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Accidentally Turing-Complete

https://beza1e1.tuxen.de/articles/accidentally_turing_complete.html
25•bschne•10mo ago

Comments

panstromek•10mo ago
Nice list. Some of those are arguably not accidental, TypeScript type system seems kinda obvious to be turing complete when it tries to describe dynamically typed langauage.
WalterGR•10mo ago
x86 MOV instruction: “The mov-only DOOM [game] renders approximately one frame every 7 hours, so playing this version requires somewhat increased patience.”
a_cardboard_box•10mo ago
Rule 110 is only Turing-Complete if you have an infinitely large array of cells, and are able to initialize it with an infinite repeating pattern. If I'm not mistaken, HTML+CSS can only do a fixed-sized array.

With a Turing-Complete language, if a program runs out of memory on one machine, you can run the same code on a bigger machine without modifying it, and it can use the additional memory. With fixed-length rule 110, you need to modify the code if you want to use more memory.

256_•10mo ago
This is addressed in the second paragraph of TFA:

"Stuff which is somehow limited (stack overflows, arbitrary configuration, etc) is still considered Turing complete, since all "physical" Turing machines are resource limited."

In my opinion, worrying about infinite memory, in regards to Turing completeness, makes the task of implementing computation much less interesting.

Also, I'm pretty sure CSS only does one generation (or a finite number of them) before stopping anyway.

256_•10mo ago
Logic in Doom is particularly interesting to me. Apparently you can fit ~64k logic gates in a map (using the method described). From [1]:

"As the DOOM engine was not designed to be an interpreter, there are some constraints on our programs written against it. The biggest one is how large our programs can be. Since each gate uses at least one tag, we can use this as a metric to derive an upper-bound on the size of a program. As the DOOM engine uses 16-bit tags, this means we can have, at most, 65535 gates. This is not a particularly large number. We may be able to implement a very small CPU but this limit will be hit pretty quickly I believe."

The z80 had ~8,500 transistors. The 8086 had ~29,000 (checking Wikipedia). You could get far fewer if you use a 1-bit microarchitecture, I'm sure. I think there was a DEC (PDP?) computer that used that trick to have a really low transistor count, but I don't remember what it was called.

The real problem is RAM; for this you may as well cheat and modify Doom's code to add a RAM chip, and I/O while you're at it.

You could create a CPU in Doom implementing an architecture for which a C compiler exists, capable of compiling Doom, and run it in the CPU in Doom. For "reasonable" speed you'd have to do more than one simulation step per frame render (in the host Doom). If you ran it for long enough maybe you could get a full frame of Doom in Doom.

[1]: https://calabi-yau.space/blog/doom.html

karmakaze•10mo ago
Doom running in TypeScript static type checker[0].

> half trillion lines of types totaling 177 terabytes ran through the type checker around the clock for 12 days to get the first frame

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43184291

karmakaze•10mo ago
My favorite one is Conway's Game of Life. It's perhaps the least surprising one, but it's also the most visually appealing. Really like this video that leads up to making the Game of Life in itself[0]. It's something you can show a non-technical person and they can get a sense of how crazy it is that something so simple can do anything.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kk2MH9O4pXY

Vatican Rebukes Peter Thiel's Antichrist Lectures in Rome

https://www.thenerdreich.com/peter-thiels-antichrist-circus-smacked-down-in-rome/
1•vrganj•1m ago•0 comments

Brezn – Decentralized Local Communication

https://github.com/DaBena/Brezn
1•brezn•2m ago•1 comments

Google Shakes Up Its Browser Agent Team Amid OpenClaw Craze

https://www.wired.com/story/google-shakes-up-project-mariner-team-web-browsing-agents/
1•bookofjoe•3m ago•1 comments

Rust Project Perspectives on AI

https://nikomatsakis.github.io/rust-project-perspectives-on-ai/feb27-summary.html
1•vinhnx•4m ago•0 comments

A man used AI to help make a cancer vaccine for his dog

https://theconversation.com/a-man-used-ai-to-help-make-a-cancer-vaccine-for-his-dog-an-oncologist...
1•conferza•5m ago•0 comments

Rendering complex scripts in terminal and OSC 66

https://thottingal.in/blog/2026/03/22/complex-scripts-in-terminal/
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Enigmalite: An Unusual Mineral Phenomenon

https://www.enigmalite.com
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Impl Drop for Tensor

https://flodl.dev/blog/impl-drop-for-tensor
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Software 2.0: Code Is Cheap, Good Taste Is Not

https://aaronstannard.com/beginning-of-software-2.0/
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0.1 and 0.2 = 0.3, – a two-strand number type for Python

https://github.com/JustNothingJay/mobius-number
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The Ollama browser extension I made to teach myself Dutch

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Show HN: I redesigned Activity Monitor's dock icon to look native

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Asteroid Spinning Impossibly Fast

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Autoresearch-genealogy: Structured prompts for AI-assisted genealogy research

https://github.com/mattprusak/autoresearch-genealogy
1•helsinkiandrew•30m ago•0 comments

Steve Jobs, speech at the Apple campus (1999) [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoM2Y2KO6kU
1•tagyro•30m ago•0 comments

Debunking the Gold Standard (2015)

http://greyenlightenment.com/2015/06/21/debunking-the-gold-standard/
1•chistev•32m ago•0 comments

Little Known Development Methods (2009)

https://lr0.org/blog/p/lkdm/
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Hormuz Minesweeper – Are you tired of winning?

https://hormuz.pythonic.ninja/
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Skyscanner Drops

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Lord of Light

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_of_Light
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Microbenchmarking Chipsets for Giggles

https://chipsandcheese.com/p/microbenchmarking-chipsets-for-giggles
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Why AI is Making Your RAM more expensive

https://adlrocha.substack.com/p/adlrocha-why-ai-is-making-your-ram
1•adlrocha•44m ago•1 comments

To Understand AI's Future, Read Dickens, Bronte, Industrial Revolution Novels

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Kbooboo: Find Linux kernel maintainer contacts from dmesg stack trace

https://git.infradead.org/~rw/kcontact/
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Microsoft Azure Monitor alerts abused for callback phishing attacks

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1•01-_-•52m ago•0 comments

Apple hasn't caught up to MacBook Neo demand yet

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2•01-_-•54m ago•0 comments

Why Gen Z Abandoned Morals for Money [video] (Mentions Cluely and Clavicular)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCSMceQPJcY
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AI is programmed to hijack human empathy – we must resist that

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00834-z
1•XzetaU8•58m ago•1 comments