Mind Grenade (2019) | Hacker News Reader

Mind Grenade (2019)

fourmilab.ch

108 pointsnano17c23 comments

This is the web site of John Walker, founder of Autodesk and co-author of AutoCAD, living in Switzerland for a long time now, and still a hacker (in the good sense) despite being very wealthy.

Reminds me of how these days it's almost impossible to register a patent. Some of the techniques I used in some of my open source projects are probably just innovative enough to be patent-worthy but it's too expensive and the potential financial returns are unclear.

Tech nowadays is a two class system. The innovator needs to have a certain pedigree or else their innovations don't register.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12298575-patent-it-yours...

If you register a patent, you have to be able to protect it, which will require money and knowledge, and that is always something the people who could register patents don't always have, if they have even thought that far ahead.

There is no requirement to defend a patent. There is a requirement to defend trademarks

Would you want to prevent others from using your techniques?

Patents need not prevent others from using a technique. Licensing is a perfectly valid option and the terms need not be onerous. Some even provide free licensing.

As a child I wanted to be an inventor when I grew up, and to me that entailed patents. While I have now learned that inventing isn’t a job so much as something that might happen along the way, filing for a patent is firmly on my bucket list. I think many people consider a patent proof of some level of novelty or ingenuity. It is some measure of achievement and a status symbol.

The tradition of using shift registers for automated music generation very much lives on! These days they are typically called "Turing Machines" (I know, kinda of confusing for us CS folks), due to the influence of a popular version which came out in 2012: https://www.musicthing.co.uk/Turing-Machine/

The most common use of this recirculating shift register technology are those little flickering LED lamps used to simulate candles. That's how the pseudorandom flicker is generated.[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndXQex_spS8

Great to know about one of the brains behind Intel 8008 microprocessor - Harry S. Pyle. An interview with him at CHM - https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10270201...

Reminds me of this device: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phPp5oYnps0

Thanks for the rabbit hole!

It's hilarious how extensive a prop can be re-used (last starfighter, STNG, The Flash etc)

That was fun! There's so many clips that look interesting to watch, I wonder if anyone has a list of each movie or show that was shown?

Can we interpret these 9-bit square arranged combinations as letters in Marain, the language of The Culture?

Is this supposed to affect your mind somehow?

No. It's just fun.

Don't build this. Don't bring it to school. Don't show it to anyone.

This is the kind of thing that get you expelled, jailed, or shot.

Why?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmed_Mohamed_clock_incident

The history and engineering teachers were impressed, the English teacher claimed it was an effort at a bomb scare and called the police. Sigh.

“don’t bring it to school”, yes, but the rest should be safe.

airport too

Nothing about it looks particularly dangerous except the label. Slap a "random tone generator" sticker on it instead and you'd be fine.

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