if you add beam search and custom scoring rules to a markov chain text generator, you can do some pretty fun things. like enforcing alliteration, limiting word length, and adding a bunch of adverbs (corpus is Frankenstein, output limited to twenty tokens, ngram length of 3)
opens the hood of your laptop welp i see your problem. you got transistors in here. lil electric switches. maybe billions of 'em. not much i can do for you
testing out a bit of code to display text on the gameboy by rendering 3px x 8px characters to VRAM tile data and tile maps, as needed at runtime. I like that the density of this allows more information on screen, but i'm worried that in practice it would be difficult to read—both because of the small size on an actual hardware screen, and because of the letters that don't take well to being rendered at 3px width, like Ms and Ws
@eob gameboy has four shades of grey—i'm actually using these a little in the screenshot for antialiasing and to try to make M/W/m/w/u/v etc more distinctive
!!Con has consistently been one of the weirdest and most fun tech(-adjacent) conferences out there for a while, and their call for talks is open for their 12th and final(!) gathering later this summer in Santa Cruz. consider submitting something! https://bangbangcon.com/give-a-talk.html (talks are ten minutes long, must have something to do with computing, should be about something you think is neat, and need to have an exclamation mark in the title)
(i'm not big on promoting in-person events lately, on account of covid risk, BUT the !!con organizers are holding the conference outdoors this year and will have other covid mitigation strategies in place, with potential virtual attendance options for speakers)
the first assembly-like language i've ever seriously tried to learn is rp2040 PIO (two registers, no RAM access, no math, programs have max 32 instructions), and now that i'm picking up a bit of game boy assembly (z80-ish), everything i come across seems like a luxury. you mean i can just check if a bit in a register is set?! i can increment things?
made myself a simple little board today that has a few useful logic gates made from discrete bjt transistors (i found myself breadboarding the same gates over and over and thought i'd save future-me some trouble)
latest issue of Taper is gooood https://taper.badquar.to/12/index.html (online journal of literary web experiments, all of which are implemented in 2KB of html/css/javascript or less)
my bootleg gameboy cart lives!! sorta! i can flash a game on it and play it but only on the occasions when the rp2040 actually starts up... which seems to happen only randomly, like one out of twenty tries. but that is a problem for tomorrow allison; tonight allison is overjoyed that it works at all!
if anyone has ideas about the inconsistent power, i'd love advice! the schematic for the voltage regulator section is attached. the lm66200 is there so i'm never accidentally powering from both gameboy and USB; the regulator is a regular old 3.3v linear regulator. 3.3v goes to the rp2040, which has the normal decoupling cap setup. after power up, voltages on inputs/output are normal, but the rp2040 doesn't initialize. i suspect startup current draw is an issue?
getting close to v0.2 of this cart! changes include: open drain-compatible level shifter (should hopefully help w/a bunch of subtle bus contention problems); smaller footprint qspi flash; shorter battery clip and inset usb port (so it'll fit inside an unmodified cart shell, hopefully); and i added one more address line to both the parallel flash and sram (8MB flash is cheaper than 4MB, and 256KB sram is about the same price as 128KB... would be fairly easy to make this a multicart?!)
I'm teaching an experimental new class called "Human-scale Natural Language Processing" this summer (mid-June to mid-July) for the School of Poetic Computation https://sfpc.study/sessions/summer-24/human-scale-nlp it's being taught online, with two sections scheduled to (hopefully) be convenient for folks all over the planet. applications are due April 15th!
first version of my gameboy cart boards are back from fab and they're so pretty! unfortunately i won't have time to put one together and see if it even comes close to working until this weekend probably, boo
three years out from the Stochastic Parrots paper (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922) it's remarkable the extent to which LLM researchers and startups have seemingly used the paper's recommendations as a list of things to specifically not do