€, that‘s roughly 260€ for a 17x17 matrix.
Should be doable to implement GoL on an ortholinear RGB keyboard using QMK
I mean - that sounds like an awesome project in itself!
Re: Conway's Game of Life, in real life
#58This isn't what this is about, but I wonder if anyone has created a fully mechanized version of Conway's Game of Life. The fact that you only have to follow 4 rules, and each cell only needs to observe its neighbors to follow those rules, makes me wonder if it's possible to track these things mechanically. I unfortunately don't know enough about mechanical engineering to do such a thing.
Re: Conway's Game of Life, in real life
#59Technology Will Save Us, from a brighter past, produced the Arcade Coder as their swan song. It had 12×12 tactile buttons with color leds inside, a companion app to program it with scratch like code blocks, and interactive tutorials. It's ESP32 based.
There's an effort to continue it's life, ast the app was on the app store for a brief time. https://github.com/padraigfl/twsu-arcade-coder-esp32
Re: Conway's Game of Life, in real life
#60A much cheaper way might have been to buy a couple of Novation Launchpads. 8x8 full RGB tactile buttons for 90€, MIDI-controllable. Four of those next to another for 16x16 at 360€ plus a little bit for cables and controller comes out at 1/3 the price
It would be larger (even with the mini), you’d have gaps between the four, and also the four middle buttons in each part have their corners clipped.
But you can get illuminated buttons for less money: https://www.ebay.com/itm/173922115935