Nostalgia and Claude Code makes some interesting hard things possible. Five of us wrote this as our ECE291 final project at UIUC in the summer of 2002. It's a Middle Earth space shooter in pure x86 assembly, fully software rendered. It has hand-tuned SSE memory ops, Mersenne Twister RNG, toroidal physics, 10,000 particles at 60fps. We were pretty rough after those two weeks and probably didn't smell great either.
The code sat on a CD-ROM for 24 years. I had Claude Code burn a bunch of tokens to port it from x86 asm to C to WebAssembly (via Emscripten), wrapped it in tests, and got it running cross-platform in the browser/mobile/desktop/everywhere. It's 98% faithful to the original, however I did tune the difficulty a bit; and by that I mean best of luck!
This started as a two-week final project for ECE 291 at UIUC in 2002. A space (or sky) shooter written entirely in x86 assembly. Hand tuned SSE memory ops, Mersenne Twister RNG, toroidal map physics, 10,000 particles at, all software-rendered.
Twenty-three years later I burned a pile of Opus 4.6 tokens to port the assembly to C, then compiled to WebAssembly via Emscripten. The first attempt was a direct x86 to WASM transpiler; it passed hundreds of unit tests but kept crashing. The second approach through C worked well.
Ah this is sad news. I came to know of him by way of UIUC's Engineering Open House. Back in 03' or 04' a rag tag group of us put together an "asymmetric capacitor" exhibit -- a sort of simple ion thruster. A kind hearted TA put our project in for an award Bitzer had sponsored, and it went in our favor.
Here is a personal anecdote that I cannot help but extrapolate on this sad day:
Back in 2016 I made an impossible to get replacement part [0] for the Breville BCG800XL SmartGrinder and sold it through ShapeWays. It paid for all my coffee up until ~2022 when another company popped up and began selling an injection molded copy of my part on Amazon, Walmart, etc.
ShapeWays' marketplace always let you easily see the top sellers in each category. I somewhat wonder if outside firms simply caught on, bought one of each, copied it, and made an injection mold to mass produce everything cheaply. This is great for the consumer but I have no idea how ShapeWays could have defended against it. I am thankful it lasted the few years it did. 3D printing was a fun way to make a little while helping folks keep their stuff out of the landfill.
Every idea seems obvious to add to the OS in hindsight, yet we all lose. For a small shop these apps are their lifeblood and so they get constantly nourished. For a large corporation, this taking candy from babies moment constitutes a blurb in a keynote followed by minimal attention or innovation from then on.
Copyright and patent law were intended to prevent this, but software has no real moat from this. The little plants in the garden get to prove the concept just before the giant redwoods draw all the water from the soil and block the light -- and the legal system is setup to favor this.
Radioactive Polonium-210 is the most potent carcinogen within tobacco, and it is not intrinsic to the plant. It is a result of past use of phosphate fertilizer [0].
I have occasionally wondered if they were fingerprinting users based on that mouse jitter. Most likely certain aspects of the mouse motion and timing would be unique.
No doubt they are. Google CAPTCHA isn't really about whether or not the user is a human but about which human they are. Enabling Firefox's fingerprinting resistance turns Google's CAPTCHA into the Allied Mastercomputer.
I really wish there was a feature to lock the phone upon rapid movement, such as when a thief snatches the device while it is in use. It seems like an obvious mitigation to a common problem by way of the built in accelerometer.
Before it was called "local first" it was known as "subsidiarity". Seeing the principle applied to food, politics, software is exciting to me.
"Subsidiarity is an organizing principle that matters ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest or least centralized competent authority. Political decisions should be taken at a local level if possible, rather than by a central authority".[1]
It's interesting, I'm one of what I presume is a small number of people that have conversed extensively over my life about subsidiarity, mostly on the context of subsidiarity and sphere sovereignty a rather niche area of theology.
Most Catholics, even highly engaged western catholics are not aware of subsidiarity. It's ~commonly/known term and catholic juxtaposition cited by theological/historical non-conformists in church polity and discussions around separation of church and state.
FDA doesn't have defined safe levels for some of these toxins in food, hence the reliance by the paper's authors on EPA's defined safe levels in water.
It's not an accident, and it's not like it never occurred to anyone that we might want to pay attention to heavy metal levels in food. Who do you think has more money to spend on lobbyists and campaign contributions, the people who want FDA to pay attention to this or the people who don't?
The FDA likes to rely on well-supported, highly controlled studies before they put tons of resources into performing long term testing of products. Remember that the FDA not only does consumer food but also pharmaceutical drugs, medical implants, vaccines, etc. with only a $3.4 Billion yearly budget.
The code sat on a CD-ROM for 24 years. I had Claude Code burn a bunch of tokens to port it from x86 asm to C to WebAssembly (via Emscripten), wrapped it in tests, and got it running cross-platform in the browser/mobile/desktop/everywhere. It's 98% faithful to the original, however I did tune the difficulty a bit; and by that I mean best of luck!
Playable Link: https://particlefield.com/projects/alan-parsons/game.html