Blackle Mori's personal site hosts creative technical projects, including a cryptography horror story, a CSS puzzle box, and the computer iceberg meme.
HN commenters praise the Basilisk Collection as exceptionally well-written fiction about computer science and cryptography, and admire the CSS Puzzle Box.
aside from the question of novelty, i think i can buy a pocket am/fm radio for us$6 today https://articulo.mercadolibre.com.ar/MLA-917855935-radio-portatil-ditron-am-fm-parlante-bolsillo-vintage-antena-_JM so building a radio from scratch doesn't have the same cachet it had in the 01950s when a radio was a major household appliance people would save up for
you can definitely kit-build an am or fm radio from a kit without any understanding of the concepts, the radioshack '200-in-1' 'science fair' kit had wiring netlists for both am and fm radios, and didn't really explain the concepts. similarly you can solder together a microcontroller board and write circuitpython on it without any understanding of the concepts
in any of these cases there are a shitload of concepts to learn
i don't know much about chemistry but i think you have measurement error, valence electrons, vacuum filtration, density, oxidation states, precipitation, ph, solubility, activity, decantation, density, enthalpy, recrystallization, pressure, solubility product, never give an acid a drink, entropy, flasks bubbling over, gibbs free energy, hplc, equilibrium, distillation, the arrhenius law, sublimation, ligands, spectroscopy, differential scanning calorimetry, ...
in analog electronics you have measurement error, voltage, current, energy, capacitance, resistance, complex impedance, inductance, frequency, power, charge, parasitics, exponential decay, diffeqs, linear time-invariant systems, lti system…
The fictional article https://suricrasia.online/unfiction/basilisk/ is one the best written computer science/cryptography SCP like articles I've ever read.
What I loved is that:
$ echo -en 'basilisk:0000000000:ds26ovbJzDwkVWia1tINLJZ2WXEHBvItMZRxHmYhlQd0spuvPXb6cYFJorDKkqlA' | openssl dgst -sha256 -binary | openssl dgst -sha256
(stdin)= 0000000000000000000000161b9f84a187cc21b172bf68b3cb3b78684d8e9f17
actually works, but is a little sneaky. See https://www.metafilter.com/190463/so-who-is-there-left-to-trust
Edit2: https://github.com/blackle/Basilisk-Hunter How the examples were generated.
Since "Lena" ("MMAcevedo") and "They're Made Out of Meat" from this subthread are on my "fiction recommendations" list, let me share the list: https://dbohdan.com/fiction-recs.
I highly recommend "Basilisk collection" by Blackle Mori (https://suricrasia.online/unfiction/basilisk/), a fascinating short story written as a fictional Wikipedia page, like "Lena". It is about a partial hash inversion anomaly. Really! I would call its genre "hard computer science fiction". It was a delight to stumble upon after I followed a link to https://suricrasia.online/iceberg/.
I think it's rather crude and inefficient to generate several translations with a prompt.
Can't we just sample different "branches" of successive tokens with some mechanism for ensuring diversity like [1] did? This would allow the user to edit a handful of words/phrases/sentences and guide the LLM towards a more idiomatic translation.
This may even give smaller local models a chance.
[1] https://suricrasia.online/blog/making-amulets-with-llama/
Self-plug, but demoscene on linux is very possible. I got into the scene around 2015 and submitted my first entry to an IRL demoparty in 2018. All of my prods are linux and open source.
Most are 4k exegfx, which means they are still images, but "scalemark" is an animated 4k intro with music.
https://suricrasia.online/demoscene/
There was another story on the same site [1] that involves thermodynamics and signal processing. I don't think I've seen such technical sci-fi before. Anybody else have more examples to share?
[1]: https://suricrasia.online/unfiction/CSC218-Software-Precognance.pdf