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whatrockson I wrote a short story about von Neumann probes

Another influence, especially for the binary numbers bit, was "Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software" by Charles Petzold. I've always loved his explanation of counting in binary.

whatrockson I wrote a short story about von Neumann probes

Thank you! I recently read a great von Neumann biography (The Man from the Future by Ananyo Bhattacharya) and I've thinking about the von Neumann probes ever since. Definitely agree with you on how von Neumann probes are typically represented as ships or machines, but I wanted to make the nibbles "cute", so I thought "why not make the probes organic little blobby things?" But I'm definitely going to pick up the "We are Bob" book this week - seems from comments below that it has a lot of fans!

Also, I have been writing one short story every week this year, as a project to get better at writing, and you can read them all here: https://f52.charlieharrington.com/

Some favorites of mine are: - The Correctives - Flynn's Arrow - El Codigo de los Estados Unidos - Plastic Man on the Moon

whatrockson I wrote a short story about von Neumann probes

Oh, also, "A Boy and his Blob" was another major influence. Such a weird game that my sister and I loved on regular Nintendo.

whatrockson I wrote a short story about von Neumann probes

I'm not sure I even made this connection when writing this. But, as OP, I'm going to say yes. I mainly was thinking about how to connect Lemmings and Gremlins.

whatrockson A Linux desktop for your wall

Wow, good point. Need to do that ASAP!

whatrockson A Linux desktop for your wall

Yeah, this project is more for the strange souls who refused to toss their EO1s in the bin after the iOS app dropped from the App Store.

whatrockson ‘Voyager on steroids.’ Mission would probe region beyond our Solar System

I had a weird dream about a secret Voyager probe recently, the Voyager III, and wrote a short story about it, if anyone’s interested: https://f52.charlieharrington.com/stories/voyager-3/ It’s fairly “Contact” by Carl Sagan inspired.

whatrockson Making podcasts from Project Gutenberg e-books (2021)

I believe I mentioned this in the article, but I really think scripts or plays would be a great medium for TTS, where you could have separate voices for each character. Could be a neat feature to add to script-writing software.

whatrockson Making podcasts from Project Gutenberg e-books (2021)

That’s the one. There’s a Colab link in the repo so you can try it out easily!

whatrockson Making podcasts from Project Gutenberg e-books (2021)

OP here. I read ALL the time. But I also do dishes. I find it hard to do dishes and read a physical book at the same time. Unless someone else was holding it up for me, slowly flipping the pages. That does sound nice.

whatrockson Logo and Learning (2015)

Wonderful book that I think about all the time. So much so that I've jotted down my booknotes for Mindstorms here, if anyone's interested in a quick glance: https://charlieharrington.com/mindstorms/

whatrockson Show HN: I wrote a story about GPT-3 writing a story about me writing about GPT3

Thanks! Following the thread of the story, it will be fascinating as these tools evolve (deliberate word choice) to create narrative-driven video. GPT-3 seems to already have the narrative side down, as evidenced in my story, but probably lacks “state” between prompts. If GPT-3 can gain memory/state for my prompts, then I think we’re spiritually quite close to a young lady’s illustrated primer of The Diamond Age. Which is wild.

whatrockson Show HN: I wrote a short story about the Minus World in Super Mario Bros

Interesting - how come the Minus World is always a water level then? Could you figure out how to "create" a different Minus World somehow?

Also - it's definitely a one-day goal of mine to write an NES (or probably Game Boy emulator). That's a very cool senior project you had!

whatrockson Show HN: Query Google Sheet data using PostgreSQL clients

I use roapi to power my “book list” on my static site. I have it running on an always-on Replit repl. Try it here:

https://charlieharrington.com/library/

Click the “I’m feeling lazy” button if you just want to see some example queries.

I also wrote a tutorial, as well, if you’d like to try out roapi yourself:

https://charlieharrington.com/sql-powered-reading-list/

whatrockson Show HN: I wrote a short story about AR contact lenses and daemons

Yes! That’s me. I try my best to single-take it, cause this is just a project for fun (writing a new short story every week for 2022). My wife did guest star as the narrator for one of the stories (“The Weird”) and I recommend listening to that one, cause she’s great at narrating.

If I had more time, I’d try to find other people in my life to read some of the stories, cause I think that would be a fun thing to have saved - a parent or sibling or friend reading a story you wrote. It’s like how I wish I had more recordings of my grandparents telling stories. Anyway - thanks for checking it out!

whatrockson Surfing the Gopherspace

Very cool! I'd like to set up something similar myself one of these days.

whatrockson Surfing the Gopherspace

Definitely going to try this next!

whatrockson Surfing the Gopherspace

Share a link! I’d love to check it out.

whatrockson Plants grown in Apollo lunar regolith

This is cool to see, especially because I've been thinking about life on the Moon quite a bit this week (aka reading the Wikipedia article about the 2019 Beresheet lunar lander crash with those sturdy little tardigrades onboard). One article led to another, as they do, and I ended up writing a weird short story about life on the Moon a few days ago:

https://f52.charlieharrington.com/stories/plastic-man-on-the...

whatrockson Ask HN: Share your personal site

https://charlieharrington.com

I write about old Apple computers and also other stuff I like. I’m also doing a writing challenge this year, one new short story for every week, inspired by a quote from Ray Bradbury:

https://f52.charlieharrington.com

whatrockson Crows possess higher intelligence, thought a primarily human attribute (2020)

I love this book so much, thanks for reminding me of this part! One of my favorite quotes ever comes from Merlin in this book:

> The best thing for being sad is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.

whatrockson Crows possess higher intelligence, thought a primarily human attribute (2020)

Thank you! I’m doing it as a little writing project for the year, one short story every week, just to get better at writing, and also to expunge all these probably dumb story ideas from my head (with the hope that there’s now room for better ones).

whatrockson Crows possess higher intelligence, thought a primarily human attribute (2020)

Great story! I love the image of the huge airships looming over the city. A lot of my stories in my "Fahrenheit 52" project have been extended versions of dreams. Whenever I have a particularly weird one, I try to tap it out quickly on my phone, even if it's the middle of the night.

whatrockson Crows possess higher intelligence, thought a primarily human attribute (2020)

> Did you intentionally make the crows names use mainly phonemes from the word "crow"? That's a cool technique

Not consciously! But they sounded crow-like to me. Like they could be onomatopeias for words that crows could theoretically speak/croak to each other.

whatrockson Crows possess higher intelligence, thought a primarily human attribute (2020)

This is only inspirationally relevant, but a few weeks ago, I saw a crow (or a raven, never quite sure) holding a stick, floating without moving, on top of Twin Peaks in SF, like it was waiting to give a wand to a wizard. When I got home, I wrote this weird little story about it: https://f52.charlieharrington.com/stories/a-great-unkindness...

whatrockson My New Old Macintosh SE/30 Computer

So cool that you're here and responding! Thank you! I'm going to find this app and get it on my SE/30 pronto.

whatrockson My New Old Macintosh SE/30 Computer

This is very helpful! I will try this first. Thanks.

whatrockson My New Old Macintosh SE/30 Computer

I'm going to add this to my to-do list.

whatrockson A submarine's weakness: its software?

I'm working on some cool submarine software here: https://adventofcode.com/

whatrockson Revisiting Old Magazines

Yeah, OP here, I'm with you, at least insofar as what I enjoy reading. I'm still buying all my books on paper, for example. And my experience with tracking these magazines down showed that some are still doing great on print (e.g. Weird NJ). I'd love to get more details on how Stripe Press faired and why exactly they're transitioning to something new.