11 comments

  • nineteen999 55 minutes ago
    This couldn't be more perfectly timed .. I have an Unreal Engine game with both VT100 terminals (for running coding agents) and Z80 emulators, and a serial bridge that allows coding agents to program the CP/M machines:

    https://i.imgur.com/6TRe1NE.png

    Thank you for posting! It's unbelievable how someone sometimes just drops something that fits right into what you're doing. However bizarre it seems.

    • quesomaster9000 4 minutes ago
      Oh dear, it seems we've... somehow been psychically linked...

      I developed a browser-based CP/M emulator & IDE: https://lockboot.github.io/desktop/

      I was going to post that instead, but wanted a 'cool demo' instead, and fell down the rabbit hole.

  • vedmakk 56 minutes ago
    If one would train an actual secret (e.g. a passphrase) into such a model, that a user would need to guess by asking the right questions. Could this secret be easily reverse engineered / inferred by having access to models weights - or would it be safe to assume that one could only get to the secret by asking the right questions?
    • Kiboneu 20 minutes ago
      I don’t know, but your question reminds me of this paper which seems to address it on a lower level: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.06974

      “Planting Undetectable Backdoors in Machine Learning Models”

      “ … On the surface, such a backdoored classifier behaves normally, but in reality, the learner maintains a mechanism for changing the classification of any input, with only a slight perturbation. Importantly, without the appropriate "backdoor key", the mechanism is hidden and cannot be detected by any computationally-bounded observer. We demonstrate two frameworks for planting undetectable backdoors, with incomparable guarantees. …”

    • ronsor 20 minutes ago
      > this secret be easily reverse engineered / inferred by having access to models weights

      It could with a network this small. More generally this falls under "interpretability."

  • a_t48 29 minutes ago
    Nice - that will fit on a Gameboy cartridge, though bank switching might make it super terrible to run. Each bank is only 16k. You can have a bunch of them, but you can only access one bank at a time (well, technically two - bank 0 is IIRC always accessible).
  • roygbiv2 59 minutes ago
    Awesome. I've just designed and built my own z80 computer, though right now it has 32kb ROM and 32kb RAM. This will definitely change on the next revision so I'll be sure to try it out.
    • wewewedxfgdf 37 minutes ago
      RAM is very expensive right now.
      • tgv 18 minutes ago
        We're talking kilobytes, not gigabytes. And it isn't DDR5 either.
  • Zee2 1 hour ago
    This is super cool. Would love to see a Z80 simulator set up with these examples to play with!
  • pdyc 53 minutes ago
    interesting, i am wondering how far can it go if we remove some of these limitations but try to solve some extremely specific problem like generating regex based on user input? i know small models(270M range) can do that but can it be done in say < 10MB range?
    • Waterluvian 6 minutes ago
      Generate an LLM that is designed to solve one extremely specific problem: answering the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything.

      Even with modern supercomputing the computation would be outpaced by the heat death of the universe, so token output must be limited to a single integer.

  • dirkt 45 minutes ago
    Eliza's granddaughter.
  • Dwedit 55 minutes ago
    In before AI companies buy up all the Z80s and raise the prices to new heights.
  • jasonjmcghee 1 hour ago
    For future projects and/or for this project, there are many LLMs available more than good enough to generate that kind of synthetic data (20 Qs) with permissive terms of use. (So you don’t need to stress about breaking TOS / C&D etc)
  • alfiedotwtf 1 hour ago
    An LLM in a .com file? Haha made my day
    • teaearlgraycold 16 minutes ago
      SLM
      • quesomaster9000 13 minutes ago
        All the 'Small' language models and the 'TinyML' scene in general tend to bottom out at a million parameters, hence I though 'micro' is more apt at ~150k params.
  • codetiger 1 hour ago
    Imagine, this working on a Gameboy, in those days. Would've sounded like magic
    • Sharlin 51 minutes ago
      I don’t think this could beat an ELIZA-style bot in how magical it feels, given the extreme terseness of its replies.
    • lodovic 47 minutes ago
      I love these thought experiments. Looking at the code size, it would have been possible for someone to come up with this back in the days, similar to the idea of a million monkeys on a typewriter eventually producing Shakespeare.
    • alfiedotwtf 1 hour ago
      And would have lasted 3 minutes.

      Speaking of - I remember my first digital camera (Fujitsu 1Mb resolution using SmartMedia)… it used so much power that you could take 20-30 photos and then needed to replace all 4 batteries lol