Judge Rules Apple Executive Lied Under Oath, Makes Criminal Contempt Referral (thebignewsletter.com)

It's not just "Turing complete, job done"; I've tried to make it actually practical. Devices are compact, e.g. you can fit a binary adder into a 3cm square. It took me nearly two years and dozens of different approaches.

There's a sequence of interactive tutorials to try out, demo videos, and a janky simulator. I've also sent out a few prototype kits and have some more ready to go.

Please ask me anything, I will talk about this for hours.

-- Jesse

Comments (15)

cuken · 27m ago

This is really really cool! The physicality of it is special and can be a huge help with some people to gain an understanding of whats actually happening on the micro scale. Reminds me very much of "Spintronics", a game that holds a special place in my heart as I could teach a traditionally conceptual topic to my kids.

Are the designs you've come up with 3D printed? I feel like there's a huge possibility of community advancement into this ecosystem (fully appreciating you should make a return on all of your time and creativity).

Thanks again for sharing something so cool.

BlimpSpike · 30m ago

How loud is it? Would it disrupt the whole office if I had it on my desk and occasionally played with it?

Very cool, I'll check back for the Kickstarter!

uncial · 14m ago

With the FDM-printed prototype version there's a noticeable "a mechanism is occuring" sound, largely due to layer lines. Tbh it's not too loud rn but I'm confident we can get it smooth and whisper-quiet using any vaguely sane manufacturing technique (defaulting to injection moulded ABS but we have some options). The marbles/roons themselves are silent, it's just a question of getting the barrel cams to play nice.

uticus · 1h ago

> ...the gears have a layer of phase baffles (I don’t know the technical term). These physically block the gears from connecting until they’re perfectly synced up...

perhaps the correct term is "key" [0]? only thing i could find to contribute to this masterful project, by pointing out unimportant details like this.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_(engineering)

uncial · 56m ago

That sounds like the right general category, but maybe not specific enough? We could call it an Uticus Key and see if we can get the name to stick, that might be funny. (Thanks for the kind words!)

uticus · 1h ago

btw love the about page

> Do you want to work with a company servicing 6,000 Clients across 8 Different Countries, with turnover of more than 125 Million USD?...Are you looking for a Proven Track Record delivered by an Award-Winning Multinational Conglomerate with over Two Hundred Years of Business Experience?...If not, whomtech has you covered.

proaralyst · 1h ago

This is cool! The simulator was useful for understanding what was going on, I hadn't realised until I watched a few that the roons can push marbles out in between squares.

uncial · 1h ago

Thanks! Glad to hear the simulator was worthwhile, took me ages to hack it into shape. I did actually experiment with adding markings on the edges of the path roons, so that when you put them together, the "phantom channel" becomes visible. Ended up looking pretty cluttered though so I scrapped it.

Johnbot · 1h ago

This is really neat.

Is there any use for something like a hopper that dispenses new marbles continuously?

uncial · 1h ago

Absolutely yes! I prototyped a hopper peripheral that doubled as marble storage. It hooked into the gear grid and used the rotation to drive a helical lift to carry the marbles up to the surface, where they'd enter the edge of an adjacent disk. I ended up setting it aside for 2 reasons: 1) Lack of time -- sad to say but I had to focus on getting the roons core ready. Too much to do! 2) The HDD peripheral -- this is a WIP that compactly stores and emits bitstreams. The way it's designed, it can be set to "reservoir" mode, which emits the continuous marble bitstream like you suggest. I figured it'd be redundant to have both a hopper and HDD, so I scrapped the hopper for now.

shafoshaf · 1h ago

All with a reference to the Rockwell Turbo Encabulator! Awesome.

uncial · 1h ago

I'm grateful to Rockwell for their excellent research, but I think they really dropped the ball on side fumbling -- any competitive encabulator in 2025 really needs to be using bifurcated resonance.

sriram_malhar · 1h ago

Good God! This is marvelous!

convolvatron · 1h ago

you implied that there were scaling problems. it would be really fun and indstructive if one could use enough nodes to bulid a simple store and von neuman machine with instruction decode. but this seems like it would take a 10x10 array of your panels. do you think you can push this architecture that far?

uncial · 1h ago

Yes, fantastic question! 10x10 is actually way more than we need -- don't know the minimum but I suspect 2x2 is possible. The interactive tutorials sketch out an approach to this. My instinct is to use SAM with timers for memory/program, then there's a couple of approaches in the tutorial for the instruction processor. Toying with the idea of an OISC to minimise space requirements. Tho we can always add a motor to the encabulator if we need to drive a larger grid!

Redis is open source again (antirez.com)

The Gang Has a Mid-Life Crisis (chris-martin.org)

Claude can now connect to your world (anthropic.com)

We identified a North Korean hacker who tried to get a job at Kraken (blog.kraken.com)

A faster way to copy SQLite databases between computers (alexwlchan.net)

Dopamine signals when a fear can be forgotten (picower.mit.edu)

Llasa: Llama-Based Speech Synthesis (llasatts.github.io)

Show HN: Mechanical Computer Kit (Roons) (whomtech.com)

Waypoint Transit (YC W25) Is Hiring a Founding Engineer (workatastartup.com)

Millihertz 5 Mechanical Computer (srimech.com)

Fivetran to acquire Census (fivetran.com)

Linkwarden: FOSS self-hostable bookmarking with AI-tagging and page archival (linkwarden.app)

Judge Rules Apple Executive Lied Under Oath, Makes Criminal Contempt Referral (thebignewsletter.com)

Starting July 1, Academic Publishers Can't Paywall NIH-Funded Research (nih.gov)

Office is too slow, so Microsoft is making it load at Windows startup (pcworld.com)

AI code review: Should the author be the reviewer? (greptile.com)

Trust Me, I'm Local: Chrome Extensions, MCP, and the Sandbox Escape (blog.extensiontotal.com)

How to vibe code for free: Running Qwen3 on your Mac, using MLX (localforge.dev)

Git Changesets (github.com)

108B Pixel Scan of Johannes Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring (hirox-europe.com)

Show HN: Robot Unlock – an open-ended programming game/zachlike (store.steampowered.com)

International Workers' Day (en.wikipedia.org)

The Brief Origins of May Day (archive.iww.org)

The cat that wouldn't die (aeon.co)

The term "vegetative electron microscopy" keeps showing up in scientific papers (sciencealert.com)

Show HN: Hyperparam: OSS Tools for Exploring Datasets Locally in the Browser (hyperparam.app)

Mercury: Commercial-scale diffusion language model (inceptionlabs.ai)

Arizona laptop farmer pleads guilty for funneling $17M to Kim Jong Un (theregister.com)

The one interview question that will protect you from North Korean fake workers (theregister.com)

Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds (wsj.com)

Pwning the Ladybird Browser (jessie.cafe)

'ProtectEU' security strategy: a step further towards a digital dystopian future (edri.org)

How the US defense secretary circumvents official DoD communications equipment (electrospaces.net)

Espressif's ESP32-C5 Is Now in Mass Production (espressif.com)

The complicated circuitry for the 386 processor's registers (righto.com)

Why some Mac apps launch slowly: A follow-up (lapcatsoftware.com)

How the Water System Works (thenewatlantis.com)

When ChatGPT Broke an Entire Field: An Oral History (quantamagazine.org)

All four major web browsers are about to lose 80% of their funding (danfabulich.medium.com)

Linux Kernel Exploitation: Attack of the Vsock (hoefler.dev)

Zuckerberg: "The average American has 3 friends, but has demand for 15" (twitter.com)

I created Perfect Wiki and reached $250k in annual revenue without investors (habr.com)

Xiaomi MiMo Reasoning Model (github.com)

Vanguard 50-year anniversary CEO letter (corporate.vanguard.com)

84% of the coral reefs hit by worst bleaching event on record (apnews.com)

Zhaoxin's KX-7000 (chipsandcheese.com)

Home washing machines fail to remove important pathogens from textiles (medicalxpress.com)

All roses were once yellow (phys.org)

I Found Malware in a BeamNG Mod (lemonyte.com)

Thinking Forth (2011) (thinking-forth.sourceforge.net)

Show HN: Mechanical Computer Kit (Roons)

Comments (15)