this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2025
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Science Memes

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[–] [email protected] 92 points 1 month ago

Oh so computers are doing carcinization now as well

[–] [email protected] 61 points 1 month ago (2 children)

There are not 8 logic gates in a byte, there are 8 bits in a byte

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 month ago

Yeah this part really confused me

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago)

Original is correct If the gate they built with it with is a D-flipflop.

[–] [email protected] 49 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

BORN TO KILL

HELL IS A FUCK

πŸ¦€ Rip and Tear 1993

I am logic gate

16,039,018,500 SOLDIER CRABS

[–] brrt 36 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Dehydrate!

(For anyone unfamiliar with it, there’s a similar concept in Cixin Liuβ€˜s Three Body series. Forgot which of the books.)

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 month ago

The first one

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

One of my coworkers calls taking a piss "Dehydrating" and it has stuck in my head since.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

Also in Adrian Tchaikovsky's "Children of Time" and the following books!

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Sentient AI: "OMG I'm a crab?!" Scientist: "Always have been..."

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 month ago

Too late, Pratchett and Ponder did it with ants, so it's more micro

Also what happens when the crabs die? Does the computer start recycling itself?

[–] sanpedropeddler 18 points 1 month ago (3 children)

How do you store a tweet in logic gates? Would you not need to construct crab based memory?

And to play doom you would need a crab based cpu with much more functionality than the few logic gates they have working.

[–] enumerator4829 26 points 1 month ago (2 children)

If you can have NAND-gates, a clock and some wires, you can build anything.

Go visit https://nandgame.com/ to try it out yourself!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Based on the https://nand2tetris.org/ courses if you want an even deeper dive.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

I know what I'll do in the next boring lecture!

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago

You can create memory by arranging logic gates in bistable or latch circuits.

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

If the logic gates can feed back onto themselves, you can build a simple [flip flop](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flip-flop_(electronics)) that can store a bit.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

Yeah but you need 2 logic gates for one bit so it would take 16 logic gates for a byte, not 8.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago

Some people may be asking "is that a bit too many crabs?"

The answer is that it's an adequate amount of crabs. For that task at least.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Do we need any more proof that crabs are indeed the ultimate lifeform?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I'm not doing that math. One every 6 hours.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

What if you overclock the crabs? Surely you could reach 1 per hour!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

How do you overclock the crabs? Hot butter?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago

when two swarms of crabs collide, they merge and continue in a direction that is the sum of their velocities.

Hahahahahaha. I love nature

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Why 640 thousand? You mean store and retrieve? Because 240 UTF-8 chars is 240*64= maximum just over 15 thousand bits.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

It also equates 1 bit to 1 logic gate, which I'm not sure it's possible to create memory using that few gates unless it's read-only. All memory cell circuits I know of require at least 2 logic gates.

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

DRAM needs 1 transistor per cell, but it loses stored data quickly, and a crab-based computer would probably be too slow to update it.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

Ah right. DRAM also requires a capacitor instead though, and I don't know how you'd represent that with crabs. Maybe it's possible.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Why 640 thousand?

It should be enough for anyone.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

They were too engrossed in if they could, to condsider if they should.