Show HN: MacMind – A transformer neural network in HyperCard on a 1989 Macintosh
153 points by hammer32
by edwin
3 subcomments
There’s something quietly impressive about getting modern AI ideas to run on old hardware (like OP's project or running LLM inference on Windows 3.1 machines). It’s easy to think all the progress is just bigger GPUs and more compute, but moments like that remind you how much of it is just more clever math and algorithms squeezing signal out of limited resources. Feels closer to the spirit of early computing than the current “throw hardware at it” narrative.
by hyperhello
1 subcomments
Hello, if there are no XCMDs it should work adequately in HyperCard Simulator. I am only on my phone but I took a minute to import it.
I first studied back-propagation in 1988, at the same time I fell in love with HyperCard programming. This project helps me recall this elegant weapon for a more civilized age.
by nxobject
1 subcomments
I love this. From reading the nuts-and-bolts "parameters" (haha) of your implementation, I get the impression that the fundamental limit is, well, using a 32-bit platform to address the sizes of data that usually need at least 48 bits!
by gcanyon
4 subcomments
It's strange to think how modern concepts are only modern because no one thought of them back then. This feels (to me) like the germ theory being transferred back to the ancient greeks.
by tty456
1 subcomments
Where's the code for the actual HyperCard and building of the .img? I only see the python validator in the repo.
by rcarmo
1 subcomments
Neat. Looks like I found my new benchmark for my ARM64 JIT for BasiliskII :)
(still debugging it, but getting closer to full coverage)
by immanuwell
1 subcomments
The architecture of macmind looks pretty interesting
by DetroitThrow
1 subcomments
This is very cool. Any more demos of inference output?
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