13 replies
1d2h
The idea of buffering data by transmitting it somewhere far, bouncing it off a moon or whatnot, and using that distance of radio waves as your memory is my favourite thing ever.
8 replies
1d1h
is there a TL;DW on this? I don't have the patience for these long drawn out videos with bad audio.
4 replies
21h6m
Unfortunately no. With a short attention span, you will just have to miss out on what makes his videos awesome. For this type of thing, making it accessible for you would ruin the magic.
2 replies
12h43m
The commenter could have ADHD or some other disadvantage outside of their control. Imagine applying what you said to someone in a wheelchair—“making it accessible to you would ruin the magic.” Gross.
1 replies
12h38m
Huh? Making many things wheelchair accessible would ruin them. Stad for wheelchair people, but not a bad thing to acknowledge... Right?
0 replies
11h11m
Why are you asking me again when I’ve already stated my position?
0 replies
3h53m
So I sat down and watched the entire thing. I didn't find it awesome or magical. Just annoyed that he stretched a concept that could be explained in 60 to 120 seconds into a whole lot of unentertaining, onanistic nonsense.
0 replies
23h41m
Try it, or work towards it as a goal
0 replies
23h45m
It's very hard to summarize
0 replies
1d
Yes, previously submitted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41159075
5 replies
1d2h
I wonder how many people here are discovering tom7 for the first time beacuse of this video.
1 replies
23h28m
#metoo
It’s like when you think of something that will never exist, because it is just too absurd. However, this guy not only has an even more absurd idea, he also brings it into existence and shows why it’s a great idea to build a sustainable future!
#nohate
0 replies
21h2m
Wait until you encounter his executable research paper about executable research papers.
The NAND gates video is probably the closest humanity will ever get to perfection though.
0 replies
1h19m
I've never heard of this guy but that was fantastic. Subscribed!
0 replies
1d
Does he always have so much vocal fry?
0 replies
1d1h
Me!
4 replies
19h57m
It'd be nice if there were a topic summary. What is this about? I'm not going to devote part of my day reading/watching something about chainsaws to understand what the topic is
2 replies
19h36m
Tom7's relatively small oeuvre of videos are frequently re-posted here and just as frequently re-upvoted, and they deserve to be.
Discovering what the video is about as it discursively unfolds is part of the joy. There comes a moment in every video (multiple moments, even) where you'll suddenly be like, "wait, I can't believe what you appear to be suggesting", only to find out that not only is he suggesting it, he actually implemented it. There are few video creators who are as attuned to the hacker mindset as Tom7; I decline to summarize and instead strongly recommend you watch it and find out for yourself. It's a video about the logistics of juggling a trillion chainsaws, in a manner of speaking.
1 replies
19h19m
Your comment makes it sound even less appealing since I avoid getting nerd sniped by my hacker mindset and go on to topics that actually interest me
0 replies
19h7m
I don’t think Tom7 videos will ‘nerd snipe’ you. Nobody has watched a Tom7 video and thought ‘wait, I need to implement something like that’.
They will give you some things to think about, some new metaphors to use (you clearly like geeky creators who give you metaphors to employ since you are aware of XKCD’s ‘nerd sniping’), and they will entertain you.
0 replies
19h31m
Throwing chainsaws in space is probably a more reasonable "juggle" that for example using blockchains as mass storage. It's also probably cheaper for the environment to boot.
3 replies
1d
Do yourself a favor and watch the entire back catalog. Not sure there’s anyone more creative than tom7 working right now.
0 replies
18h13m
Seconded. My first experience with Tom7 was the "Super Mario Bros. is Easy with Lexicographic Orderings and Time Travel..." I've been hooked ever since.
0 replies
16h47m
100% agree. This guy is next level.
0 replies
20h20m
SIGBOVIK is always fantastic, and Tom7 is consistently the star of the show
2 replies
1d2h
1 replies
1d
Fair, but Tom7's video presentations are always really fun too.
0 replies
23h42m
That said, if Tom7 wasn’t meticulous about typesetting all his results, we would never have been blessed with https://youtu.be/Y65FRxE7uMc
2 replies
1d2h
The PDF a couple of weeks ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41159075 Not sure if that counts as a dupe.
Also, it needs [2002] tagging.
0 replies
1d2h
*2022
0 replies
1d1h
Yeah I submitted that. Why is it #1? Should I flag it?
1 replies
6h6m
This is the first time I encounter a tom7 content. I expected a fun, nerdy video.
I walk away with goosebumps, cathartic feelings. I didn't see it coming how the end switches to a pretty serious topic. The whole composition is award winning in my mind, but then he also put a ton of engineering effort in it, at a level of quality that I could at most wish that I could achieve in a lifetime.
Wow.
0 replies
4h49m
My favourite feature of this video is that he uses the "Network Block Device Kit" to make a kit of 3 drives, each using one of those words as the main point:
"Network" storage, "Block" storage, and "Device" storage.
1 replies
1d2h
this lives in my head rent free for the rest of my life
0 replies
21h27m
Haha..., storing data volatile, with not good retrieval success, slow speed in thousands of heads... I wonder if you could make a harder drive out of this approach... And how much you could store there. And does it benefit society?
Like automatic phone calls..., texts... :-D
0 replies
1d
I remember lcamtuf mentioning very similar concept ca. 2003.
In his version you would partition secret data and send it out to non existing email addresses, just to get them bounced back within a couple of days.
If you want to get your secrets back together you would simply start gathering appropriate parts (you need to keep track of all the chunks somewhere), otherwise you'd simply send them to another non existing email address.
0 replies
13h38m
The concept of storing data within the transfer process like that heavily reminded me of a short story that invoked a very similar idea, Valuable Humans in Transit by qntm: https://qntm.org/transi
0 replies
1d
I really need to add Tom's plugin to nbdkit upstream ...
0 replies
3h48m
The basic premise of the ping-based drive, taking advantage of ephemeral media i.e. transmission time of a packet, was the idea behind clacks (https://github.com/AlexanderParker/clacks). I got excited to see someone else had a similar idea and explored it.
My approach was more as a p2p system of mutual random packet bouncing rather than using ICMP ping.
Edit to add: I simulated a network of peers and rendered some videos of a single message propagating through the network: https://github.com/AlexanderParker/clacks-tests/blob/main/pr...
Recovering your file in this way would take some time... "Eventually" you'll get it back...
0 replies
21h26m
41 comments, 2 years ago:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
0 replies
1h51m
GNU Terry Pratchett
0 replies
7h51m
Finally, I understand what the Dark Net is :D
0 replies
16h23m
126egv
0 replies
22h58m
Some of these ideas are as old as time but the comic seriousness is great.
Reminds me of older analog delay circuits where the signal was sent as a sound wave in glass IIRC ... with multiple taps for different delays.
EDIT: Here's a cool example that maybe warrants its own submission: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/glass-ultrasonic-dela...
0 replies
32m
Need to praise the inception here - the whole time I was watching it, I was feeling clever, thinking "all of these silly and wasteful methods for storing data are still pretty efficient compared to 'blockchain'".
Then it turns out that that that was secretly the whole point :)
There's a great sci-fi short story (well, two, I guess) that I can recommend based on this - although, knowing what you said is a slight spoiler for them.
Please do!!
One of them is https://qntm.org/transi. I don't know about the other.
That's one of the ones I was thinking of!
Another one is "The Hundred Light Year Diary", by Greg Egan.
Unfortunately due to free-space path loss limiting the Shannon-Hartley channel capacity, the total amount of information storable using this method asymptotically approaches zero for large distances.
For reference, the combined formulas are C=d×B×log_2(1+(Dc÷4πdf)²×S÷N)÷c. And lim->∞ d×ln(1+1÷d²) unfortunately = 0. (Curiously, attempting to store more information by increasing bandwidth -- and thus center frequency -- suffers the same limitation.)
(Wolfram Alpha isn't forthcoming yet with a closed-form solution for the optimal distance...)
One of the things preventing us from seeing dinosaur images reflected back to us from the objects at 33Mly+
The soft limit is the size of a solar system, a practical one is the furthest and the biggest body in it, so... Jupiter/Saturn?
Sort of like a really, really long delay-line memory tube, it's just mostly-vacuum instead of mostly-mercury...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-line_memory
OTOH, you’d be building one of the largest computers in the solar system. Count me in.
Delay-line memory used this concept in a variety of ways, such as by bouncing slow sound waves around a chamber and by transmitting twists along a long coiled wire.
Used to be a common thing for storing analog signals in the past :)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay-line_memory
Except access times are not so good, generally.
In Conway's Game of Life, the first self-constructing machine used this principle. It has two construction arms, and the recipe for them to create new copies of themselves is encoded in gliders and bounced back-and-forth between them. This turned out to be much simpler than building any kind of storage device.
https://conwaylife.com/wiki/Gemini