a1k0n (u/a1k0n) - Readit News

a1k0n commented on Pure Silicon Demo Coding: No CPU, No Memory, Just 4k Gates a1k0n.net/2025/12/19/tiny... · Posted by u/a1k0n

RossBencina · 6 hours ago

I was curious about the long-term stability of the cited HAKMEM sin/cos generator. I found an overview here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3111501 (EDIT: I'm still not sure about stability, apparently it is stable in exact arithmetic under certain conditions.) Coincidentally it is related to the Verlet integration video I posted last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46253592

a1k0n · 5 hours ago

Yeah, it is exact in this specific circumstance. But yes, it's exactly the same trick; I also enjoyed that video in my Youtube recommender feed last week!

a1k0n commented on Pure Silicon Demo Coding: No CPU, No Memory, Just 4k Gates a1k0n.net/2025/12/19/tiny... · Posted by u/a1k0n

a1k0n · 9 hours ago

Ah that's what I get for self hosting. What browser?

https://youtu.be/7xPS-0nydms

a1k0n · 9 hours ago

And this thread shows all of them on real hardware: https://x.com/i/status/1992802154370011595

a1k0n commented on Pure Silicon Demo Coding: No CPU, No Memory, Just 4k Gates a1k0n.net/2025/12/19/tiny... · Posted by u/a1k0n

hackernudes · 9 hours ago

If you have flip flops, it's not "no memory".

If you have a ROM, it's not "no memory".

Needlessly pedantic!

I thought this was pretty cool but the first video didn't play. All this write up and I really just want to see the damn demo in action first! (Edit: reloaded the page and it worked. I still would like to see it on rela hardware!)

a1k0n · 9 hours ago

Ah that's what I get for self hosting. What browser?

https://youtu.be/7xPS-0nydms

Posted by u/a1k0n 11 hours ago

Pure Silicon Demo Coding: No CPU, No Memory, Just 4k Gates a1k0n.net/2025/12/19/tiny...

a1k0n commented on From ASCII to ASIC: Porting donut.c to a tiny slice of silicon a1k0n.net/2025/01/10/tiny... · Posted by u/a1k0n

still_waiting · a year ago

When are you going to post part 3 of your Hacker Challenge?

It's been fifteen years and we're still waiting. Thanks.

a1k0n · a year ago

lmao! that was so cringe I unlisted it from the main index. who is "we"?

part 3 is to find the secp256k1 private key for satoshi's bitcoins

Posted by u/a1k0n a year ago

From ASCII to ASIC: Porting donut.c to a tiny slice of silicon a1k0n.net/2025/01/10/tiny...

a1k0n commented on Attention Is Off By One evanmiller.org/attention-... · Posted by u/elbasti

sebzim4500 · 2 years ago

Don't transformers typically have a <bot> token at the beginning of the prompt? This seems equivalent to letting the network attend to this token, and produce a zero value if that's what it wants.

a1k0n · 2 years ago

Yes, it has to in fact. If you have zero context to attend to in a transformer, and you try to predict the first token, you effectively are multiplying a zero-vector by the attention head, making all tokens equally likely in the final softmax (unless the lm_head has a bias, but at least in GPT it does not).

So the <|beginning of text|> token, with no context before it, learns to predict the first-token-in-a-document distribution. That's not quite the same as predicting nothing at all.

a1k0n commented on Finding Nice MD5s Using Rust blog.youmu.moe/posts/find... · Posted by u/zdw

zamadatix · 3 years ago

The GitHub repo for this can be found here: https://github.com/johnmave126/nice-md5s. Note if you set the rustflags environment variable in CMD instead of PowerShell you don't want the quotes.

Fun little tool, get ~900M/s after a couple minutes on a 5950X. As the article says though the GPU should clobber that, anyone know of a similar tool that uses the GPU?

a1k0n · 3 years ago

For finding interesting Ethereum addresses on the GPU (uses SHA3 instead of MD5) there's a tool called profanity.

Amusingly the tool was archived by the author years ago, and just last year a stupid bug in the random initialization code was found (32 bytes of state initialized with ~31 bits of entropy), leading to ~millions of $ in stolen ETH by exploiters.

a1k0n commented on Atari 2600 hardware design: Making something out of almost nothing bigmessowires.com/2023/01... · Posted by u/zdw

a1k0n · 3 years ago

> If anyone has an idea why the TIA’s designers used LFSRs for this stuff, I’d love to hear about it.

I'm guessing because a counter would have ripple carry (i.e. five extra gate delays when rolling over from 111111 to 000000) or need extra gates for carry lookahead and an LFSR is constant-delay.

a1k0n commented on An Introduction to ASCII Ray Marching ch-st.de/its-ray-marching... · Posted by u/c-st

smcameron · 5 years ago

Reminds me of two other things:

* https://www.a1k0n.net/2011/07/20/donut-math.html * https://www.iquilezles.org/www/articles/distfunctions/distfu...

a1k0n · 5 years ago

https://github.com/a1k0n/asciitracing sort of combines those things also

u/a1k0n

KarmaCake day1876March 9, 2007

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the obfuscated C donut guy.

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