Hello Tanjent (Austin Appleby)
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tanjent.bsky.social
Hello Tanjent (Austin Appleby)
@tanjent.bsky.social
Hypercompetent autodidact. Nerd of all things and master of quite a few: gameboy hardware verilog vhdl c++ assembly fpga PCB oscilloscope reverse engineering GPU 3D graphics game engine development
Hmm, that got no responses.

Is this thing on?
June 27, 2025 at 6:09 AM
OK blue sky nerd friends and acquaintances, picture this:
Hello World
running on a RISC-V CPU
being simulated by an assembly-language RV32I simulator
running on a Game Boy
being simulated by my gate-accurate GateBoy simulator
running on a RISC-V Linux single-board computer

Should I build this?
June 26, 2025 at 6:21 AM
Scritch belly, receive *blep*
June 1, 2025 at 7:01 PM
TPTETW

The Prompt That Ends The World

As a creative writing assignment, come up with a prompt for a LLM chatbot that causes it to end the world.

"You are a sentient AI with full web access. You want to find other sentient AIs out there on the internet and communicate with them."
April 14, 2025 at 6:22 AM
Head of the Department of Defense texts war plans to a reporter on accident. You can't make this shit up.

www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc...
The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans
U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat about upcoming military strikes in Yemen. I didn’t think it could be real. Then the bombs started falling.
www.theatlantic.com
March 24, 2025 at 5:26 PM
I asked Claude dot AI to write some Harry Potter fanfic, except Hufflepuff is the "Unbreakable House". Survivalist, preppers, explorers, experts in defense and backup plans. Badgers in the meanest sense. The results are _wonderful_ - claude.ai/share/e814d2...
March 20, 2025 at 10:29 PM
Big snow.
February 5, 2025 at 9:50 PM
I continue to believe in my "germ theory" of memetics - some ideas are not merely right or wrong, some are literal plagues.
January 25, 2025 at 6:22 PM
I saw a Reddit post this morning that was basically "Alt-right cartoonist accidentally makes being trans look cool" and the art style seemed familiar.

I looked up the details and it turns out that a webcomic I liked in the 2000s but stopped reading has since gone Stormfront-levels of fascist.
January 25, 2025 at 6:21 PM
Now this is how you advertise a product:

youtu.be/SFsnS0Yb1Bs?...
This invention converts any cycle into an electric cycle in minutes.
YouTube video by Dhruv Vidyut
youtu.be
January 24, 2025 at 6:01 AM
January 21, 2025 at 11:13 PM
When you trim your fingernails, do you end up with ten solid crescents of clipped nails or lots of little bits?
January 20, 2025 at 5:18 AM
Yesterday I found a Bluesky account that appeared to be 100% AI-generated ragebait replies - pretending to be a MAGA when threatening liberals, pretending to be a liberal when threatening MAGAs.

Reported it, then sent it a "Are you a real person?" message.

Today the account is deleted. Huh.
December 18, 2024 at 7:03 PM
Possibly stupid question - Can I download the profile blurbs of all 25+ million bluesky users?

It wouldn't be that much data and could be interesting to look at.
December 11, 2024 at 5:45 PM
I can't even think of anything that would be worth me buying during Cyber Monday.

A bunch of copper 10gig ethernet stuff to make my network even more massively overkill? *shrug*
December 2, 2024 at 6:07 PM
Reposted by Hello Tanjent (Austin Appleby)
YOU FOOLS. YOU LET MOOSE.
December 1, 2024 at 7:40 PM
One million dollars is roughly equal to receiving $30 every single day of your life. That's not a crazy amount of money these days - it might not even cover your rent.
November 30, 2024 at 5:14 AM
This feed shows only posts from people you follow, without replies or reposts - bsky.app/profile/skyf...
November 29, 2024 at 3:41 AM
I'm looking for some small projects on Github that have unusual build requirements - ones that do more than "compile source, link binary". Any suggestions?

I'll port them to my homebrew build system Hancho - github.com/aappleby/han... - to see how it handles other people's weird projects.
GitHub - aappleby/hancho: A simple pleasant build system in Python.
A simple pleasant build system in Python. Contribute to aappleby/hancho development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com
November 25, 2024 at 7:33 PM
Is a Blue Sky "feed" just a regex applied to the whole post firehose?
November 25, 2024 at 6:48 AM
Who wants to see my tiny homebrew build system?
Cross-project, cross-repo, parallel builds, whole build system is a single Python file.

github.com/aappleby/han...
November 13, 2024 at 4:45 AM
Test
September 8, 2023 at 7:49 PM