One notable difference between working on Claude and the other productivity tools I’ve touched is that feature requests are surprisingly not the #1 discussion topic. Instead, people want to know how I’m using Claude, how they should be using Claude, … Read more
Wait… you said they were animated! Ah, yes… well, unfortunately we do not have all the animations working yet, but we do have quite a few. Look for the color thumbnails. They identify the completed animations. Use the prev and … Read more
Mechanical Turk will close September 30, 2026. We regularly evaluate our programs, tools, and services and make adjustments based on those assessments. Following an assessment, we’ve made the decision to close Amazon Mechanical Turk, effective September 30, 2026. Amazon Mechanical … Read more
Learning from the automation dreams of the first Machine Age “All the other wonderful inventions of the human brain sink pretty nearly into commonplaces contrasted with this awful mechanical miracle.” Such was Mark Twain’s verdict on the Paige Compositor, a … Read more
Methodology A note before you flame us. Every audio sample on this page comes from the open-source mechanical keyboard community. None of these were recorded by us. We are the curator, not the field recordist. As ThereminGoat has argued, sound … Read more
In May 2022, someone posted to Hacker News Bartosz Ciechanowski’s blog post explaining how mechanical watch movements work. Since then, his blog has been my absolute favorite corner of the Internet. His posts are not just well written and easy … Read more
binary adder computing 14+7=21 (01110+00111=10101) Welcome, weary traveller from the orange site! Let me tell you the tale of roons — a kit for building mechanical computers. [embedded content] I got inspired a couple of years ago when I binged … Read more
8 min read Allison Marsh is a professor at the University of South Carolina and codirector of the university’s Ann Johnson Institute for Science, Technology & Society. In the receiver for Baird’s televisor, electrical signals modulated the brightness of the … Read more
North Carolina State University researchers have developed a kirigami-inspired mechanical computer that uses a complex structure of rigid, interconnected polymer cubes to store, retrieve and erase data without relying on electronic components. The system also includes a reversible feature that … Read more
Not long ago I was part of a discussion about using mechanical things to demonstrate computing concepts (such as building a learning Tic-Tac-Toe game out of matchboxes). This got my head spinning on different ways to use mechanical devices to … Read more