This looks like it’s a story about some Israeli individuals being arrested for organ trafficking, and not at all a story about prisoners in Israel having their organs harvested.
TIS-100 is great. The “mesh of many tiny cores” architecture is cool, and also somewhat mind-bending — but the simplicity of the TIS design makes it just about possible to get your head around it.
After playing TIS a bit I found it really interesting to read about the Transputers and the Connection Machines, two similar real-world architectures.
David Ackley’s T2 Tile project[0] and Movable Feast Machine[1] look similar to me too, but they take the idea much further; the aim is to create an infinitely scalable and totally decentralized architecture. I only know a little about it, but it’s super cool stuff.
If you liked Transputers, you might want to also read about Adapteva and their Epiphany core for a more recent attempt at something similar-ish.
I still have two of their prototype machines from their Kickstarter - two ARM cores to run Linux, with an Epiphany chip with 16 cores in a 4x4 grid. But their goal was scaling it up to 64 cores or up to I think 4K cores on a board. Each core had a small amount of on core RAM and four buses to each side in the grid, and you could access the memory of every other core with a predictable latency (one cycle per "hop"), so if you planned things carefully, you could have them working in lockstep.
It's an interesting space, but hard because the first difficult question you need to answer - which strips away a whole lot of potential use-cases and many of the most profitable one - is "why not a GPU?".
Just before Epiphany, there was also the Tilera, which had a lot in common with the Transputer. Our lab got one and we played around with it, but it was a pain to program. Transputer had OCCAM, Tilera chased after the C model and shared coherent memory.
The Tilera TILE architecture lives on in NVIDIA's DPU.
I’m always delighted when I visit HN and see one of your blog posts on the front page; they posts are great and they elicit some of the most interesting HN discussions. It took me a little while to realize that all these good posts were on the same blog, but once I did I had a lovely time browsing through the archive and reading more of the “deep cuts.”
The posts about the System/360 consoles come to mind, for example. I’m not sure how “popular” those were(?), but they’ve been very helpful as references for an art project I’m working on!
Obsidian creates a hidden directory in your “vault,” which contains plugin files, plus metadata about your settings, currently opened files, etc. If those settings don’t work equally well on both systems, that would be a hassle. Maybe try copying all the files from inside the directory (so that you don’t grab that hidden dir when you do) instead of grabbing the whole directory.
You might also want to look at the git-obsidian plugin. It takes a little setup, but seems to work well once it’s going.
Have you looked at the handheld keyboard-trackpad units that Rii makes? They don’t quite tick all your boxes, but I think it could still be a step in the right direction.
I am quite happy with my Rii I8X. The trackpad exceeded my expectations—I have no complaints. Having it centred makes a big difference, compared to the wobbly experience with the full-size units where it’s on the side.
My one complaint is that I can’t quite touch-type on it. But that’s probably OK if it’s for occasional use with an HTPC.
I think other brands make similar keyboard units with mini trackballs, but I don’t think I have seen any with trackpoints.
I learned about this phenomenon earlier today, from an artist who does a fantastic job teaching colour theory and colour science under the handle “color.nerd”
