Posts by spiralganglion@mastodon.social
(DIR) Post #AdFWI1yWNL2DOp7CN6 by spiralganglion@mastodon.social
2023-12-27T21:31:11Z
1 likes, 1 repeats
If we were living in the good software timeline, I could drag-and-drop this temperature data into an Ableton wavetableOr drag-drop the wavetable synth onto the temp data, I suppose
(DIR) Post #AdTsbHC7StQdRMjTLU by spiralganglion@mastodon.social
2024-01-03T20:38:23Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
This looks incrediblehttps://youtube.com/watch?v=D0EUUp46H54
(DIR) Post #AhowKIVC8f1WYfDXCi by spiralganglion@mastodon.social
2024-05-06T04:00:19Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
"Befreak is a purely reversible two-dimensional programming language.”…"It may seem peculiar that, in essence, we are forced to put both an entrance condition and an exit condition in loop code, instead of just an exit condition. This is a natural phenomenon in reversible programming, since if we were running the loop backwards, we need to know at what point we are done so we can ‘exit’ the loop (through the entrance).”http://tunes.org/~iepos/befreak.html
(DIR) Post #AihrcC8lPEFpaRUqVk by spiralganglion@mastodon.social
2024-06-08T03:30:55Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
I was insomniac last night, and the Connection Machine is cool as hell, so I did some 3am spelunking.I hope you enjoy this CM appreciation thread!
(DIR) Post #AihrcEmtYzXnnUHvLE by spiralganglion@mastodon.social
2024-06-08T03:36:12Z
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I bet you've seen the CM–1/CM–2 — the iconic black cube-of-cubes with red LEDs.The industrial design was led by Tamiko Thiel, when she was in her 20s no less! She has a great website with photos and history of the machine.https://tamikothiel.com/cm/index.html
(DIR) Post #AihrcH3z6QP0r4IbFw by spiralganglion@mastodon.social
2024-06-08T03:40:52Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
The company behind the CM — Thinking Machines Corp. — was cofounded in '83 by MIT alum and (I have on good authority) freaky-smart engineer Danny Hillis. Danny's design went hard "non-von Neumann" as I like to say, and embraced extreme parallelism:> 65,536 1-bit processors!> A layer of top-down networking for broadcasting commands.> A layer of fixed-wire interlinks between sets of processors, arranging them into a 12-dimensional hypercube. (Yes!)
(DIR) Post #AihrcJW3z03ESjS3Ie by spiralganglion@mastodon.social
2024-06-08T03:44:43Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
The data-parallel computation model excelled at simulating fluids, molecules, and physical materials, and running cellular automata or other grid-based computation.In this model, memory = compute. AFAIK, if you wanted to work with a bigger dataset, you'd add compute *and* interlinks, so your program execution time stayed constant or even came down.
(DIR) Post #AihrcLWqV3rihjphnU by spiralganglion@mastodon.social
2024-06-08T03:48:55Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
Thinking Machines developed *Lisp (“StarLisp”) as an efficient, high-level language to leverage the massive parallelism of the Connection Machine. Does that mean the CM was the ultimate Lisp Machine? I'm going to assume yes and reject all evidence to the contrary.Their website was think.com, which is just so choice. Thanks to the Wayback Machine (no relation), we can see that Thinking Machines was probably one of the first companies to list a dog on their team page. Innovation abounds.
(DIR) Post #AihrcNHfyQv49GkcQi by spiralganglion@mastodon.social
2024-06-08T03:52:57Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
Richard Feynman even worked at Thinking Machines for a spell. In fact, the 12D Hypercube was his design.Amusingly, when Feynman appeared in Apple's Think Different campaign, he was wearing a shirt with the Thinking Machines logo designed by Tamiko Thiel.
(DIR) Post #AihrcPMiEg8WbT7fYe by spiralganglion@mastodon.social
2024-06-08T03:54:55Z
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Danny Hillis gave a lecture on the technical architecture of the CM-1/CM-2 and their CM-5 successor, and he's wearing just the most amazing polyester sweater I've ever seen. Watch this on 2x to get a good sense of what Thinking Machines were up to in the mid-90s… shortly before they ran out of money, alas.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ua-swPZTeX4
(DIR) Post #AihrcRn1DqMq7dRhq4 by spiralganglion@mastodon.social
2024-06-08T03:56:36Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
I'll leave you with one final reference, where you likely first heard the name Thinking Machines and saw those iconic black boxes with their blinking red lights: Jurassic Park! Everyone loves "It's a UNIX system", and deep heads name-drop the IRIX 3D file system, but it's those CM-5s in the background that'll live forever in my amber heart.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAK4dk32bSI
(DIR) Post #AnsIgpJzRtOyceyLqq by spiralganglion@mastodon.social
2024-11-08T01:59:49Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
Lately I've felt a lot of "big feelings” — pain, yearning, confusion, frustration, desire — about computer programming.I can't quite explain how I feel. Certainly can't write it down. Most definitely not in brief.So I did the only thing that comes naturally: felt my way through it, out loud, exploratively.Titles are hard, so it's called "Live as in Alive”, perhaps glancing sideways at the recent d-d-discourse about live programming vs live coding.#40 —> https://ivanish.ca/hest-podcast/
(DIR) Post #AvL9WdmYrIIkRBfcWW by spiralganglion@mastodon.social
2025-06-19T14:50:55Z
6 likes, 1 repeats
Hey Germans, please come up with a word that means "the fear of typing `return` vs `shift-return` because you don't know which inserts newline and which sends the message"
(DIR) Post #AwRXoHKR5XnGjd18u8 by spiralganglion@mastodon.social
2025-07-24T00:21:36Z
0 likes, 1 repeats
Ink & Switch is hiring someone to* help engineer and maintain the Automerge TypeScript library, and* build experiments that get people excited about Automerge!It's a great group of creative people pushing computers to be fundamentally better. We'd love to have you.https://www.inkandswitch.com/jobs/automerge-typescript-maintainer/
(DIR) Post #Ay0h1k9VAmRTocKWPo by spiralganglion@mastodon.social
2025-09-08T22:30:43Z
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@neauoire Timely. The next episode of FoC is about a dream I had where I was hanging out in Daniel's bedroom.
(DIR) Post #AyXVXRO8dQqlIagNHM by spiralganglion@mastodon.social
2025-09-24T00:31:50Z
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I think this is the first time in my career I've needed the "double mod"
(DIR) Post #AzHKsotsFh9u4nfuoy by spiralganglion@mastodon.social
2025-10-16T20:07:56Z
0 likes, 0 repeats
🫠 https://automerge.orgA brand-new website for Automerge, designed by Todd Matthews and built by yours truly.Featuring a playful interactive demo, beautiful illustrations, an emphasis on the people behind the project, and so many subtle details, assembled by a custom static site generator (the same one powering the new Ink & Switch website).There's a lot more coming — improved docs, most of all. But this is a big step and I'm thrilled to share it with you.
(DIR) Post #B2DQ2Yr1k1ir9YLulc by spiralganglion@mastodon.social
2026-01-12T05:40:19Z
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code.org (which I already had a pretty low opinion of) has absolutely slathered themselves with slophttps://code.org
(DIR) Post #B2mbdsP3MPtTZwxQA4 by spiralganglion@mastodon.social
2026-01-29T16:14:08Z
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@nikitonsky space is the only key used by both hands
(DIR) Post #B2qogAzTIfC9qHG5NA by spiralganglion@mastodon.social
2026-01-31T17:25:54Z
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@neauoire implement some flavour of Tonedown?https://wiki.feelingof.com/tonedown/The (meh, but heavily commented) reference impl is line 86 to 256 here:https://github.com/feelingofcomputing/wiki/blob/main/build/build.coffeeBut generally, making your own to-html macro lang is a lovely little thing to do.