Living Computation: Robust-first programming in ULAM

What people said

sgentle · 2019-08 · Strong recommendation

I'll always upvote Dave Ackley. His vision for computing is so audacious it seems unbelievable. Global consistency? Don't need it! Determinism? An illusory safety blanket for wimps and suckers! Sure, everyone talks a big game about eventual consistency, but who's signing up to use an eventually consistent CPU? Dave freakin' Ackley, that's who. And the whole thing would sound like blue-sky bullshit except he's out there actually building it. I think the best place to start is this demo of a network switch made out of cells: [VIDEO] (and then watch the rest of the video if you liked that) His more recent videos are weekly updates on a "T2 Tile" prototype made out of 3d printed parts, custom PCBs, and like a hundred BeagleBones: [LINK] Also, all his code is on GitHub: [LINK]

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DonHopkins · 2025-07 · Recommendation

Me to, and I'm always battling with the LLM's obsession with lazily writing reams of ridiculously defensive code and masking errors in the code it generates and calls, instead of finding the root cause and solving that. (Yes, I'm referring to the code LLMs generate, not the API for generating code itself, but "fail early and spectacularly" should apply to all code and apis.) But you have to draw the line at failures that happen in the real world, or in code you can't control. I'm a huge fan of Dave Ackley's "Robust First" computing architecture, and his Moveable Feast Machine. His "Robust First" philosophy is extremely relevant and has a lot of applications to programming with LLMs, not just hardware design. Robust First | A conversation with Dave Ackley (T2 Tile Project) | Functionally Imperative Podcast [LINK] Robust-first computing: Beyond efficiency [LINK] Bottom up engineering for robust-first computing [LINK] Living Computation: Robust-first programming in ULAM [VIDEO] [LINK] DonHopkins on Feb 11, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: Growing Neural Cellular Automata: A Differentiable... Also check out the "Moveable Feast Machine", Robust-first Computing, and this Distributed City Generation example: [LINK] DonHopkins on Oct 26, 2017 | parent | favorite | on: Cryptography with Cellular Automata (1985) [pdf] A "Moveable Feast Machine" is a "Robust First" asynchronous distributed fault tolerant cellular-automata-like computer architecture. It's similar to a Cellular Au

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akkartik · 2019-07 · Reference

More links. The underlying project for programming using Cellular Automata: [VIDEO] . Previously on HN: [LINK] There's a Youtube channel: [LINK] Sources: [LINK] Paper for city generation in particular: [LINK]

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