I happen to own a physical pong table. Everyone loves it. [0] There is something magical about material and only-does-one-thing instantiations of digital things.
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I am really looking forward to a flat table top screen consisting of millions of magnetically-controlled vertical-extruding rod pixels, with actual color controlled pixels along their length. For an amazing table display/extrusion of D&D dungeons and terrain, for miniatures.
A little sensor ability, and when the extrusion "scrolls" laterally, it could create little lips that move the miniatures too, so they stay "in place". And move NPCs around at the DMs direction. Now turn of the room lights, and use the light pixels not just for color, but for lighting effects like wall lamps flickering, add spooky position-distributed sounds...
That has to be coming soon, right?
Some part of me wants to describe it Claude, iterate, and say "Now polish that design, economically optimize the parts, link in the supply chain, and ship me the first review unit." That has to be coming soon, right?
The lines separating planes of reality, they are a blurring, quickly.
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I like the way you think.
"I needed to replace 18 lightbulbs in my chandelier. Turns out 18 times any number is a lot. In cash"
I'm sure there are an abundant source of 'How I hustled a thumpawangy into $1000 a month in subscriptions" written by AI, but I doubt I could perceive a loss in that compared to the ones we had before.
The next problem we'll face after that, with the 1-2 years newer AIs of the time, is that the default LLM voice is just a particular affectation created by the training, not "the voice of LLMs" or anything. It's trivial to kick them into a different style. I just used AI to do some architecture design documents this week, and prompted it to first look at about 1-2k words that I wrote myself all organically for the style. The good news is the resulting documents almost, but admittedly, not quite entirely, lack that LLM style. They're still prone to more bullet lists than I use directly; then again, in this context they were fairly appropriate, so I'm not too triggered by the result.
The bad news is, that's all it takes to make AI writing that isn't in that default tone. It's not that hard. Students cheating on essays have already figured it out, the spammers really can't be that far behind. Probably more stuff than we realize is already AI output, it's just the stragglers and those who don't really care (which I imagine is a lot of spammers, after all) who are still failing to tweak the style. They'll catch up as soon as engagement falls off.
You could also 4x the resolution by using half- and quarter-block characters from the top half of the ASCII table (or it'd be the PETSCII one i C64 case).
Exactly. It's even how I taught myself extremely basic Pascal -- getting my BASIC Life program running in Pascal. With asterisks.
A taught a friend at uni, who was a much better programmer than me, how the algorithm worked. He did a pixel-by-pixel version in machine code, but it was a bit slow on a ZX Spectrum.
So he did exactly the quarter-character-cell version you describe. I wrote the editor in BASIC, and he wrote a machine-code routine that kicked in when told and ran the generations. For extra fun he emitted some of the intermediate state to the border, so the border flashed stripes of colour as it calculated, so you could see it "thinking". Handy for static patterns -- you could see it hadn't crashed.
I've been considering doing a quarter-cell Mandelbrot for about 30Y now. Never got round to it yet.
A grid of capacitive touch sensors could be printed directly on the pcb, bringing down costs by a degree of magnitude. Real switches are much more satisfying though.
One window = one pixel.
Did that a few years back, i guess this might still be possible
Looks like they are still around? https://novationmusic.com/launchpad
Also seems to be in stock locally.
The device that I think popularized that design (citation needed) was the Monome (https://monome.org/) that looks like it is also still around and it has (always had?) some kind of open source license (https://github.com/monome).
fake edit: yes, kind of: https://www.eurobricks.com/forum/forums/topic/164622-moc-mec...
https://latedev.wordpress.com/2011/06/25/a-poker-chip-comput...
Now that would be simulating life witg life.
But I agree mistakes might be fun to watch.