Forth is popular on small computers because it is simple to implement, yet quite powerful. But what happens when you really need to shrink it? Well, if your target is the 6502, there’s milliForth-6502. This is a port of milliForth, which is a fork of sectorforth. The sectorforth project set the standard, implementing a Forth […]
It’s traditional to launch new software on April Fool’s Day, which is when we heard that Rockbox 4.0 has been released. But, in this case, the venerable MP3 firmware actually did update after a long absence. It’s great to see that good old Rockbox is still kicking along. We first mentioned Rockbox here at Hackaday approaching […]
This week, the hackerverse was full of “vibe coding”. If you’re not caught up on your AI buzzwords, this is the catchy name coined by [Andrej Karpathy] that refers to basically just YOLOing it with AI coding assistants. It’s the AI-fueled version of typing in what you want to StackOverflow and picking the top answers. […]
An occasional series of mine on these pages has been Daily Drivers, in which I try out operating systems from the point of view of using them for my everyday Hackaday work. It has mostly featured esoteric or lesser-used systems, some of which have been unexpected gems and others have been not quite ready for […]
With all the attention on LLMs (Large Language Models) and image generators lately, it’s nice to see some of the more niche and unusual applications of machine learning. GARF (Generalizeable 3D reAssembly for Real-world Fractures) is one such project. GARF may play fast and loose with acronym formation, but it certainly knows how to be picky […]
Have you ever felt the urge to make your own private binary format for use in Linux? Perhaps you have looked at creating the smallest possible binary when compiling a project, and felt disgusted with how bloated the ELF format is? If you are like [Brian Raiter], then this has led you down many rabbit […]
Incomplete JSON (such as from a log that terminates unexpectedly) doesn’t parse cleanly, which means anything that usually prints JSON nicely, won’t. Frustration with this is what led [Simon Willison] to make The Incomplete JSON pretty printer, a single-purpose web tool that pretty-prints JSON regardless of whether it’s complete or not. Making a tool to […]
Lots of people swear by large-language model (LLM) AIs for writing code. Lots of people swear at them. Still others may be planning to exploit their peculiarities, according to [Joe Spracklen] and other researchers at USTA. At least, the researchers have found a potential exploit in ‘vibe coding’. Everyone who has used an LLM knows […]
Once the domain of esoteric scientific and business computing, floating point calculations are now practically everywhere. From video games to large language models and kin, it would seem that a processor without floating point capabilities is pretty much a brick at this point. Yet the truth is that integer-based approximations can be good enough to […]
3D scanning is becoming much more accessible, which means it’s more likely that the average hacker will use it to solve problems — possibly odd ones. That being the case, a handy tool to have in one’s repertoire is a way to work with point clouds. We’ll explain why in a moment, but that’s where […]