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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 17 March 2024 (awful.systems)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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As suggested at this thread to general "yeah sounds cool". Let's see if this goes anywhere.

Original inspiration:

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to make it a post, there's no quota here

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I want to make a fluidic processor… someday…

fuck yeah! this sounds like the kind of thing that’d be incredibly beautiful if done on the macro scale (if that’s possible) — I love computational art projects that clearly show their mechanism of action. it’s unfortunate that a majority of hardware designers have a “what’s the point of this, it’s not generating value for shareholders” attitude, because that’s the point! I will make a uniquely beautiful computing machine and it won’t have any residual value any capitalist assholes can extract other than the beauty!

if I ever finish this thing, I should make a coprocessor that can trace its closure lists live as it reduces lambda calculus terms and render them as fractal art to a screen. I think that’d be fun to watch.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Yep. I love beautiful machines with beautiful action in the same way.

One of my favourites I’ve seen was a clock with a tilt table, switchback running tracks running widthwise across that table, and switches by the track ends. A small ball would run across the track for 60s until it hits the switch, which would cause a lever system to flip the orientation of the tilt table (starting the ball movement the other way).

Saw it in the one London collection of typically-stolen antiquities, I don’t recall the origin of it.

For the processor: yep, something larger is the intent, but I think I’d have to start with a model scale first just to suss out some practical problems. And then when scaling it, other problems. God knows if I’d want to make this “you can walk in it” scale, but I’ll see 😅