Day: June 3, 2026

But Just What Is This ‘Artificial Intelligence’?

June 3, 2026 by 57 Comments

In the world of buzzwords, the acronym ‘AI’ has absolutely been the buzziest of buzzing buzzwords for at least a few years now. Where previously terms like ‘smart’ and ‘intelligent’ sufficed to promote a product, we are now being told that we are living in an age where this supposedly newfangled ‘artificial intelligence’ is doing literally everything faster and better while also curing cancer on the side. Yet, as a wise man once said: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

The obvious implication of using a term like ‘artificial intelligence’ in this manner is that it brings to mind a modern version of early last century’s ‘electronic brain’ vernacular alongside the rise of digital computers. Yet rather than electrons in vacuum tubes and semiconductors propelling us into a brave new world of super-intelligence, we now just use said devices to doom scroll and to engage in passive-aggressive online communications like the typical primate groups in a virtual jungle defending their turf.

Similarly, the term AI is massively oversold today, least of all in the inherent presupposition that we somehow have finally cracked the mystery of the brain and have created an intelligence that can go toe-to-toe with humans and even our corvid dinosaur friends. Perhaps the worst part is that there is a veritable mountain of fascinating algorithms and other constructs that help us automate many tasks today, making it somewhat rude to just give up and call everything ‘AI’ like we learned nothing from the 1980s AI craze.

So what is exactly being smoothed over by the glossy marketing of ‘everything is AI’?

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Game Dodecahedron Runs AArch64 Assembly

June 3, 2026 by No comments

Operating systems are great things to have for general purpose computing, but sometimes they can just get in the way. There’s RAM overhead and processor cycles required for all that operating, after all. For something like a game system, it seems unnecessary. The NES certainly did well enough without an OS, as did its various successors for several console generations.

[Inkbox] wanted to get back to those heady days by programming bare-metal games for a Rasberry Pi 3 that had sat unused since 2016. Games are on cartridge, running bare metal, in assembly — as God and Masayuki Uemura intended. Also, the console is a dodecahedron, because the name GameCube was already taken.

The GitHub link above doesn’t exactly have documentation, at least as of this writing, so you’ll need to watch the video to get the full details. The dodecahedron form factor might not be ideal for packing away in a bag, but as a handheld we have to admit it does look comfortable to hold. Two faces of the dodecahedron get a half-dozen buttons each, which are wired to a GPIO pin on the Pi via a Schmitt trigger for hardware debounce. Like all good consoles, it uses cartridges, these ones being adapted from SD cards on large PCBs derived from a project we featured before.

That all sounds great, but it’s the assembly programming we’re really interested in — skip to around the seven-minute mark in the video for that. Ultimately it’s a build video, so not the ideal tutorial for ARM assembly programming, but it might not be a bad introduction for some. Unfortunately you don’t get line-by-line of the PacMan game he put together — but he does have it in the repository for you to examine. The repo also has STLs if you want to make a dodecahedron of your own.

Of course he’s got a RetroPi cartridge as well, loaded with emulators, and we suspect that’s mostly how this GameDodecahedron will get used. Still, we’ll always have a soft spot for assembly code and projects that use it — be it on ARM, good old 6502, the open-source RISC V architecture, or even the absolute monster of op codes that is x86.

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A Diffraction Grating Makes This Clock Readable

June 3, 2026 by 7 Comments

We’ve seen just about every possible way to make a clock here at Hackaday over the years. So it’s rare to have a first, but here we are with [Twisted & Tinned], who’s made a novel clock with a diffraction grating.

The display of the clock looks for all the world like a jumble of LEDs, that is, until you place the grating in front of it. Those LEDs are addressable multi-color parts, and each digit is generated at a different color all on top of each other. The grating splits out these colors, resulting in a magical set of floating LED figures.

Behind those LEDs is a Pi Pico, but that’s just one of many microcontrollers that could have powered this project. It’s the use of the diffraction grating in a novel way with those LEDs that makes the difference, and we rather like it. He’s also managed to get the grating pattern in the 3D printed surround for a shimmering look, by printing directly onto a diffraction grating sheet. That in particular is a technique we’ve looked at before in detail.

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