5 ms·
I made a programming language with M&Ms
- owyn 8mo agoThis is AI slop but mildly amusing. Brainfuck did it first.
- ramon156 8mo agoWhich part made you conclude there's AI involved?
- owyn 8mo agothe bold section headers and bullet points. but who cares. i don't.
- 306bobby 8mo agoI literally write like the article on similar write ups, where do you think the AI's learned to write this way from. I really don't get the AI vibes from the actual writing of it
- willwade 8mo agoIt gave me strong vibes too. It’s the writing style. I’ve seen OpenAI write just like this. Doesn’t mean it’s bad. There’s a few other markers. Note “silly” in quotes and over use if that word. Once would be enough. But also this is very very typical. The bolting and short quite direct and a bit repetitive statements “it absolutely does not solve “dumped a bag of candy on a messy kitchen table and took a dramatic iPhone shot.” Real example programs are where the joke becomes a language I didn’t want this to stop at “hello world with candy colors.”” The over use of quoting. The bold. It’s not like a human wouldn’t write this. But it’s unusual for a human to do this imho. All the same - it feels novel. And at the end of the day it’s a neat idea. It’s just we enter this new brave world where things written like this give you the ick. “Where do the ai learn this from?” Well I wouldn’t mind betting the author asked it to be written in a hn style post.
- Timwi 8mo agoPlease re-read your comment and tell me you're not grasping at straws just to accuse someone of using AI to write.
- NetMageSCW 8mo agoYou have a problem. I would suggest thinking about it.
- sdwr 8mo agoYeah, the execution is stronger than the idea and design choices as well, which suggests heavy AI support
- Timwi 8mo agoAre you serious? We can't make headers bold or use bullet points anymore without people like you instantly calling it AI slop?
- bronlund 8mo agoIt’s funny until one guy spills his bag of M&M’s and accidentally deletes the production database.
- ramon156 8mo agoWanted to fix this bug but I ran out of green M&M's
- mufeedvh 8mo agoAuthor of this silly project here! Sharing a bit of backstory on why I decided to work on this; Firstly, “for fun” but primarily because I felt like I started losing the childlike wonder/whimsy I once had with programming. So I started this new hobby where I ask myself “can I hack on this?” upon getting/seeing something. For instance, I got this new Aula F75 keyboard (really good keyboard for the price btw, it sounds good too!) and it only has dedicated control software for Windows. So I downloaded the driver files, software executable, and manual sheet and reverse engineered the full protocol/packets and rebuilt it for my Mac. Then played snake with the backlights. Fun. Anywho, happy to see my blog on the front page. Would love to hear if anyones going through something similar or working on silly little projects! :)
- chocochunks 8mo agoDoes this work with real candy?
- mufeedvh 8mo agoYes! Just make sure to take a photo on a plain white surface is all. With: uv run mnm decompile path/to/photo.png --mode photo
- berlinquin 8mo agoFun project! I had a similar project a while back, but my medium of choice was the Uno card game. I called it UnoScript [1] and it had similar mechanisms as color was an important factor. I also ended with a stack as the main part of the language, where different colors/combinations of cards could read from/modify the stack. Interesting how similar constraints can lead to some similar design choices! [1](https://github.com/berlinquin/UnoScript https://github.com/berlinquin/UnoScript)
- AdieuToLogic 8mo agoGreat post, thanks for sharing it! When I saw the title, I thought of Lambda Calculus[0] and SKI combinators[1]. Given that there are "only six useful colors", I wonder if M&Ms could be used to implement them. 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_calculus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda_calculus 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SKI_combinator_calculus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SKI_combinator_calculus
- bigstrat2003 8mo agoIt's all fun and games until some fat bastard like me decides he wants a snack. Incidentally, which flavor? Asking for a friend.
- amelius 8mo agoWhat color is your function?
- spaqin 8mo agoThat's one language that doesn't need an external IDE for syntax highlighting.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- avatardeejay 8mo agoAm I allowed to use the term psychopath in the most loving, even inspired, way?
- dang 8mo agoPsychopath implies lack of empathy so I don't think that's quite the word you want. You could maybe repurpose "psychotic" though!
- 47282847 8mo ago“ As it turned out, there is nothing special about psychopaths when it comes to understanding or feeling empathy with others. ” https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/fulfillment-at-any-age/202508/is-it-true-that-psychopaths-lack-empathy https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/fulfillment-at-any-a... But maybe it is like so often more about the contradictory definitions of “empathy”, and capability vs. willingness.
- efilife 8mo agoHow I understand the article, is that they understand why others act in certain ways, they know the mechanism of empathy, but nothing here confirms that they are empathetic themselves. I think this article's conclusion is misleading.
- 47282847 8mo agoThere are many different definitions of what empathy means or how it “feels”. Do you (literally) feel the pain you’re inflicting on somebody else, do you know about it cognitively but not feel it, and how does any of it influence your actions.
- dang 8mo agoThat's interesting! But confusing as well. The test they reference (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy_Checklist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy_Checklist) includes lack of empathy. Are they saying that this criterion could be dropped from the test with no effect on the classification?
- filozopdasha 8mo agoit actually sounds like a fun idea, but i have one question. do you think a lightweight CNN trained on synthetic candy layouts would outperform the deterministic decoder for messy real world photos?
- mufeedvh 8mo agoYes, for messy real-world photos a lightweight CNN would probably outperform the deterministic decoder, but I’d still use it in a hybrid pipeline with classic CV for blob detection and deterministic logic for reconstructing the actual program.
- swaraj 8mo agoThis is what HN is all about
- MASNeo 8mo agoThank you.Awesome project! Unfortunately I think you have given my kids one more hard to refuse reason to get more candy: I need more storage.
- nathaah3 8mo agothis is so cool!
- mufeedvh 8mo agothank you! :)
- MostlyStable 8mo agoNot really the same, but made me think of this classic xkcd: https://xkcd.com/505/ https://xkcd.com/505/
- Timwi 8mo agoWill read this later, but in the meantime, if you're into “physical programming”, check out efghij: https://esolangs.org/wiki/Efghij https://esolangs.org/wiki/Efghij
- Surac 8mo agooh man the program just melted in my mouth
- xnorswap 8mo agoI can't see it explained, why/where is 000000 defined as newline?
- rhoopr 8mo agoLooking forward to the first LLM&M coding agent
- tapeloop 8mo agobut can it run Doom?