this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2024
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fuck yeah! this sounds like the kind of thing that’d be incredibly beautiful if done on the macro scale (if that’s possible) — I love computational art projects that clearly show their mechanism of action. it’s unfortunate that a majority of hardware designers have a “what’s the point of this, it’s not generating value for shareholders” attitude, because that’s the point! I will make a uniquely beautiful computing machine and it won’t have any residual value any capitalist assholes can extract other than the beauty!
if I ever finish this thing, I should make a coprocessor that can trace its closure lists live as it reduces lambda calculus terms and render them as fractal art to a screen. I think that’d be fun to watch.
Yep. I love beautiful machines with beautiful action in the same way.
One of my favourites I’ve seen was a clock with a tilt table, switchback running tracks running widthwise across that table, and switches by the track ends. A small ball would run across the track for 60s until it hits the switch, which would cause a lever system to flip the orientation of the tilt table (starting the ball movement the other way).
Saw it in the one London collection of typically-stolen antiquities, I don’t recall the origin of it.
For the processor: yep, something larger is the intent, but I think I’d have to start with a model scale first just to suss out some practical problems. And then when scaling it, other problems. God knows if I’d want to make this “you can walk in it” scale, but I’ll see 😅