Hacker News: artemonster

New comment by artemonster in "CPPL: A Circuit Prompt Programming Language"

artemonster — Mon, 25 May 2026 20:45:47 +0000

> RTL is not code

>>Of course it is.

most programming languages have that one serious key property that Ive mentioned above - ABSTRACTION. you can well reason about a function that calls another function addTheseTwoStranegObjectsTogether(arg, arg2) and make totally valid assumptions on how and what would happen. "executing" that code is a depth first call graph walk, pretty linear one too. You cannot do these things by reading RTL code, the state space is enormous, there is no "unusual machine" that executes it (if you mean simulators, thats a different thing). also you cannot reason even about simplest instances since they are stateful and that is in no way is exposed via interface connections

>AI is advancing so quickly though, I bet it will be pretty good in a few years.

Time will tell :) Cheers

New comment by artemonster in "CPPL: A Circuit Prompt Programming Language"

artemonster — Mon, 25 May 2026 20:21:18 +0000

The very first sentence: "Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in register-transfer level (RTL) design automation" I want to see some serious proof for this shitty claim. While LLMs excel at slop webapp codegen because the code is usually highly modular, composable and easy to reason about), LLMs understanding of RTL is just pure dogshit. A simple signaling protocol, even well documented with some temporal behaviour and even some ready made assertions that are picked up by formal verification tools for static proving - none of this helps any top tier LLM to grok whats happening. state explosion, temporal dependencies, no composition - RTL is not code, its construction for complex machinery and LLM suck balls at it. and all of this will not go away if you slop into existence some low quality DSL for netlists

New comment by artemonster in "Aperio Lang"

artemonster — Fri, 15 May 2026 18:52:53 +0000

Good catch! You want me to rewrite the paragraph to sound less like an LLM? (sigh)

New comment by artemonster in "I love Linux, but I can't quit Windows"

artemonster — Fri, 15 May 2026 16:48:54 +0000

this resonates with my experience. once every 3 years I try linux as primary OS for my home PC, I do small stuff with C/python, browse web and play factorio. I use linux in VM on my job daily, so I am not a beginner, but gosh, linux sucks. Everything breaks constantly even when doing NOTHING. Nothing ever works installing first try, you always end up googling stupid error message and stumble upon 250 other idiots that try to solve same issue. after trying 5 solutions, one (or combo) will hopefully work. Then, you can hang-up entire system by a stupid python script or your own buggy program and I miss unkillable always working task manager that can recover almost every hanger (and just stfu about reisub) without needing to restart the whole system and killing my FKIN FLOW! ugh. I just use WSL2 for rare cases where I need my unix build tools and forever abandoned the idea of switching to linux. Life is too short wasting it on googling some nonsense shit that just have to fucking work.

New comment by artemonster in "Statecharts: hierarchical state machines"

artemonster — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 17:30:22 +0000

Is there any research in composing state machines?

New comment by artemonster in "Claude Opus 4.7"

artemonster — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 15:29:45 +0000

All fine, where is pelican on bicycle?

New comment by artemonster in "Visualizing CPU Pipelining (2024)"

artemonster — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 20:02:43 +0000

I am always puzzled by such articles - its actually very well made, drawings are good, little interactive pipeline animations are fine. But in order to follow it you must already know and understand what its writeen about and if you dont - the content is just noise for you.

New comment by artemonster in "Second Revision of 6502 Laptop"

artemonster — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 18:15:37 +0000

nah, something like LLMs wouldnt be possible due to sheer power consumption - abstract (FL)OPs/uW is billions worse than modern tech. I used claude to make me back of a napkin calcs - single LLM prompt in 6502 era tech would be over 3k Eur vs fraction of a cent today, DISRECARDING WALL TIME (which is ridiculously impractical)

New comment by artemonster in "Second Revision of 6502 Laptop"

artemonster — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 09:32:35 +0000

Imagine in steampunk fashion wed get an alternative future timeline where computer tech froze in 80s due to some physical limitation that prohibited shrinking transistors. all typical laptops would have same config as this awesome project. what would the society become?

New comment by artemonster in "VHDL's Crown Jewel"

artemonster — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 16:37:33 +0000

Ofc blocking assign is used too and even it that always_comb case scheduler splits eval/assign into 2 phases!

New comment by artemonster in "VHDL's Crown Jewel"

artemonster — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 15:02:29 +0000

dont know if trolling. SR latch you can do with 2 NANDs, or NORs there are plenty of *digital* circuits with that functionality, and yes, there are very rare cases when you construct this out of logic and not use a library cell for this. pulse circuit is AND(not(not(not(a))),a) also rarely used but used nonetheless. to properly model/simulate them you would need delta cycles

New comment by artemonster in "VHDL's Crown Jewel"

artemonster — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 07:32:57 +0000

Please stop bickering about verilog vs vhdl - if you use NBAs the scheduler works exactly the same in modern day simulators. There is no crown jewel in vhdl anymore. Also type system is annoying. Its just in your way, not helping at all.

New comment by artemonster in "VHDL's Crown Jewel"

artemonster — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 07:13:03 +0000

Draw yourself an SR latch and try simulating. Or a circuit what is known as „pulse generator“

New comment by artemonster in "Electron microscopy shows ‘mouse bite’ defects in semiconductors"

artemonster — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 08:26:52 +0000

New proc step : Cheese Vapor Deposition

New comment by artemonster in "Write up of my homebrew CPU build"

artemonster — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 08:19:06 +0000

I always applaud homebrew cpu designs but after doing so many myself I would reaaaaly advice to stay away from dip chips/breadboards/wirewraps and any attempts to put it into real physical world. Taking a build out of a logisim/verilog to real world in chips sucks away all the fun about cpu design - suddenly you have to deal with invisible issues like timing, glitchy half-dead chip, bad wire connection, etc. these are not challenges, just mundane dull work. The only exception to „stay in the sim“ rule is if you want to make an „art statement“, i.e. like BMOW (or my relay cpu https://github.com/artemonster/relay-cpu/blob/main/images/fr... /shamelessplug)

New comment by artemonster in "The dead Internet is not a theory anymore"

artemonster — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 20:45:20 +0000

optional de-centralized hosting, unified cryptocurrency as payment tokens, single open LLM as summary and search-indexing tool, specialized toolkits for journals and social networks (livejournal, early twitter, early fb). Most importantly: you can post anonymously where its allowed (there could be areas where it can be disallowed entirely, like a public square), but your account will take the punishment, so no edgy shitposting behind throwaways.

New comment by artemonster in "The dead Internet is not a theory anymore"

artemonster — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 20:39:56 +0000

I think next step will be an isolated version of invite-only internet where you have to be physically present with your invitee to give them access. There will be a beautiful navigation widget where you can access a unified "addon" to any page: community moderated comment section, version history of that page, backlinks, carefully curated "related" section(so that you can continue browsing beautiful human written content on 1910 era steam locomotives, similar to 90s era webrings), donate button so that you can support he author and much more! Oh, the dream

New comment by artemonster in "Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans."

artemonster — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 20:29:55 +0000

I find it interesting that we havent invented a democratic version of policing a rule system. HN is dang, and he is dictator and guardian of these rules, basically. If you replace them with some typical reddit mod HN dies. If you spread out this role to some democratically elected mods via karma system this will fall apart just as quick as StackOverflow did, so, also HN dies.

New comment by artemonster in "On the Design of Programming Languages (1974) [pdf]"

artemonster — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 19:22:49 +0000

If you really have followed the research in type systems and see how it *factually* intersects with practical reality you wouldnt joke about it. Its a bizzare nonsense what they do in „research“ and sane implementations (only slightly grounded in formalisms) are actually used

New comment by artemonster in "On the Design of Programming Languages (1974) [pdf]"

artemonster — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 19:20:12 +0000

Your critique is valid, but I am not in a mood to prove myself to anons on the internet :)