Neat and Scruffy
A couple years back, I wrote about my experience in professional life without a degree, and the challenges it posed. At 50 years old, I recently completed a master’s degree in computer science at Dartmouth College, with a focus including Formal Methods and Artificial Intelligence. The way Dartmouth is organized, I was able to integrate some Electrical Engineering courses into my academic work as…
“Brothers and sisters, this is our God: Jesus, King of Peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war. He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.” – Pope Leo XIV The Military Religious Freedom Foundation reports receiving hundreds of complaints from U.S. service members alleging commanders have framed current military operations in Iran in terms of…
The photo above isn’t an emulator screenshot, it’s a photo of the actual Zelda game played through my system on an HDMI monitor (any moire effect is a result of taking a picture of the monitor screen itself). For several months, I’ve been playing with the c0pperdrag0n PPU Digitizer ; I’ve had a lot of success soldering it into a lot of devices it was never originally targeting: an early Famicom, a…
Warning: Attempt this at your own peril. While busy with class this past term, I accidentally let the battery in my Nikon Z9 run down. Usually, batteries are only mostly dead, and will charge back up. This one was beyond mostly dead. Nikon’s charger failed to recognize it at all, and it will blink furiously to let you know that you should immediately go to their website and purchase a new battery…
Running the XGecu T76 chip programmer with x86 emulation has been miserably slow, even on my M4 MacBook Pro, and so I finally took some time to figure out how to get it working on Windows 11 ARM in Parallels on Apple Silicon. There wasn’t any information online about this, except for one person who had some luck with Zadig, but had no idea what they actually did. I’ve documented the entire process…
There’s an old 1985 sci-fi series I remember watching as a kid. In Otherworld S1E1 , the Sterling family, on vacation in Egypt, winds up in a parallel dimension where they encounter a civilization of self-evolved AI androids. Parts of the episode were amazingly spot on to how today’s LLMs are playing out. In the episode, the teenage son (Trace) falls in love with an AI, and the android itself is…
With several different blog posts scattered about, I thought it best to put a link to all of the arcade hardware hacking material in one place, so here it is. Arcade Hardware Hacking: Part I Arcade Hardware Hacking: Part II Arcade Hardware Hacking: Part III Arcade Board CAD Files Read More
Now that I’ve cleared the appropriate IP hurdles with my employer, I’m able to make the CAD files available for the arcade boards I’ve blogged about recently. Included in this repo are adapters for: Atari Multi-System JAMMA Edge TRON / Discs of TRON RoadBlasters Spy Hunter Universal JAMMA Edge Williams Multi-System JAMMA Edge New: Arduino-Compatible Microcontroller Edges (Atmel 328) I haven’t…
Spy Hunter (Steering Yoke, Gear Shift Latch, and Lamp Conversion) Arcade Hardware Hacking: Part I Arcade Hardware Hacking: Part II Spy Hunter is a well loved classic, and by far the most challenging and ambitious title I have worked on to date. While the purists will insist that the only way to enjoy the game is on the original arcade hardware, many (many!) adaptations to various consoles have…
RoadBlasters (Steering Yoke Conversion) Arcade Hardware Hacking: Part I Arcade Hardware Hacking: Part III Temple of Doom was a great introduction to the Atari System 1 logic board, and as it turned out was very easy to adapt to the JAMMA standard. With the exception of inverting the directional buttons (and the ridiculous number of repairs I had to make to the board), everything was super straight…
Temple of Doom and TRON to JAMMA Conversion Arcade Hardware Hacking: Part II Arcade Hardware Hacking: Part III I’ve been dabbling a bit in amateur EE this summer as my interest in rehabbing arcade games has recently hit a peak. It started with this 40-year old trashed Indiana Jones: Temple of Doom Atari System 1 board I found for cheap. If the seller says, “was working last time I played it, but…
Empathy is often defined as understanding another person’s experience by imagining oneself in that other person’s situation: One understands the other person’s experience as if it were being experienced by the self, but without the self actually experiencing it. Hodges and Myers, Encyclopedia of Social Psychology Asimov’s Three Laws have long governed behavior for robotics, in both science fiction…
One of the focus areas of my graduate research is artificial intelligence. In my foray into adversarial game theory, I became acquainted with AI’s value alignment problem firsthand. In the development of a strategy-theoretic AI Chess agent project, I decided that it should lose points for allowing its pieces to be in jeopardy. The change resulted in the opposite effect I had hoped – significant…
As long as a branch of science offers an abundance of problems, so long it is alive; a lack of problems foreshadows extinction or the cessation of independent development. David Hilbert, 1900 As a self-educated professional working with the best in the field, I think I’m supposed to tell you that you don’t need college to be successful. My journey has been an unconventional one for sure. Growing…
Much of what we perceive about others in the workplace is their performatory character – what others are inviting you to believe about themselves; it’s an attempt to become the idealized version of ourselves by acting the part. Most of us are very competent in the field, but even still everyone gets imposter’s syndrome from time to time. For the self-taught professionals in tech, it can be the…
Mechanical arts are of ambiguous use, serving as well for hurt as for remedy. Francis Bacon It’s been a long time since I’ve worked in the field of ML (or what some call AI), and we’ve come a long way from simple text classification to what’s being casually called generative AI today. While the technology has made many advances, the foundational concepts of machine learning have remained analogous…
How can I curse those whom God has not cursed? How can I denounce those whom the Lord has not denounced? I have received a command to bless; he has blessed, and I cannot change it. Numbers 23 Christians are expected to be a people who bless. We were commanded so, in fact. Luke 6:28 goes so far as to instruct Christians to “bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you”; Romans 12:14…
I’ve recently written about the problems with social media in provoking speech and conformity, as well as the cult phenomenon that social media companies capitalize on. Elon Musk’s recent purchase of Twitter seems an apropos time to address the direct suppression of free speech. Among Musk’s poorly thought out misadventures, he recently and rightfully reinstated the Twitter accounts of several…
The priest shall bring her and have her stand before the Lord. Then he shall take some holy water in a clay jar and put some dust from the tabernacle floor into the water. After the priest has had the woman stand before the Lord, he shall loosen her hair and place in her hands the reminder-offering, the grain offering for jealousy, while he himself holds the bitter water that brings a curse. Then…
In the beginning wickedness did not exist. Nor indeed does it exist even now in those who are holy, nor does it in any way belong to their nature. Athanasius, Against the Heathen I’ve devoted much of the past 30 years as an evangelical Christian “layperson” to Christian studies to try and become an educated one. Greek, theology, the patristics, and Christian history should be in the wheelhouse of…