Miscellanea, September 2024

Cool photos and breakdown of a Navajo weaving of an Intel Pentium chip from a display in the National Gallery of Art (sadly the exhibit now seems to be closed). The breakdown is able to map out the chip to determine specifically which chip it is based on. The blog post also closes with an interesting story of the Fairchild work on the Shiprock chip and the relationship to the Navajo.

Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power Since 1500: Scrollable visualization of computing, communication, and control from the 1500s to the present categorized by things like communication devices, interfaces, algorithms, education, human bodies, biometrics, medical, policing, energy and resources, etc. Lots of ways to browse this; one interesting option is to zoom in on the era you were born (if it was long enough ago to be referred to as an era) and scroll your way across horizontally.

The headline “Secret calculator hack brings ChatGPT to the TI-84, enabling easy cheating” hides the amount of hardware modification required to get this to work. The pitch on the video that this is the “Ultimate Cheating Device” may oversell how helpful it is to query ChatGPT during an exam through your calculator keyboard and screen (better prompt engineer some shorter responses than usual!). But it is a pretty impressive hardware hack.

A couple of cool looking paper-and-pencil, single-player sims of a dungeon crawler and a space shooter: Paper Apps Dungeon and Paper Apps Galaxy. Both procedurally generated so each game notebook is unique.

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