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Wow! And it also implements a very interesting variant of SUBLEQ that is turing complete.

>This VM implements an OISC - a One Instruction Set Computer. That instruction takes three signed 32-bit operands, a, b and c, and runs a program from memory m[] as follows:

1 PC (program counter) starts at 0

2 Fetch the next instruction (32-bit signed operands a, b and c)

3 If the low bit on any operand is set, remove it, and replace that operand with m[operand] i.e., a dereference of that address

4 Set m[b] = m[b] - m[a]

5 If m[b] is 0 or negative, set the PC to c, otherwise increment PC by 3 words

6 Go to step 2


> 3 If the low bit on any operand is set, remove it, and replace that operand with m[operand] i.e., a dereference of that address

This dereference option makes a second instruction, this is not OISC.


CISC view: Its another adressing mode.

RISC view: SUBLEQ is already four instructions (2x memory access, alu, branch)


3x memory access then, because read+read+write. And extra 0 to 3 reads in this work.

The early discovery of light emission from silicon carbide long before the first LEDs is a very interesting finding, worth pointing out.

But alas, as ever so often, the article turns this into a hyperbole. The premise from the title does not check out at all.

>The Russian who invented semiconductors 25 years before the USA

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor#Early_history_of...


There's always someone somewhere who, with hindsight, did something that could be retconned into being similar to something important we've got today, von Däniken being an extreme example. Not putting down Losev's work, but accidentally stumbling on an interesting physical effect that you treat as a curiosity and engaging in targeted research to turn in into a product is a very different thing. For example the FET was envisaged multiple times in the same time frame as Losev's work, but wasn't rigorously pursued until Bardeen et al came along.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oleg_Losev#Solid-state_electro...

has quite a bit on it checking out:

> He used these junctions to build solid-state versions of amplifiers, oscillators, and TRF and regenerative radio receivers, at frequencies up to 5 MHz, 25 years before the transistor. He even built a superheterodyne receiver.

That one calls them "negative resistance diodes" but I don't see how you can make a functional solid state amplifier and the like without it being a transistor.

Maybe Wikipedia needs some edits.


The USSR famously invented everything the west did but years or even decades earlier, only for some reason never commercialised any of it, to the point where it became a bit of a running joke like the Su-24 "validating" the design of the F-111 which preceded it by some years. So I'd take any claims like this with a bit of a grain of salt.

I probably over exaggerated there. But it does seem he was earlier than the team that’s been given credit for it, no?

Great article!

Yeah, that pattern can be seen everywhere in semiconductors. E.g. the transistor invention vs. Lilienfeld, Heil, Matare etc. So the scope is more narrow than "Inventend Semiconductors".

Generally, there seems to be a tendency to disregard discoveries from outside the US. I think this pattern can still be observed today...

Other examples: Invention of light bulb, telephone.


What do you mean with "open-source"? Of course, the inference code for all the open weight models is publically available - see llama.cpp or hf transformers.

There are, however, very few models where also the full training pipeline is available. Olmo by AI2 comes to mind.


More than 25 years ago, there was a show off, of building the smallest web server:

https://web.archive.org/web/20000815063022/http://www-ccs.cs...

Someone with an ACE1101 microcontroller "won". I can't find the original articles, but there is also this:

https://conceptlab.com/fly/

Webserver on a fly...


I did the ACE1101 version, and mailed a preprogrammed chip to the artist in Saskatoon. Archive.org has the original description:

https://web.archive.org/web/20020605032321/http://d116.com/a...

It was great fun bumming the code down; eliminating ping made room for bit-banged I2C and UDP uploading to an eeprom, still <1024 bytes.


Wow, nice! It's an honor.

I guess nowadays one could use some of the 32bit WLCSCP microcontrollers to easily beat this.


That MCU has an instruction set that looks very 6502-inspired.


Ahah I was just thinking about that tiny web server the other day and even submitted it here, but it didn't get any traction. Back then (and even now) I thought it was very impressive!



Nice!


But why is this always the first comment on custom CPU builds? Can't there also be other designs out there?


Noone ever mentions this one, but I always found it pretty cool: https://www.donnamaie.com/AMD_2900.html


Because they are both well-known and really well documented in a way that's easy for beginners.


I've been following this series for a while: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyR4neQXqQo5nPdEiMbaE...


i look forward to other resources as accessible to those pointed out. by all means, go for it.


Great to see this!

Worth mentioning that Huggingface already offers a similar service. And they are also European:

https://huggingface.co/docs/inference-providers/index

https://huggingface.co/inference/models


Huggingface isn‘t european just because they have offices there.


Huggingface is about as European as Google, IBM, or Visa: they all have some offices in Europe.


nah... their founders and most of their employees are in france.

Very ill-suited comparison to IBM.


Nice, but I could't find pay-as-you-go plan


They only offer pay-as-you-go. The $9/month plan includes $2 credits and then its payg without markup.


https://huggingface.co/docs/inference-providers/pricing

It's well buried though. Does not seem to be a focus of theirs.


I had to give it a try.

Claude, the ole cheater, recognized what the file was, downloaded the psid from the web, found a wasm sid player and built a website around it:

https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/df6cdcae-08dc-452b-ba19-f...

https://claude.ai/share/4dd36c16-bc62-445a-b423-ad4637f06432

GPT-5.5 built a lot of python scripts to extract the music data. Strudel implementation failed, but I then asked it to build a website:

https://ubiquitous-vacherin-8e7993.netlify.app/

This is a translation of the music into javascript based on the assembler source.

Really impressive on both accounts. Some iterations were requied for both.


Yes, marks of AI all over the place. Also the SVGs.

>No solution written, 100% score.

Its weird. Turns out that hardest problem for LLMs to really tackle is long-form text.


Maybe in one shot.

In theory I would expect them to be able to ingest the corpus of the new yorker and turn it into a template with sub-templates, and then be able to rehydrate those templates.

The harder part seems to be synthesizing new connection from two adjacent ideas. They like to take x and y and create x+y instead of x+y+z.


Most of the good major models are already very capable of changing their writing style.

Just give them the right writing prompt. "You are a writer for the Economist, you need to write in the house style, following the house style rules, writing for print, with no emoji .." etc etc.

The large models have already ingested plenty of New Yorker, NYT, The Times, FT, The Economist etc articles, you just need to get them away from their system prompt quirks.


I think that should be true, but doesn't hold up in practice.

I work with a good editor from a respected political outlet. I've tried hard to get current models to match his style: filling the context with previous stories, classic style guides and endless references to Strunk & White. The LLM always ends up writing something filtered through tropes, so I inevitably have to edit quite heavily, before my editor takes another pass.

It feels like LLMs have a layperson's view of writing and editing. They believe it's about tweaking sentence structure or switching in a synonym, rather than thinking hard about what you want to say, and what is worth saying.

I also don't think LLMs' writing capabilities have improved much over the last year or so, whereas coding has come on leaps and bounds. Given that good writing is a matter of taste which is beyond the direct expertise of most AI researchers (unlike coding), I doubt they'll improve much in the near future.


You're ignoring what I said. They work better when turning it into a two step process. Step 1 create a template. Step 2 execute the template.

>The large models have already ingested plenty of New Yorker, NYT, The Times, FT, The Economist etc articles

And that ends up diluting them. Going back and doing another pass on only a subset would give them stronger voice. At some threshold, scanning information brings it to average and a return to the mean, instead of increasing the information. It's a giant table of word associations, it can regress.


No, the failure is the human written prompt


You know, after a while this excuse is not valid anymore.


If they're that hard to prompt maybe it's easier just to write the blog posts yourself.


Someone here mentioned a whole ago that the labs deliberately haven't tried to train these characteristics out of their models, because leaving them in makes it easier to identify, and therefore exclude, LLM-generated text from their training corpus.


But it's odd that these characteristics are the same across models from different labs. I find it hard to believe that researchers across competing companies are coordinating on something like that.


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