[HN Gopher] Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part...
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Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?
List of scenes that I am particularly fond of: - Minecrat computer
engineering: Culminated with this playable 3d simplified minecraft
clone (CPU+GPU) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BP7DhHTU-I -
Shader computing scene: More of a subculture of an already
marvelous subculture, people are finding weird ways to compute with
shader https://blog.pimaker.at/texts/rvc1/ Risc V emulator in a
shader https://github.com/SCRN-VRC/SVM-Face-and-Object-Detection-
Shader Object detection in a shader - Cellular automata: people
finding awesome patterns, some great project:
https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/11880/build-a-working-
game-of-tetris-in-conways-game-of-life
https://btm.qva.mybluehost.me/building-arbitrary-life-patterns-
in-15-gliders/ - TAS/Speedrun:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBK1sq1BQ2Q Insane game exploit
which uses only player input in order to inject an elaborate rom
hack with network functionality
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9dTmzRAL_4 Another insane one
which work by switching game (!!) during the run - "Can it run
Doom" Scene:
https://twitter.com/sylefeb/status/1258808333265514497 Run a doom
map renderer on a FPGA. Not on a classic computer "emulated" by the
fpga, the renderer is directly implemented in the fpga
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6hnQ1RKhbo Yes doom can run doom
So what are your technical gem?
Author : ForgotIdAgain
Score : 159 points
Date : 2022-11-21 18:42 UTC (4 hours ago)
| Forge36 wrote:
| Speed running Mario Kart 64.
|
| I'm not great. I enjoy it though. It's also been a place to play
| around with small a programming project to make it easier to
| update my streaming UI. https://github.com/Forge36/Speed-Run-
| Sidebar
| theCrowing wrote:
| I am still phreaking and active in the demoscene.
| kevstev wrote:
| what really exists in phreaking? I used to be interested in the
| mid-late 90s, but it seems it was all but dead by 2000 or so.
| Asterix seemed to keep things interesting for a bit, but I
| haven't heard about that in years.
| theCrowing wrote:
| In the last years it shifted mostly to tinkering with radio
| communication of all sorts. IoT etc. it's amazing what you
| can find out about factories and your general environment if
| you have a look at everything that's buzzing around... with
| mostly default passwords. :) but there are still interesting
| systems around just last week I found a 170 line isdn system
| still in use by a printing company... roughly 1mbit :D
| hxugufjfjf wrote:
| While not that interested anymore, I used to be really into the
| iOS jailbreaking scene, more specifically writing and testing
| tweaks/tools used post-jailbreak. This was back around iOS 5
| (2012-ish), when names like Cydia, Saurik, Redsn0w and unc0ver
| were commonplace. I guess they are not anymore. Back then,
| Jailbreaking was not commercial in the same way it is now, no
| money prices, large teams, etc. It was just a few dedicated,
| talented individuals working in small groups, backed by a
| community very eager to jailbreak. I remember I showed off dark
| mode on iOS around 6-7 years before it became an official
| feature.
|
| The main point of jailbreaking for me was actually to "fix" a lot
| of broken shit in iOS, and significantly improve usability. After
| a while, that I kind off became less and less relevant, as
| important (to me) features like dark mode got native, change the
| lockscreen, and similar things. Also, performance on iphones and
| iOS got so good there was no longer any point to disable
| animations and other things I used to tamper with to give the
| illusion of increasing performance.
|
| They were good days! I remember hard refreshing /r/jailbreak
| hundred times a day because "a jailbreak for iOS 1x is 'right
| around the corner'".
| madmax108 wrote:
| Coming from a country where "legally" procuring
| movies/music/software has always been harder than it should be
| (though things are better now), the scene I enjoyed was the
| piracy scene.
|
| Be it the warez scene mentioned elsewhere in the thread, or
| simply the pirated movies/games scene, it formed such an integral
| part of my childhood. The whole aXXo/KlaXXoN debacle, the sheer
| respect for SkidRow for being able to deliver awesome games in a
| playable crack within days of their release, and purely the sense
| of community around, of all things, pirating content, was
| incredible. It sounds weird to say, but in many ways, it felt
| like a global movement to "stick it to the man" and keep control
| of the internet.
|
| TBH I'm still a bit upset that mininova closed down because
| compared to TPB/RarBGe etc, I always felt like mininova was a
| much tighter knit community (and let's not even get into the
| whole eMule/Demonoid/Napster community).
| muxamilian wrote:
| Decreasing network latency by tweaking routers/developing new
| software:
|
| https://www.bufferbloat.net
| europeanguy wrote:
| Do you know that weird phenomenon where you just learned a new
| word (which is weird in itself, how come I've live 20, 30, 40
| year sand never saw this word before?!) and immediately after
| you see the same word again in an entirely different context?
|
| Well that just happened with "bufferbloat". I had just learned
| about this word on the book "alrogithms to live by". And now,
| here.
| blacksmithgu wrote:
| Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, or simply the "frequency
| illusion". Or maybe just dumb luck :)
| gedy wrote:
| Designing mechanical keyboards and making mostly from scratch.
|
| Algorithmic and AI art
| [deleted]
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Microsoft flight simulator scene, pre-"flight sim 2020" was super
| interesting. FSX was well documented and built to be extensible
| through data, and I wanted to replace the terrible quality
| terrain of my local area with modern geo-data and ground
| textures.
|
| There was an entire scene around this, that built, sold and
| supported third party programs to help you build custom airports,
| paid tools for importing google earth ground textures, tools to
| help autogenerate tree cover for a ground texture based on
| machine learning of "this group of pixels look like a forest so
| place a forest here", plus all the tooling in the GIS space which
| is incredible and lovely.
|
| I was a month into stealing google earth images with homebrew
| code using techniques borrowed from a different open source tool,
| hand labeling a hundred square miles of ground textures,
| including thousands of polygons to tell FSX where to place
| houses, a revamped local airport with new structures and signage,
| and autogenerating a winter version of the ground textures
| through writing some java code (because python is stupidly slow)
| to sample a "snow" texture and place it onto a green ground
| texture, which worked surprisingly well, writing code to overlay
| publicly available house polygon data and water polygon data to
| place rivers and lakes, before I go to hand labeling forests and
| trying to learn the machine learning tool before I gave up, and
| then MSFS2020 was announced about a year later.
|
| This field is also related to turning google earth terrain and
| texture data into Assetto Corsa tracks, which has a similar
| community including paid tools (that mostly suck though)
|
| I learned a lot of GIS and it was pretty great, and I got to play
| with a bunch of publicly available large datasets of different
| formats, and wrote code to generate 3D models from hightmaps,
| even though it was a terrible implementation.
| wrycoder wrote:
| Will the community reform around MSFS2020?
| mrguyorama wrote:
| MSFS2020 is straight up infinitely more friendly to novice
| development. Instead of having to read enterprise
| documentation for a custom product that is entirely based on
| binary file types that is very very mid 2000s microsoft, you
| literally import a standard 3D model file into the engine
| itself, and manage it with built in dev tools that are only
| getting better and more powerful, and the vast majority of
| plumbing to make things work is done in human readable xml
| and cfg text files, though there was some of that in FSX
|
| Adding visual things to FS2020 is infinitely easier than any
| version before it. Meanwhile for ground texturing, turns out
| replacing that with google satelite data is as easy as
| proxying the web calls to google servers instead of bing.
| Theoretically, you could add in your own tileserver that also
| responds to those calls if you have your own ground textures,
| though I think you can also manage those in the dev tools in
| the sim.
|
| Meanwhile, the api for moving data and programming into and
| out of the sim is super similar to how it was done in FSX,
| meaning it's almost backwards compatible, and supplemental
| apps that interact with your flight data were out within
| months.
|
| Another fun thing about FS2020 over the previous version is
| that the 3D cockpit is much easier to program, because the
| instruments and even TV screen style flight displays can be
| programmed in javascript and WASM, giving you multiple
| different ways to build powerful and impressive cockpits. For
| FSX, things that wanted smart and powerful cockpit displays,
| like a modern boeing, basically required pulling data out of
| the sim, rendering it yourself, and smuggling that data back
| into the sim, meaning updating the displays at 15 fps put a
| large overhead on an already struggling single process
| executable.
|
| MSFS2020 is so popular, and so easy to access, and so
| inspiring, that it has infinitely more amateurs trying to
| build planes in it than FSX had over it's entire life.
| zulban wrote:
| My wife recently went back to school for civil engineering. They
| must take one programming course, in matlab. So we have this
| community of academic go-getter students who've never programmed
| before, suddenly working hard to learn about for-loops and
| structs and functions in Matlab. As a computer scientist it has
| been fun teaching them a bit. The assignments are easy enough
| that I can help a ton without knowing any syntax and just learn
| language features on the fly.
| flafla2 wrote:
| Matlab is awesome. I had to learn it for a class in
| Computational Photography back in school. The matrix-centric
| language design is an interesting change from traditional
| languages and the amazing linear solvers available give you a
| shocking amount of power sometimes. For example, the language
| has really good SIMD/parallelism support out of the box,
| because you are steered towards making all of your variables
| into vectors and performing batch processing. Backslash is also
| an incredibly powerful tool in the right hands, and lends
| itself to some beautiful oneliners (it's sort of like a shell
| language in that way).
| conductor wrote:
| Disclaimer: I am in no way encouraging or advocating for software
| piracy.
|
| The warez scene in 90s and early 00s was fun to follow. I
| consider the NFO files a legitimate form of art, not to mention
| the skills for unpacking and keygen-ing or cracking of the
| protected software.
|
| https://scenelist.org/
| LaserDiscMan wrote:
| I wasn't aware of this at the time, but apparently INC "leaked"
| a game to The Humble Guys which was modified to search for a
| modem and dial 911, supposedly leading to some police visits.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Network_of_Crack...
| Rodeoclash wrote:
| So much fun. Hanging out on Undernet in channels like #zeraw,
| exchanging hacked corporate FTP servers where people had
| uploaded disk images.
|
| My friend was way further (better?) at the scene then I ever
| was but we'd pool our resources. I.e. he'd get access to an FTP
| and share it with me. I'd download disks 1 - 10 and he'd grab
| 11 - 20. We'd then use a direct dial program with our modems to
| share the remaining disks with each other (using ZModem!)
| overnight. Double our bandwidth!
| johnwheeler wrote:
| #cracking4newbies on efnet
| jll29 wrote:
| ...and Drive Music is a form of art (even if it makes your
| local data safety person cringe):
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZR454sxi27o
| nailer wrote:
| First piece of dance music i ever heard was the Razor1911
| Terminator demo
| ihusasmiiu wrote:
| > I am in no way encouraging or advocating for software piracy.
|
| I am.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| I do advocate for the importance of backward engineering -
| with its companion, competence and awareness over the lower-
| level.
| unixhero wrote:
| Nfos, great Culture.
| theonething wrote:
| growing up in the 80s with a Commodore 64, my friends and I
| never bought any games. They were all "cracked by
| $some_cracker"
| jamiek88 wrote:
| Yeah we literally had a club we'd go to and just copy each
| others floppies!
|
| As a poor 12 year old they weren't losing money. I had none!
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| Grew up around the same time, we would typically change
| $some_cracker to our nicknames before trading them to the
| next person.
| EMM_386 wrote:
| I ran a dual-node Salt Air PC-Board BBS with a custom scrolling
| intro screen.
| pfoof wrote:
| and keygen music
| ckozlowski wrote:
| The channel Ahoy on YouTube dove into Tracker music, and has
| a few callouts on how this materialized in the Warez scene.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roBkg-iPrbw
| pfoof wrote:
| I used to have entire Keygen Jukebox on my iPod. And speaking of
| iPods: iPodLinux and Rockbox. So satisfying when you are 14, just
| change colors of the blocks in "copter" and it compiles and runs
| on your nano.
|
| Oh and I also loved to show off with Tiny C Compiler on my
| jailbroken Kindle 3rd gen
| phkahler wrote:
| Arcade game emulators. I quit years ago, but reverse engineered
| the Cinematronics processor used in their vector games. It was
| built from TTL chips and a few proms. 5 MIPS max, 12 bit
| accumulator, supported multiplication in hardware. Crazy stuff.
| ilaksh wrote:
| A few years back I spent quite a long time (like two years off
| and on) trying to kind of create my own scene with a Lua-
| programmable 3D libretro front-end
| https://vintagesimulator.com/media.html
|
| Then I tried to post it on reddit in r/lua and they called it
| Malware and tried to insist that the whole thing had to be open
| source. I think what really screwed me there was Microsoft and
| their GD message identifying everything as Malware by default
| unless you have paid them off. I did eventually get the code
| signing certificate and stuff but no one ever really seemed to
| care.
|
| I assume there may be something like this for VR somewhere that I
| haven't heard of yet that is actually somewhat popular.
| pocket_cheese wrote:
| Web scraping. I love figuring out how to reverse engineer
| websites and defeat systems designed against web scrapers. It's
| also super interesting (concerning?) how much data websites leak.
| 4 out of the 5 bug bounties I've discovered have been while
| poking around in my scraping efforts.
| andruby wrote:
| What's a good tool/language to write scrapers in these days? A
| decade ago I was using ruby with mechanize and hpricot. I hope
| tools have improved since then, especially for scraping sites
| that use javascript.
| dewey wrote:
| Really depends on how big your scraping operation is going to
| be. These days there's a lot of "managed" providers that give
| you headless browsers / proxy rotators through an easy API so
| it's relatively easy to plug them into your code. Examples of
| these would be https://www.browserless.io or
| https://www.scrapingbee.com for headless browsers to render
| JS.
|
| From my work experience of working on a large scraping stack
| with thousands of integrations, I can say that we are very
| happy with our own custom framework, written in Go
| (https://github.com/PuerkitoBio/goquery for HTML parsing) and
| using headless Chrome for JS rendering.
| spfzero wrote:
| A fun way, though maybe there are much more productive ways,
| is to learn Scheme and/or Lisp, and, with a language that has
| a library for it, convert the html to a big s-expression.
| Then you have it in a form that is the form of the language
| itself, where you can literally do anything with it.
| tluyben2 wrote:
| I like webscraping and made a lot of money making farms 15 or
| so years ago; I started disliking it somehow when Python kind
| of took over. What are you using? I am also interested in doing
| it as cheap as I can which is a lot of fun for tech reasons.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| 6502 chiptunes
| spoils19 wrote:
| - Pure HTML / CSS / vanilla JS sites. It's a shame that it's
| turned into a niche scene, but I'm always a fan of inspecting
| sites that don't bloat themselves with unnecessary frameworks.
|
| - Sites that work without JavaScript. Even better than the first,
| it's always a pleasure to see when a site is made properly for a
| change, without the toxicity of JavaScript that pervades the
| world wide web (WWW) as we know it.
| dorfsmay wrote:
| For tiny very specific problems that can be done under 2 k
| lines, I love a single self contained page that includes the
| necessary html/ja/CSS!
| WhyCause wrote:
| I've made a few "games" that go a step further, including
| images as SVG or base64 encoded binary.
|
| I use them mainly for learning / testing new (to me)
| concepts.
| jw_cook wrote:
| Are there any particular communities or groups for this you can
| recommend?
|
| Here are a few I've discovered that I've really been enjoying
| lately:
|
| https://tildeverse.org (EDIT: apparently they don't like being
| linked to from HN; copy and paste the link instead of clicking
| it)
|
| https://indieweb.org
|
| https://neocities.org
|
| I think the main focus of those communities is recapturing the
| spirit of the (arguably more fun) internet of the 90s to early
| 2000s. They're not specifically dedicated to static site
| minimalism, but there's definitely a large overlap.
| ckozlowski wrote:
| That tildeverse URL is not going where you think it
| is...(Currently set to Rickroll.)
| jw_cook wrote:
| Ah, I forgot, it specifically does that when referred from
| HN.
|
| Previous discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29449238
|
| Two of the more active communities:
|
| https://tilde.team
|
| https://tilde.club
| bob1029 wrote:
| > It's a shame that it's turned into a niche scene
|
| Not sure about niche. Maybe more... understated, proprietary
| and confidential.
|
| We've been doing totally vanilla HTML/JS/CSS web apps for our
| B2B customers for the last 3-4 years. In fact, we can't use
| your typical web frameworks because our contracts are measured
| in half-decades and due diligence against _our_ vendors makes
| it infeasible to participate in that kind of ecosystem. Banking
| is a great industry to get into if you want to get frameworks
| out of your life. You have the perfect bat to use. "Oh.. I
| don't know about that... is Angular 12 still going to be around
| _and supported_ halfway through this client 's seven-figure
| contract?".
|
| Doing pure web in 2022 is hard. It's mostly a human/courage
| thing. The _technology_ is easier than its ever been. But, you
| have to stand your ground day after day against this onslaught
| of cargo cult web dev. The outcome is worth whatever salty
| arguments you get into.
|
| >the toxicity of JavaScript
|
| I understand the sentiment. I'd probably use similar diction if
| I had to screw around with NPM-style projects for a living.
| That said, javascript itself can be an answer to this vendor
| bloat if used very carefully.
| mNovak wrote:
| It is really strange how this is a niche now (the frameworks);
| a couple lines of JS to handle button clicks is fine with me
| (again assuming you're not downloading jQuery for it)
| jcpst wrote:
| As a recovering former SPA enthusiast, coming back to the
| simplicity of HTML/CSS/JS over the past few years has been a
| breath of fresh air.
| sirbranedamuj wrote:
| I run a website (https://mustad.io) that keeps track of the stats
| for matches on Final Fantasy Tactics Battleground
| (https://twitch.tv/fftbattleground). We have a channel on the
| stream's discord dedicated to development of various other tools
| for viewers. I am not super active now but I have been paying to
| keep my website afloat for a couple years now. I don't know
| exactly how many users I have but people tell me if it goes down
| so I know it's at least a few.
| spogbiper wrote:
| Amateur radio
| bmitch2112 wrote:
| 73
| shaunxcode wrote:
| It's called lisp-machine-punk and it's similar to solar or steam
| punk except we imagine a world where the lisp machine became the
| dominant paradigm for all forms of computing. The difference
| between lisp-machine-punk and other *-punks is there is a
| tangible path forward eg revive and build lisp machines!
| devwastaken wrote:
| Nintendo 64 archiving, modding and homebrew game development.
| Check out n64brew, there's a discord server too. Plenty of work
| to be done documenting hardware protocols or making developer
| libs/tools.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| Making Doom levels, but that's probably more artistic than
| technical, though knowing your way around the engine and editors
| is technical.
| patorjk wrote:
| The first book I ever bought in a computer store was Tricks of
| the Doom Programming Gurus. Back in the mid-90's I saw it
| randomly while walking by the games section and thought it
| almost too good to be true. I ended up spending countless hours
| making my own levels. I was never any good though, and I
| definitely preferred playing what other people came up with.
| Every couple of years I'll go back and revisit some of those
| levels and see if there's anything new. It's definitely awesome
| that people have kept this scene alive.
| spicyjpeg wrote:
| I have been working on PlayStation 1 homebrew SDKs [1] and tools
| over the last year. Unlike other retro consoles - especially
| Nintendo consoles - the PS1 gets almost no attention at all;
| "PS1-style" games made using Unity or Unreal Engine seem to be
| decently popular, but nobody wants to bother with the real
| hardware anymore. Which is a shame, as the PS1 is a relatively
| simple platform which can be found for relatively cheap and
| offers a bare metal development experience reminiscent of modern
| 32-bit microcontrollers, with some interesting graphics and audio
| hardware thrown in. It is a platform unencumbered by the
| tile/sprite and storage limitations of the 8- and 16-bit eras,
| yet still limited enough to be a breeding ground for creativity
| and at the same time easily expandable with custom hardware
| through its integrated serial port and ISA-like parallel bus.
|
| [1] https://github.com/Lameguy64/PSn00bSDK
| corysama wrote:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/retrogamedev/
| ok_dad wrote:
| Can I run programs built in this SDK on an original PS1? Like
| the one I have from when I was a kid? I'm interested, I'm gonna
| check it out.
| corysama wrote:
| * Works on real hardware and most popular emulators.
| spicyjpeg wrote:
| Most of the SDK has been tested and confirmed to be fully
| functional on real hardware, but there is some copy
| protection you will have to get around in order to run
| arbitrary software on a PS1. The traditional solution is to
| perform disc swapping or install a modchip, but nowadays we
| also have softmods [1] that make the process as easy as
| inserting a specially formatted memory card (which can be
| prepared using a PS2, or even a PS1 by swapping discs).
|
| You are not required to use CDs either. With the help of some
| code and linker script magic, you can build an image that can
| be booted directly from a cheat cartridge (or simply a
| parallel EEPROM) connected to the console's expansion bus,
| bypassing the copy protection checks entirely. There are also
| debugging tools that, once loaded, let you download an
| executable into RAM for quick testing and manage memory cards
| using a modified serial cable [2].
|
| [1] https://github.com/brad-lin/FreePSXBoot
|
| [2] https://schnappy.xyz/?building_a_serial_psx_cable
| mamcx wrote:
| I start with FoxPro so eventually get on the board of making a
| version of it (https://tablam.org), and now I'm regular at
|
| - https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/
|
| and because this working on a RDBMs, so:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/databasedevelopment/
| tluyben2 wrote:
| Thanks, didn't know the latter.
| cpsns wrote:
| Gopher, not many of us use it anymore, but a handful of people
| including myself are keeping it alive and writing new services
| that can be accessed via it. It's a nice group of technical,
| slightly eccentric computer users.
|
| The vintage Mac community is excellent and is full of extremely
| smart people. Lots of people writing new software, designing new
| hardware, and doing really complex repair and preservation work.
| jw_cook wrote:
| > writing new services that can be accessed via it
|
| This sounds cool. Care to link some examples? And is there a
| particular Gopher browser you'd recommend?
|
| Also, how do you feel about Gemini?[1] I only learned about it
| recently, but it appears to be similar in purpose to Gopher
| (minimal sites with only text and links), but with a different
| document format based on a subset of Markdown.
|
| [1]: https://gemini.circumlunar.space
| cpsns wrote:
| A new one I started is gopher://gophernews.net:70, but the
| best place to find stuff is on Floodgap:
| http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw
|
| Lynx is probably the best that most people already have, but
| Gophie is a nice, modern client written in Java.
|
| I think Gemini is nice, but I have no interest personally due
| to the TLS requirement. That makes it a nonstarter for my
| older computers.
| sircastor wrote:
| I don't know that I'd describe it as "weird", but for me it's
| sequenced Christmas Lights. My setup is relatively small, but
| yes, I'm that guy with the big Christmas light display. This year
| I'm at about 1500 RGB LEDs this year (again, still pretty small)
| it's fun hobby.
|
| The weirdest part for me still is custom ordering hundreds of
| dollars of lights from Chinese companies directly.
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| I really hope that you also do cool things like this one [1]
| with your Christmas lights
|
| 1. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TvlpIojusBE
| Loughla wrote:
| HEY. I'm looking for dependable, C9 lights. Would you know
| where to look? I love the look of the old-timey large bulbs,
| but so far the lights I've found have been; a) overly expensive
| and b) not able to withstand more than one winter in the upper-
| Midwest.
|
| Any recommendations?
| krallja wrote:
| Retro computers, like RC2014 (based on the Z80), Ben Eater's 6502
| breadboard computer, anything by Lee Hart[1], all the fun kits on
| Tindie...
|
| 1: http://www.sunrise-ev.com/projects.htm
| fortran77 wrote:
| Locksport!
| yboris wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locksport
|
| > Locksport is the sport or recreation of defeating locking
| systems.
| jcims wrote:
| Locksport and tying knots are two skills I would love to
| develop but I don't get enough opportunity to use them to use
| the application of the skill as the driver. Probably need to
| find a community for each to see if that helps.
| wetmore wrote:
| Climbing is a great way to learn knots in an applied way.
| jcims wrote:
| oh wow, I have no idea why I didn't think of that. thank
| you!
| unixhero wrote:
| I watch silly review videos of old games ok the YouTube channel
| Accursed Farms https://youtube.com/@chilledsanity
|
| I used to be partnof the comment field on Joe Rogan videos. The
| comments were hilarious, great community.
| zeendo wrote:
| My favorite was the satellite hacking scene back in the early
| 2000s. It started earlier than that, I know, but my exposure was
| around that time.
|
| It's fairly well documented these days but there was a very fun
| game of cat-and-mouse between the satellite companies (DirecTV
| and Dish Network) and all the pirates. For DirecTV, at least, the
| outline of the whole thing went like this
|
| Subscriber specific smart cards were insertted into the DirecTV
| set top boxes and they were, IIRC, essentially responsible for
| providing the decryption keys for the video stream. The cards did
| this using a custom onboard ASIC that I don't _think_ was ever
| really reverse engineered. So the cards - at least for the
| "mainstream" DirecTV pirates - were always required.
|
| People would manufacture and buy modified smart card readers
| which would tweak the power to the cards in such a way that after
| enough attempts they would enter some kind of debug mode and
| accept unsigned software updates.
|
| People would disassemble the software on the card and write
| patches (all in assembly) to make the smart cards to authorize
| any request for channel access instead of them cross referencing
| the authorizations for your account (1).
|
| You'd apply the update to your card using a modified reader and
| voila - all channels worked perfect.
|
| But then, DirecTV got clever and instead of just using the ASIC
| to compute the channel decryption keys they started to use both
| the ASIC _and_ a hash of parts of the card 's onboard software!
| So now every week or so a update was released which would break
| the old patches since the new update would potentially need the
| hash of parts of the original code that the software had
| overwritten.
|
| So then the people writing the patches would do things like add
| lookup tables for the known incarnations of the packets that
| initiated the decryption key generation...so they'd just have a
| table of Hash(DecryptionPacket) -> Hash(OriginalSoftware). But
| then new packets (usually released each week on Monday's I think)
| would require more updates.
|
| There were more clever patches that would do more sophisticated
| things but the extent of which I don't really remember.
|
| Note that this was all _after_ the infamous Black Sunday event
| when lots of cards were permanently disabled. That was the P2
| generation of cards. The generation I'm referring to above
| (during my exposure to the scene) was almost entirely P3. They
| were running P2, P3 and P4 cards all at the same time, I think.
|
| As far as I know this scene is entirely gone now. I don't think
| the P4 cards were ever exploited - not publicly, at least.
|
| Lastly there were LOADs of forums for this kind of thing.
| vBulletin forums were all over the place. Lots of thriving
| communities.
|
| My memory is pretty hazy on all this now and I was pretty young
| at the time so if anyone has more salient details on this I'd
| really like to hear them!
|
| (1) - I don't remember exactly how the massive subscriber
| database was sent down in the stream in such a way that the boxes
| and cards could do this. Maybe some kind of tree? Maybe someone
| else can fill in that detail.
| spiffytech wrote:
| My local 2600 club puts on a conference (CarolinaCon) that's a
| fun dive into gray-hat security stuff.
|
| E.g., one guy demonstrated how he forges the signature on a
| printer's USB firmware updates so he can deploy a his own stuff
| inside a company's network perimeter.
|
| Or they always have "Lockpicking Village", where you can learn to
| escape handcuffs!
|
| The 2600 magazine has always been a fun glimpse into this world,
| too.
| bckr wrote:
| I'm in the deep learning music scene, which is due for its stable
| diffusion moment in the next year or two. The (primarily) timbre
| transfer system called RAVE is where I'm starting, and my
| contribution is to optimize the system to improve training time.
|
| [] https://github.com/acids-ircam/RAVE/tree/master/rave
| celim307 wrote:
| I can definitely see Spotify taking something like this and
| generating songs based on your likes/seeds, especially for edm
| music.
| kwertyops wrote:
| Do you know of any online community gathering places for this
| scene? Subreddit? Discord server?
| lucasgonze wrote:
| I was hunting around for such a scene. Thanks for getting me
| connected.
| api wrote:
| Digital Artificial Life -- as in evolving program ecosystems,
| artificial chemistries or cellular automata that can manifest
| life-like phenomena, etc.
|
| Haven't done much with it in a while but was very into it in
| college. It's both a minor scientific field (would probably be
| grouped under both theoretical biology and AI research) and a
| hobbyist field with some really interesting projects.
| jl6 wrote:
| The intersection of people who understand computer* puns and
| English Football League** team names:
|
| https://lab6.com/1#page=10
|
| Warning: gratuitous 16MB PDF which will not benefit you.
|
| * Not strictly just computing
|
| ** Some international clubs too.
| etrautmann wrote:
| Algorithmic art and pen plotters - super fun and wonderful
| community.
| myself248 wrote:
| Ooooooo, any good links to share? I picked up a Draftmaster II
| at auction and someday I'll get it working I promise...
| nealeratzlaff wrote:
| I also try to be part of the algorithmic/generative art
| community. It seems really scattered but the variety of
| techniques and ideas flowing around is really inspiring :)
|
| After stable diffusion/midjourney, the community is a little
| leery of deep learning I've noticed. But I'm trying to carve
| out a space using neural networks in a different way) anyway.
| paulgb wrote:
| I love the plotter community!
|
| A timely shill: for three years now, I've run an annual
| international postcard exchange that's kinda like a Secret
| Santa for people with plotters. This happens to be the week
| that registrations are open.
| https://buttondown.email/ptpx/archive/ptpx-2022-holiday-card...
| louhike wrote:
| I love retro gaming on CRT. People tend to misjudge how retro
| games are supposed to look (visible pixels or mismatch between 2d
| backgrounds and 3d models). I'm not opposed to people playing on
| LCD screens, I just think it's important to remember how those
| games were supposed to look.
|
| Some people are dedicated to show that, which is great:
| CRTpixels: https://twitter.com/CRTpixels Standard Definition
| Gaming: https://www.tumblr.com/sdg480 or
| https://twitter.com/DefStan480
|
| And taking a picture or video of a CRT can be quite tricky, you
| have to be very careful of your parameters, your angle, etc.
| m463 wrote:
| I always loved old vector graphics games. I loved tempest.
|
| I don't know, maybe resolutions and refresh rates are high
| enough now to give a simulation a shot.
| overthemoon wrote:
| This is a phenomenon I only learned about recently. A few indie
| games I've played recently have CRT options, like Loop Hero. I
| don't know how close it gets to the IRL effect but it's really
| cool.
| louhike wrote:
| CRT-like shaders made a lot of progress recently, we re
| getting closer! And it's great as not everyone can have a CRT
| and the existing ones won't last forever.
| mfrisbie wrote:
| Browser extensions. Not quite a website, not quite a mobile app,
| and surprisingly pervasive. Most people don't realize how
| incredibly powerful they are, even with manifest v3.
|
| I almost fell out of my chair when I found out there were no
| books on how to build them, so I wrote one:
| https://www.buildingbrowserextensions.com/ It was incredibly
| enjoyable to go through the APIs and write about all the
| different crazy things they can do, and I put the best ones into
| a demo extension:
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/browser-extension-....
| vax425 wrote:
| Welcome to the club! I'm working on a browser extension right
| now.
|
| HTTPS://headlamptest.com
| galuggus wrote:
| The book looks great.
|
| I want to build an ad-blocker.
|
| Could you recommend a good open source projects to learn from?
|
| Previous extension I made: www.fuckoff.yt
| mfrisbie wrote:
| The best mv2 repository would of course be ublock origin:
| https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock The best mv3 repository
| would be AdGuard's https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardMV3
|
| For a generalized ad blocker, importing and updating filter
| lists is probably the most challenging bit.
| https://kb.adguard.com/en/general/adguard-ad-filters AdGuard
| has an amazing blog, their content is impressively broad and
| deep https://adguard.com/en/blog/how-ad-blocking-is-done.html
| RheingoldRiver wrote:
| That's awesome! I preordered. I've written one tiny browser
| extension once, which was really just for my own use, and I was
| a bit surprised at how hard it was to find anything that taught
| how to do it from beginning to end. The APIs were all well-
| documented, and there was a tutorial extension I could clone,
| but after that I was really left to searching through random
| blog posts and StackOverflow for help, since even with good
| documentation "what is possible in the first place" is hard to
| figure out. It took me a full day to write an extension to mute
| all tabs whose name matched a regex pattern. That's it, that's
| the entire extension, and I wasn't even interested in making it
| cross-browser. (The use case is that you pair its hotkey with
| an autohotkey script and then it's actually quite useful.)
|
| Since then, I've on occasion had interest in making some other
| browser extensions, but I always look back to that experience &
| the lack of resources and just think ehhhhhh do I _really_ want
| to? I 'm sure I _could_ but just how _much_ do I care about
| this, and the answer has never been enough.
| mfrisbie wrote:
| I found the lack of examples and mv2/mv3 fragmentation to be
| very irritating. For example, the Omnibox API is _awesome_ -
| yet look at the documentation: https://developer.chrome.com/d
| ocs/extensions/reference/omnib... . It barely scrapes the
| surface of what it should or can do.
|
| If you're looking to get back on the horse, check out Plasmo
| https://www.plasmo.com/. It's by far the best and easiest
| platform for building and deploying extensions.
| julianeon wrote:
| Great idea for a book. I'll get it.
| mfrisbie wrote:
| Thanks! It should be available sometime next week.
| delaaxe wrote:
| What are the biggest differences with manifest v3?
| mfrisbie wrote:
| The change that gets the most attention is the shift away
| from blocking webRequest to declarativeNetRequest, but other
| important changes are moving from background pages to service
| workers, and disallowing third party JS.
|
| Service workers are particularly problematic for some
| extensions, as the background script cannot execute
| indefinitely. I included an entire chapter on mv2->mv3 since
| there was so much to cover.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _how incredibly powerful_
|
| To the best of the updates to my knowledge, they are much less
| powerful now than when we could use XUL many years ago...
|
| I am not aware that the lackings forced around the time of the
| deprecation of XUL got fixed.
|
| I still use browser forks to keep on using those vital
| extensions of yore (Scrapbook etc).
| mysterymath wrote:
| I maintain a LLVM backend for the 6502:
| https://godbolt.org/z/6EWEb6c5E, https://llvm-mos.org
|
| I love compilers, and I work on LLVM full time at my day job. I
| love bringing modern tooling and techniques to an older
| environment where they very much don't belong; the juxtaposition
| of the two is very satisfying to me.
| mNovak wrote:
| I recently got involved with a community which organizes table-
| top wargaming rules/profiles into machine readable form. Some of
| these games have hundreds-to-thousands of units and special
| rules, so it's quite impressive what emerges.
|
| [1] https://github.com/BSData
| chc4 wrote:
| - Programming Language dev: I think compilers and VM runtimes are
| neat, and like talking to people in the space on twitter or
| reading new papers that come out about it. The
| /r/ProgrammingLanguage discord server is a great place to hang
| out, with lots of interesting and competent people working on
| sideprojects simply because they like the topic.
|
| - Urbit: I got into Urbit years ago, and still think it's really
| interesting as a Lisp-machine-alt-timeline-esque project. The
| goal is basically trying to think how the world would look if
| your entire OS was built on a runtime that uses cons cells and
| bignums everywhere for values, with a single transparently
| persistent state a la KeyKOS, and everything has typed RPC and
| P2P apps were the default.
| tluyben2 wrote:
| Programming languages here as well. I am working on 2 at the
| same time currently (and I made many before); one of them I am
| trying to have done befor 1 dec to do AoC22 with. I believe I
| can make that.
| trh0awayman wrote:
| Do you actually use Urbit? I just tried it recently and found
| it insanely buggy and slow (the most basic things didn't work,
| attempting to join certain chatrooms hung forever, etc.)
| Wondering what I did wrong or if it's that way for everyone
| chc4 wrote:
| I do use it. I'm in a few different chatrooms with friends
| that have decent traffic, including the general "hoon
| programming help" groups that have higher traffic.
|
| It is pretty slow, both because it's a decentralized chat and
| thus things are hosted on normal peoples' home connections
| across the world, and also just because Urbit the actual
| binary isn't very well optimized. It's good enough for me,
| and I don't really expect it to be as good as Discord. I
| haven't actually hit any bugs in quite a while, actually.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Hm I just started playing around with it recently and had no
| trouble joining groups and downloading apps. I'm only running
| a comet and not a planet.
| meadhbh-hamrick wrote:
| Meh. Urbit. That's not a weird technical scene, that's a
| lightning-rod for arguments about code of conduct at
| conferences and whether you're a fan of Bergson / Popper-esque
| Open Societies [cf. "The Open Society and Its Enemies" and "The
| Two Sources of Morality and Religion" vs. J. S. Mill "On
| Liberty"]
| sph wrote:
| > that's a lightning-rod for argument
|
| Then you must be the lightning itself, creating an account to
| ionise and electrically charge the thread I guess.
| dcow wrote:
| No, really, it's not political. But haters love to make it
| about politics because they can't rebut it technically.
|
| Technically it's a very interesting and valuable project. And
| there are many normal well adjusted humans beings working on
| it. It's a shame people want it smeared out of existence
| because a Berkeley grad who no longer has anything to do with
| the project has weird political fantasies that some people
| don't like. People really seem to struggle to separate the
| two. Makes it feel deliberate.
| boole1854 wrote:
| > that's a lightning-rod for arguments about code of conduct
| at conferences and whether you're a fan of Bergson / Popper-
| esque Open Societies [cf. "The Open Society and Its Enemies"
| and "The Two Sources of Morality and Religion" vs. J. S. Mill
| "On Liberty"]
|
| I'm out of the loop but intrigued.
|
| Can you explain what the controversy is? In what way are
| Bergson / Popper and Mill said to disagreed and what does it
| have to do with (Urbit?) conference codes of conduct?
| sph wrote:
| There's a nice search feature at the bottom of the main
| page. There are dozen of Urbit threads that go the same
| direction.
| guyrap wrote:
| Databending. Which is applying random noise to a file in order to
| generate something that still decodes well, but has some
| weird/cool glitch. I went to a workshop about this in some
| underground club that no longer operates; still thinking about it
| and toying around from time to time. This was waaaay before
| Dall-E et al. were cool ways to generate quasi-crappy images.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Databending
| gfd wrote:
| Competitive programming!
|
| 20k+ contestants per contest, around 1-2 times per week:
| https://codeforces.com/contests
|
| In terms of "scene", there are exclusive discord channels that
| you can only join if you have above a certain rating (usually
| candidate masters and above). Probably the highest average IQ
| community that I'm part of and they discuss stuff beyond
| competitive programming.
| adamredwoods wrote:
| I'm fond of any scene that minimizes code:
|
| https://js13kgames.com/
|
| https://js10k.com/
|
| (gone) https://the5k.org/
|
| http://www.message.sk/web4096/
|
| https://js1024.fun/
|
| https://js1k.com/2019-x/
|
| websites: https://1kb.club/
|
| https://aem1k.com/world/
|
| https://jeremiepat.github.io/svg1k
|
| (256b) http://wildmag.de/compo/
|
| (140 characters) https://www.dwitter.net/
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/tinycode/
| jcims wrote:
| This is one where I'm just a happy spectator. For some reason I
| have no desire to try to do it myself but sit in slackjawed
| amazement at what others can do.
| a-priori wrote:
| My scene is hobby operating system development, where you build
| an operating system usually for x86 / x86-64 PCs from scratch
| booting either from the BIOS, or UEFI, and then going from there.
| Common languages to use are C, C++ or (recently and my personal
| favourite) Rust.
|
| Personally I'm currently working on an AHCI storage driver (i.e,
| for talking to SATA drives) for my operating system.
|
| There's a lot of information out there, especially at
| https://wiki.osdev.org/ about how to get code booting, and about
| lots of the basic hardware works. There's also places like
| https://www.reddit.com/r/osdev/ for asking people for help.
| zh3 wrote:
| Laser galvo's. Fast flicking mirrors drawing patterns on the
| walls and ceiling. Use a UV laser and draw crazy glowing shapes
| on luminous paint (ever shone a UV laser at something luminous?)
| phkahler wrote:
| I've wanted in for a long time. I think it would be cool to add
| export to synfig studio or even blender to make animations.
| levymetal wrote:
| I wouldn't say I'm part of the community, but I'm certainly a fan
| of ZZT. A text-based game engine developed in 1991 by Tim Sweeney
| which still has a community going and new games being released to
| this day. I was able to make my way around it a 14 year old kid,
| which says a lot about its accessibility.
|
| https://zzt.org / https://museumofzzt.com
| vax425 wrote:
| I'm in the SaaS Founders community on IndieHackers, Crunchbase,
| and Kernal.
| Torwald wrote:
| https://www.demoscene.info/
|
| (used to be active there, in the demoscene)
| thot_experiment wrote:
| https://www.pouet.net/ also for those unfamiliar
| sedatk wrote:
| Demoscene on 8-bit machines. People are still creating crazy
| demos on 40 year old computers like Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, or
| Sinclair Spectrum. Demoscene on modern PCs are active too, but
| not as interesting or mind-blowing as people rotating filled
| cubes at 50fps on a C64.
|
| Since those machines have fixed configurations, it's easier to
| assess the level of technical achievements.
|
| Yesterday, I watched a C64 demo on Youtube that featured Donald
| Trump's face[1]. It's such a fantastic cross-over of 40 year old
| tech with memes of 2020's. I find it fascinating.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsXB7F0lQwY
| itsamy wrote:
| Where is the demoscene community active these days?
| vitaflo wrote:
| Pouet or Demozoo are probably your best bet.
| yboris wrote:
| I loved _LiteStep_ - an alternative shell for Windows. It could
| make the desktop experience so nice - so custom.
|
| I created a bunch of themes for it:
| https://www.deviantart.com/yboris/gallery/12368848/litestep
| nathanvanfleet wrote:
| Synths I was building synthesizers for a time, most of them used
| chips from old computers like Commodore 64 or some FM chip from
| an old PC audio card that I can't quite remember. I haven't had
| time for that in a long while.
|
| http://www.midibox.org/
|
| Coffee I guess some things around coffee and espresso machines
| specifically. Depth-wise I had rebuilt some commercial machines
| but also just being in the forum and seeing other people's
| rebuilds. I wrote some software for a prosumer espresso machine
| that had it operating with a PID and was activating /
| deactivating and even had a super simple API with an iOS app
| (That was never submitted to the store). One day I'd like to get
| access to some specific old 80s-90s espresso machine that I could
| rework and upgrade with different stuff but not so much on the
| horizon due to rareness.
|
| Plants I have a few hundred succulent plants of various types.
| Beyond collecting, attending meetups etc I've also grown from
| seed, grafted plants etc as well which is fun but I have limited
| space. I think one of the major things in the "scene" is to
| actually visit places like Mexico or Madagascar (random examples)
| in remote areas that have plants growing naturally. One day maybe
| I will have adequate space to do a lot more breeding and growing,
| there are some people in SF who are at the meetups who are a lot
| more into it (some professionally) doing cross breeding and all
| sorts of things or have encyclopedic knowledge.
|
| AI images Very superficial but AI image generation is really
| interesting to me. Does playing around and joining subreddits
| count? My knowledge doesn't pass muster on this one lol
| abetusk wrote:
| NFT generative art "scene" on fxhash [0]. There's some great art,
| articles and people there and on twitter [1]. There are problems,
| as with any community, but, in my opinion, "web3" at it's finest.
|
| [0] https://www.fxhash.xyz/
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/fx_hash_
|
| [2] https://twitter.com/fxhashdrops
| CM30 wrote:
| Definitely various video game ROM hacking scenes. My personal
| expertise is in the one for Super Mario World, where I've been
| teaching myself 65c816 to code custom enemies and objects for my
| current project, but I've also been monitoring the goings on in
| the communities for:
|
| - Super Mario 64 - Super Mario 64 DS - Super Mario Sunshine - New
| Super Mario Bros 2 - Luigi's Mansion - Mario Kart Double Dash -
| Wario Land 4
|
| And a fair few other games too.
| lbrito wrote:
| I like to try to run things on Android.
|
| Briefly on HN frontpage: Repurposing an old Android phone as a
| web server https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31841051
| butz wrote:
| Not a weird one, but I like contributing to OpenStreetMap.org
| once in a while.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| I'm a big fan of distributed systems (papers and implementations)
| and alternate networks. Fun projects that are active right now:
|
| - Usenet (yes, it's still alive!)
|
| - NNCP (friend-to-friend e2e encrypted network, doesn't need IP,
| can be airgapped)
|
| - Yggdrasil (an IPv6 overlay mesh network)
|
| - Retroshare (friend-to-friend P2P encrypted network with Chat,
| Messaging, and filesharing, and more)
|
| - Urbit (weird, distributed computation network)
|
| - Secure Scuttlebutt (P2P gossip-oriented network w/ crypto
| signatures)
|
| - Gemini (simpler version of the Web, document-oriented)
|
| There are definitely more projects out there but these are
| projects I play around with and enjoy using.
| myself248 wrote:
| Oh thank you, this dovetails perfectly into the
| offline/airgapped thread elsewhere on this page. I think of SSB
| and NNCP as related in that they both work with sporadically-
| connected nodes.
| Loughla wrote:
| It's not technology, but it is a super niche technical group of
| people.
|
| Restoring antique and vintage woodworking equipment. Like
| pre-1920's if possible. There are no manuals, most of the
| companies are out of business, and there are very few resources
| available. There are websites like oldwoodworkingmachines and
| oldwoodworkersforum but, mostly it's trial and error. It requires
| a super keen eye for detail, and when you're missing parts you
| have to be really good at deductive reasoning.
|
| One of my proudest moments was when I completely restored a hand-
| cranked drill press for a family. They had memories of their
| grandpa using it to build the family home. It was amazing to
| watch their faces as I showed them the bright brass and walnut it
| would've originally been decorated with. When I started it was a
| box of parts that were mostly just scrap cast-iron. I had to
| learn how to sand cast to re-make pieces!
|
| I've posted about it elsewhere on here, but right now I'm
| restoring a 24" J.T. Towsley jointer. I'll be done in the next
| week or two, and can't wait to run some lumber through it. (that
| being said, I will have to sell it to pay for some medical bills,
| if anyone is interested in it). I learned on this site that the
| editor of popular woodworking is actually doing that right now as
| well. I reached out to him, and was able to provide some
| technical drawings for a bearing block that his was missing. So
| that was neat.
|
| That's probably what i like the most about that community - it's
| an actual community. I was restoring a 60's PowerMatic drill
| press for a neighbor, and posted about the original column
| length, since the one I had was converted to a tabletop. One of
| the guys on the old machines forum actually PM'd me, and drove to
| my house to give me one! It was amazing.
| apocalyptic0n3 wrote:
| I haven't been part of the scene since about 2011, but I've
| always been extremely proud and fond of my contributions to the
| iPod and Mac Customization communities. I was a designer back in
| those days so my coding contributions were minimal, but those
| communities were the best around.
|
| I was involved in the iPodWizard project and was one of the
| people soft-bricking their iPods to discover what substrings of
| the Hex firmware did what so we could modify them and then build
| custom themes, change strings, and in a few cases even add new
| functionality. I also contributed my fair share of custom themes,
| particularly the themes that would turn the grayscale iPod 4G
| into something more similar to the iPod Video theme (we had 4
| colors to make gradients out of; was more fun than it sounds)
|
| I also contributed design and testing to the iPod Linux and iPod
| Wiki projects, and testing on the Rockbox project.
|
| On the Mac side of things, I was a mod of MacThemes for a long
| time, contributed my fair share of themes and icons, and was a
| beta tester for Candybar for a long time. My biggest contribution
| was probably tearing apart and documenting how to customize
| iTunes on Mac. I got it to a point where I was able to restore
| 90% of the old iTunes after a much-loathed redesign. My
| documentation also resulted in a spike in interest and new themes
| being created for the first time in a few years. It was really
| exciting seeing the frankly stupid amount of work I put into that
| pay off within the community.
| whateveracct wrote:
| Super Smash Bros Melee modding. People have fixed bugs in subtle
| parts of the logic (e.g. input polling occasionally drops
| frames). They've also made entirely new training modes and added
| visualizations for various mechanics.
|
| Oh, and they've added in-game rollback netplay using a Dolphin
| fork :)
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| > Oh, and they've added in-game rollback netplay using a
| Dolphin fork :)
|
| Holy smokes!
| kettunen wrote:
| Demoscene, especially Amiga
| vyrotek wrote:
| Hmm, I think I consider FRC (FIRST Robotics Competitions) a weird
| and unique tech scene. Not tiny, but yet not a lot of people know
| about it still.
|
| https://www.firstinspires.org/robotics/frc
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| Information security incidence response, blue team mostly... It's
| been a stressful past decade or so getting phone calls when they
| know we're going to be dealing with stuff the next day (Such as
| last night at around 10pm right as I was getting to bed), but on
| the flipside I've kind of developed a very thick skin for these
| types of things and it's kind of the most multidisciplinary thing
| I could imagine doing in anything in information technology as
| you have to know such a broad range of things (Networking,
| programming, sysadmin, scripting for windows and *nix, huge gamut
| of knowledge breadth for mastery in this field). Was just
| discussing with my partners how you just have to kind of enter a
| zen mode of realizing someone's trying to mess with you
| personally and get into the fight on a level where they don't get
| the upper hand, it's very much as close as you can get to
| properly fighting people on the internet, and I like being good
| at that.
| elihu wrote:
| Modular synthesizers. Electric vehicle conversions. The
| intersection of musical instrument construction with just
| intonation and other alternative tuning systems.
| jcpst wrote:
| Woah- I am not alone on this. I have a dotcom modular system,
| did JI tuning research in college, and dream of buying a patina
| vehicle from the fuel crisis era and converting it to EV.
| elihu wrote:
| I'm working on converting a Mazda RX-8.
| julianeon wrote:
| Firefox phone was a great way to make simple JS/HTML/CSS mobile
| apps, while it lasted. I loved it & made many.
| chunk_waffle wrote:
| ME TOO, it sucks that KaiOS has turned it into an ad machine...
| butz wrote:
| Why not continue this with PWA apps for current devices?
| julianeon wrote:
| That's a good idea. I'll look into this.
| nahumfarchi wrote:
| Generative art (fxhash specifically)
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| - Systems that work offline. Partly for practical reasons due to
| my background working in Agtech companies, as well as logistics
| in developing countries. But also it's just technically and
| socially fascinating. How do you detect conflicts? How do you
| decide what one is? To what extent - if any - can it be resolved
| automatically? Revisions, event sourcing, CRDTs... there's no one
| size fits all industry solution and not enough people to take it
| seriously. (Friendly request - if it's been a problem for you in
| your industry, drop me a line. I sometimes think I should niche
| down in it, but wonder if it's too obscure).
|
| - Frontend JS minimalism. Any stories about people ditching
| transpilers, build tools etc appeals to me immensely. My spicy
| take is that React is not an abstraction above the DOM, it's an
| abstraction parallel to it.
|
| - Concatenative langauges. Less Forth and more Joy[0]. I just
| feel like there's something here, and the idea will not die until
| it catches on. The amount of concatenative language interpreters
| I've abandoned is a bit embarassing.
|
| [0] https://hypercubed.github.io/joy/joy.html
| munificent wrote:
| _> The amount of concatenative language interpreters I 've
| abandoned is a bit embarassing._
|
| Earlier this week, I watched an excellent talk by Devine Lu
| Linvega where he was doing a bunch of digging into minimal
| programming languages. He spent a lot of time looking into
| Forth and other concatenative languages and he said he found a
| lot of implementations of the languages, but very little code
| written in them. It was as if soon as the implementers actually
| tried to _use_ the thing they created, they gave up.
|
| So your experience isn't unique. I've also written a couple of
| concatenative languages and quickly abandoned them after trying
| to write more than toy programs and realizing I wasn't smart
| enough to reason about the stack in my head.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| https://github.com/LAC-Tech/new-wave/blob/master/type.ml
|
| Looks like my last attempt failed when I got bogged down
| prototyping a type system in Ocaml then trying to port that
| to Zig.
|
| So in my case - it's not because I use them and they suck,
| it's because I find stuff like implementing type systems and
| GC very hard, and usually more practical things start wanting
| my attention more.
| harryvederci wrote:
| > I watched an excellent talk by Devine Lu Linvega where he
| was doing a bunch of digging into minimal programming
| languages.
|
| Do you have a source of this video?
| Balooga wrote:
| https://vimeo.com/771406693#t=85m30s
|
| Handmade Seattle 2022, Day One. Around ~1h25min in. I
| assume this is the video.
| whtrbt wrote:
| https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1654475429 just over 36 mins
| in.
| btheshoe wrote:
| > My spicy take is that React is not an abstraction above the
| DOM, it's an abstraction parallel to it.
|
| Why do you think this? Would be interested to hear the
| reasoning behind the take.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| Well, as reactionaries love to tell us, it's a library and
| not a framework.
|
| Great, we already have a library for that - it's called the
| DOM.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I'm all for reactive programming, and
| even templated views. But reacts approach of hiding
| everything under the rug rather than having a clear "here's
| where the state changes" and "Here's we we render" divide
| always struck me as the worst of both worlds.
| meadhbh-hamrick wrote:
| I'm a fan of FORTH, but absolutely second your motion that Joy
| is worth investigating. It has a FORTH "feel" but feels like
| you can more easily do more advanced things with it.
| wrycoder wrote:
| Joy appears even more "write-only" than Forth.
|
| Half the skill in the art of programming is choosing good
| names, but Joy lacks names for arguments and locals.
|
| Otherwise, it looks interesting. But, I think I'll stick to
| lisp.
| grepLeigh wrote:
| Where do you go to chat with offline / air-gapped systems
| enthusiasts?
|
| I've been obsessed with machine learning for embedded systems
| for years! So many practices around ML assume constant network
| connection and/or that your service runs in a data-center. I'm
| an ex-SRE and love building reliable offline computer vision
| things!
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| The NNCP Matrix/IRC rooms have folks interested in offline /
| air-gapped systems.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| _Where do you go to chat with offline / air-gapped systems
| enthusiasts?_
|
| Nowhere. Should we start something? :)
| csben wrote:
| I've joined the discord server advertised by grepLeigh in
| another comment.
| grepLeigh wrote:
| I'm in! I run a small Discord server for 3D printer
| enthusiasts (I'm building a a closed-loop monitoring system
| for 3D printers). A section for offline systems in general
| would be easy for me to add. Invite link:
| https://discord.gg/sf23bk2hPr
|
| I'm open to wherever people naturally gather though. IRC,
| maybe?
|
| Another community you might like: https://www.tinyml.org/
| myself248 wrote:
| I share this interest!
|
| I feel like a lot of ham radio networking is still
| "offline" from an internet perspective; you may have a LAN
| or even a WAN but no connection to root DNS or certificate
| servers or whatever. This tickles my fancy:
| https://blog.thelifeofkenneth.com/2018/01/off-grid-
| raspbian-...
|
| I feel like /r/darknetplan is tangentially related, but not
| quite what I'm looking for.
|
| I've been playing with Internet-in-a-box, which is
| precisely wrong about its name; it's an offline repository
| of content that was developed on the internet.
|
| Someday I'd like to marry that with my Othernet receiver,
| which is a similar offline-hotspot-of-content but keeps
| that content updated by receiving a satellite data stream.
| (One-way only.)
|
| Piratebox seems to be a dead project by that name, but I
| like the idea. A local file repo and possibly bulletin-
| board for use by folks within range of the box.
|
| Yes, yes, yes, where do we go to chat?
| wwilim wrote:
| > Where do you go to chat with offline / air-gapped systems
| enthusiasts?
|
| Presumably not online
| rengler33 wrote:
| I'm interested in these offline systems in the agtech space.
| What kinds of use cases exist here? I'd love to be involved in
| agtech if I thought it could have a positive impact on soil
| health.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| Can't speak much to the soil health side of things - though I
| know there's quite a few companies doing that.
|
| I was mainly involved in the logistics side of things -
| moving & tracing livestock, fruit. Long and the short of it
| most people, solutions and systems just assume always-on
| internet, which as you can imagine in remote regions is not a
| reality (even if it's a reality within range of the farmhouse
| router with starlink, the front gate could be miles away).
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Interesting. Having some friends who write
| software/hardware for factories, always-on connectivity is
| definitely not an assumption. I had assumed it would be the
| same for AgTech but sounds like I'm wrong. What are some of
| the biggest pain points you've encountered?
| soulofmischief wrote:
| itsamy wrote:
| EVM optimization challenges posted on Twitter (Ethereum Virtual
| Machine)
| muhammadusman wrote:
| Ok maybe not too weird but I've been a keyboard enthusiast for
| almost a decade now and earlier this year I started on a quest to
| collect as many keyboards in one place as possible to make it
| easier for newcomers to the hobby to easily find a keyboard (very
| much in progress still but making steady progress as a hobby
| project). I created a website called BoardSearch
| (https://boardsearch.io).
|
| So far, I've learned a lot about just how varying keyboarding
| building/collecting can be, and this makes building the data
| models for what a keyboard is/can include pretty complex. Some
| people go deep into the hobby building a keyboard by soldering
| the switches and others a little higher level like putting
| together keycaps and switches on a hotswap PCB. It's definitely a
| hobby that you can waste/spend a lot of money on but keyboards
| are fun!
| jodrellblank wrote:
| http://www.tifaq.org/keyboards.html has done this for
| alternative keyboards (see the Contents sections on the left)
| for contoured, split, ergonomic, chording, and so on. Bit dated
| now, but still interesting.
| indrora wrote:
| Very dated.
|
| I help maintain on occasion the /r/mechanicalkeyboard wiki
| entry for Ergonomic keyboard buying suggestions. After using
| an Ergodox for five years now, I can hands down say that this
| is one of the best choices I made for myself, but not that
| anyone should make based only on my recommendations.
| houtanb wrote:
| For anyone else who's potentially interested in this, I found
| https://www.reddit.com/r/ErgoMechKeyboards/ to be really useful
| in my foray into building keyboards. We spend so much time with
| keyboards, they might as well be customized to our needs :)
|
| I bought a kit for my first build https://choc.brianlow.com/
| and still think that was the right way to go, but some may
| prefer to start out with pre-built keyboards.
| kgwxd wrote:
| Atari 2600 programming. I haven't made anything useful myself
| yet, but I've been following the community very closely for a few
| years. There's tons of great new games being made all the time.
|
| - https://forums.atariage.com/forum/50-atari-2600-programming/
|
| - https://www.youtube.com/@ZeroPageHomebrew
| bravetraveler wrote:
| Probably somewhat common/obvious, the demo scene. The 64K intros
| were amazingly beautiful and _fast_ back in the day
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/64K_intro
|
| Inspired a lot of my early interest in computers
| kodah wrote:
| Not really weird anymore as there's a lot of entry level and
| cloud-based components for people to get into it with. My scene
| is the localized automation scene; basically home automation but
| with no cloud connected products.
| bdittmer wrote:
| This. Every couple months I disconnect the internet and walk
| around the house verifying all my "smart" home automation
| products still work. Sometimes I'll make a second pass with
| homeassistant (or a service dependency, e.g. zigbee2mqtt)
| shutdown to make sure I can still physically use things (like a
| dimmer switch).
| airbreather wrote:
| I don't understand why this is not more of a thing.
|
| I really don't like the idea of relying on offsite resources
| for automation, but it seems to be 99% of what goes on in home
| automation.
| coreyp_1 wrote:
| I detest cloud-based components, and have built my entire
| network on HA/Zigbee devices. I have a few Z-wave (because the
| devices weren't available in Zigbee), but I hate them because
| they constantly need to be re-synced.
|
| I wanted to add a Christmas light display this year (I bought
| all of the necessary individually-addressable LED strips last
| year), but I just haven't had time to work on it. One day...
| dreadnaut wrote:
| I run a 22yo online competition for a 32yo DOS racing game:
| Stunts, or 4D Sports Driving in some countries. The competition
| has spawned a long-lived community which includes reverse
| engineering, game patches, new cars, alternative engines, a few
| world meetings, and multiple other competitions.
|
| - https://zak.stunts.hu
|
| - https://wiki.stunts.hu/wiki/Custom_cars
|
| - https://forum.stunts.hu/index.php?board=90.0&label=stunts-re...
|
| - https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/the-remarkable-community-ar...
| sixtram wrote:
| Stunts was one my favourite games around 93-95, I played it a
| lot. Another guy from Hungary.
| golergka wrote:
| It was my first computer game back in the early 90s! I wish I
| knew there were competitions around it.
| meadhbh-hamrick wrote:
| I sometimes write COBOL programs for fun. Seriously... one of the
| things COBOL used to require and still strongly encourages is to
| declare record types before procedures (the Data Division is
| before the Procedure Division). There's a Fred Brooks quote that
| goes: "Show me your flowcharts and conceal your
| tables, and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your
| tables, and I won't usually need your flowcharts; they'll
| be obvious."
|
| And Peter Naur (of (E)BNF fame) suggests using the term
| "Dataology" instead of "Computer Science."
|
| But COBOL isn't a great systems programming language. It's made
| for applications. So I sometimes re-write simple C or C++
| routines / structs in COBOL to see if they're more understandable
| and where the dividing line between app-focused languages and
| system-focused languages exists.
| pharmakom wrote:
| Sounds like functional domain driven design
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