It was unintentional, but Ken Thompson being Ken Thompson, can't be 100% sure.

* Learn low-level details of a basic but real-world CPU

* Practice the brain gymnastic of programming an atypical Turing-complete computer

Your created new connections in your brain, put to use some of the old established connections. Having a machine spit-out the emulator would rob you of all that. Like, you can drive from A to B, but running for A to B can do you much good.

I am curious about what results would be for something like a lexer + parser + abstract machine code generator generation for a made up language

And then, while the tech is not mature, running on delusion and sunken costs, it's actually used for production stuffs. Butlerian Jihad when

Cellular automata where the update rule is a perceptron coupled with a isotropic diffusion. The weights of the neural network are optimized so that the cellular automata can draw a picture, with self-healing (ie. rebuild the picture when perturbed).

Back then, auto-differentiation was not as accessible as it is now, so the weights where optimized with an Evolution Strategy. Of course, using gradient descent is likely to be way better.

Posture muscles are not very well known in the general public. Loss of strength due to aging and sedentary lifestyle makes standing, seating, etc uncomfortable.

A nice interface is agreable, but maybe there are diminishing returns when you pay it with large compile time. I remember pondering about that when working with the Eigen math library, which is very nice but such a resource hog when you compile a project using it.

Be warned, zero documentation, because things are at larval stage and change often. Will include a couple of demos this week.

In the spirit, yes, but targeting different hardware, public, and environments.

* It runs on Linux, Mac, Windows. Bare metal on rp2040 and rp2350 is planned.

* It written in C, build with Make.

* It is meant to run on something like a Raspberry Pi, Latte Panda, etc

* A setup is a text file, no fancy UI.

* The plan for live parameter fiddling will be a web server. Web UI will be tailored to each setup, no one size fits all UI. Typically I pay someone to do the UI.

* For now, it's only video, no sound output

It will be used for several large interactive LED displays and object tracking systems. It's a way for me to factories all those projects I was contracted for.

Say, plug a camera, and it will blend two videos streams using a silhouette detected on the camera, with various effects. It's very, very early, pre-alpha stuff, but it already was used for a demo by a customer.

GitHub pestacle, be warned, it's undocumented and larval stage

It's using the Sun as a (gravity) lens, with probes at the focal point to gather the image. Because it's a very large lens, that's allow to have a massive zoom on whatever object we are interested in.

Very good at giving a textbook answer ("give a Python/ Numpy function that returns the Voronoi diagram of set of 2d points").

Now, I ask for the Laguerre diagram, a variation that is not mentioned in textbooks, but very useful in practice. I can spend a lot of time spoon-feeding the answer, I just have the bullshiting student answers.

I tried other problems like numerical approximation, physics simulation, same experience.

I don't get the hype. Maybe it's good at giving variations of glue code ie. Stack Overflow meet autocomplete ? As a search tool it's bad because it's so confidently incorrect, you may be fooled by bad answers.

I am using Freecad for Actual Real Things. I learned to work around the topological naming issue, but it cost me time, and it can make parametric models quite brittle (ie. a minor change can break the model).

For real, because I am way more productive with FreeCAD. FreeCAD allows to work in term of topological features like surfaces, edges, etc which is, in practice, very cumbersome with OpenSCAD.