Hacker News: russdill

New comment by russdill in "I designed a nibble-oriented CPU in Verilog to build a scientific calculator"

russdill — Sat, 16 May 2026 01:05:18 +0000

Cool project

Really hoping that ghidra can add support for non-byte aligned memory regions some day. So many cool 4-bit architectures out there and attempting to shoehorn them into ghidra produces not great results

New comment by russdill in "I hate soldering"

russdill — Tue, 12 May 2026 07:20:01 +0000

The only place I've noticed a difference is for very large components with a lot of thermal mass.

New comment by russdill in "The Serial TTL connector we deserve"

russdill — Sun, 10 May 2026 04:27:54 +0000

I mean, sure there are still rough edges, but it's not like rs232 over Juliet is some widely supported standard.

There are Android apps that support serial over ble

New comment by russdill in "The Serial TTL connector we deserve"

russdill — Sun, 10 May 2026 01:08:37 +0000

Microcontrollers that support BLE are getting so cheap this really is becoming an option. Hopefully with some button that activates it.

New comment by russdill in "Humanoid Robot Actuators"

russdill — Mon, 04 May 2026 21:27:53 +0000

The first video I clicked was an ai generated human reading an ai generated script describing why pulleys are important.

New comment by russdill in "Humanoid Robot Actuators"

russdill — Mon, 04 May 2026 08:11:24 +0000

The YouTube channel linked is more of the same. Just the absolute worst slop

New comment by russdill in "Period tracking app has been yapping about your flow to Meta"

russdill — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 15:43:11 +0000

Seriously, we have a country where a large fraction of our ad spend is for services that promise to remove your private data from data brokers. We could literally just pass laws so companies could not do this.

New comment by russdill in "Air is full of DNA"

russdill — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 15:47:54 +0000

The world of the very small is a very strange place https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearing_polymorph

We can't make a certain HIV drug anymore because after 2 years, a lower energy crystal state formed, and that state isn't as effective. Now anytime we try to form synthesize the drug it finds a molecule of the lower energy crystal state which causes the crystal to also form in the lower energy state.

New comment by russdill in "The RAM shortage could last years"

russdill — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 02:07:40 +0000

Right, that's where the major push is right now. Not with shrinking down some code libraries.

New comment by russdill in "The RAM shortage could last years"

russdill — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 01:36:02 +0000

The demand is being driven by inference though. I really don't think there will be much motivation.

New comment by russdill in "Floating Point Fun on Cortex-M Processors"

russdill — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 04:57:46 +0000

There is overhead, and applications that don't use the FPU avoid that overhead. https://www.netbsd.org/docs/kernel/lazyfpu.html

New comment by russdill in "It's OK to compare floating-points for equality"

russdill — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 19:58:48 +0000

It would be very useful to be able to compare the significant directly then. I realize there is a boundary issue when a significant is very close to 0x00..000 or 0xFFF..FFF

New comment by russdill in "PCI Express over Fiber [video]"

russdill — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 19:03:33 +0000

There's a number of optical modules for TB3 and TB4, might be an easier (but less fun) route as TB3 and TB4 can carry PCIe.

New comment by russdill in "Codex Hacked a Samsung TV"

russdill — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 17:17:13 +0000

It's not a far step from having the firmware binaries and doing analysis with ghidra, etc.

New comment by russdill in "CRISPR takes important step toward silencing Down syndrome’s extra chromosome"

russdill — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:15:05 +0000

My understanding is that crispr is less like a scalpel and more like a chainsaw. Great care just be taken to avoid introducing cancer causing mutations.

New comment by russdill in "The Deepfake Nudes Crisis in Schools Is Worse Than You Thought"

russdill — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 19:47:00 +0000

https://x.com/paulisci/status/1575610379702796288 "A Brief History of Kids Today Are Too Rude"

New comment by russdill in "New Orleans's Car-Crash Conspiracy"

russdill — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 06:10:16 +0000

I'm not defending criminal activity here, but you seem to be completely brushing off the fact that unemployment among African Americans in New Orleans hit a peak of 52% in 2011.

New comment by russdill in "We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance computer code"

russdill — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 15:42:39 +0000

"popularly described" and how it's currently understood are two different things. Because it's hard to explain to lay people, it's popularly described in a number of simplified ways, but it's well understood.

New comment by russdill in "Wikipedia's AI agent row likely just the beginning of the bot-ocalypse"

russdill — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:05:03 +0000

I'm suspect that many of his responses here are written by AI.

New comment by russdill in "Wikipedia's AI agent row likely just the beginning of the bot-ocalypse"

russdill — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 21:32:11 +0000

Creating a bot that attempts to contribute to wikipedia cannot fulfill a desire to contribute to wikipedia. If you want to contribute to wikipedia, go contribute to wikipedia. Don't make a bot.

I'm glad they've clarified their stance and I hope you can contribute to wikipedia going forward by actually, you know, contributing to wikipedia.