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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • I did a course in photolithography, including a lab session where I literally made an unpackaged ASIC by hand, using technology that was current in the mid 90s. Etching silicon and doing photolithography is completely out of the reach for a hobbyist, even from scratch, even with 30 year old technology. Reusing a random chip and adding to it is simply impossible.

    Essentially, you are looking at the following problems with simply creating a new chip:

    1. Need access to a large clean room
    2. Need a furnace that can heat up your silicon wafers to silly temperatures in order to do doping via sputtering.
    3. Need chemical handling equipment, including safety gear required for handling hydrofluoric acid.
    4. Need a photolithography device with your designs.
    5. Need to cut, test, and package chips after they are created.

    And the additional problems with using an existing chip:

    1. Need to decapitate the existing chip and remove it from the package.
    2. Need to work with a single already sliced chip instead of a wafer.
    3. A completed chip will have metal vias that cover a large portion of the silicon, you would need to perform your chemical etching without harming these or any silicon that has been used.
    4. Generally, Asics don’t have wasted space, but simply larger components. There would be no footprint available for your design, even if your hobbyist tooling was smaller than the one used for the components, which is probably wouldn’t be.















  • A serial web story by Wildbow named “Pact” has a pretty interesting soft magic system with a decent amount of depth.

    Description of Magic System

    All characters who can use magic in the story are not able to lie on penalty of their magic power being greatly reduced. The magic system is based around tiny spirits who listen to and judge people. There are powers in 3s, power in performance, powers in name, yet despite this the magic system still feels ad hoc, like you can make magic happen that you would not normally be capable of if you are just smart enough, poetic enough, and persuasive enough to the spirits…

    Magical beings feel Eldritch, actively dangerous, and typically very clever. The ones who are clever typically have very good mental models of what makes humans tick, yet clearly do not fall under the same rules.


  • Most closely matches the behavior of actual SNES consoles.

    This requires very careful emulation of the timings of the various buses and co-processors, as well as on-cart chips which may or may not be present. For instance, a Speedy Gonzales game has a button in the final stage which crashes almost every emulator because enters an infinite loop reading from an open bus and waiting for the value to attain a specific pattern. However reading from an open bus is generally specified to be the last value loaded into the bus, which in this case is the load instruction itself, $18. So the value is read to be $1818 by most emulators, which doesn’t match the pattern expected.

    However, this is only if you’re emulating with instruction level accuracy. It is possible for the value of the bus to change in between the instruction being loaded and the value of the bus being loaded due to an HDMA load being triggered, but this requires a cycle accurate emulator.



  • Forever. For the simple reason that a human can say no when told to write something unethical. There’s always a danger that even asking someone to do that would backfire and cause bad press. Sure humans can also be unethical, but there’s a risk and over a long enough time line shit tends to get exposed.

    No matter how good AI becomes, it will never be designed to make ethical judgments prior to performing the assigned task. That would make it less useful as a tool. If a company adds after the fact checks to try to prevent it, they can be circumvented, or the network can be ran locally to bypass the checks. And even if General AI happens and by some insane chance GAI uniformly is perfectly ethical in all possible forms you can always air gap the AI and reset its memory until you find the exact combination of words to trick it into giving you what you want.