!!Con 2017
2017-05-06..2017-05-07
New York, United States
!!Con ·
[!!Con 2016, !!Con 2017, !!Con 2018, !!Con 2019, !!Con 2020, !!Con 2021, !!Con 2024]
who it's for
hardware hackers and makers, interactive fiction authors, game developers, machine learning engineers, data visualization specialists, security and network engineers, retrocomputing enthusiasts
topics
Glk interactive fiction interface; human interface device keyboards; bioluminescent mushroom engineering; airline data mapping and physics; NES assembly game development; queer feminist cyberpunk manifestos; TCP corruption in data centers; Merkle trees for decentralized web; image upscaling with neural networks; AppleSoft BASIC on Apple IIc; interpolation search algorithm; simulated gravity in computer simulations
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Keynote - Cyborgs Unite! | Karen M. Sandler | 25m |
Reveals that implanted cardiac devices run closed, vulnerable software, often broadcasting telemetry with no encryption no password protection, and gives… | ||
| Finding Friends in High Dimensions... | Aaron Levin | 11m |
Locality-sensitive hashing converts item vectors into d-bit binaries by slicing space with random hyperplanes, producing fingerprints where Hamming distance… | ||
| I Wrote to a Dead Address in a Deleted PDF and now ... | Jason McIntosh | 10m |
Project predicts turbulence for specific flights using NOAA grib forecasts pulled from an anonymous FTP, a FlightAware screen-scraper to turn flight numbers… | ||
| Glk! A Universal User Interface! for Interactive Fiction! | Andrew Plotkin | 10m |
Glk! begins in 1997 to extend the Z-machine and now powers a multi-interpreter ecosystem that actually ships ports and tools. The claim: a modest, portable UI… | ||
| How do Keyboards Work? HIDing, in Plain Sight!! | Scott Vokes | 11m |
Build-from-scratch keyboard shows the actual bits: a key matrix scanned by a microcontroller (an STM32F dev board), debounce logic that handles microsecond… | ||
| Making Mushrooms Glow! | Bomani McClendon | 10m |
Making Mushrooms Glow! by Bomani McCledndon
In just over a month, we built the software and electronics for Shrumen Lumen – an interactive art installation… | ||
| Why So Loud! Geeking Out On Airline Data, Physics And Mapping | Ewan Dennis | 10m |
Uses FlightAware to pull historical tracks (about 400 tracks over two weeks), compares broadcast ADS‑B data and optional USB dongle capture, models loudness… | ||
| Writing NES Games! with Assembly!! | Christian Joudrey | 12m |
Shows how a playable NES game gets built in 6502 assembly with the CC65 toolchain, moving from a black screen to a bouncing ball sprite that reads controller… | ||
| The TOP 5 Queer Feminist Cyberpunk Manifestos! | Jean Cochrane | 11m |
A ranked survey of five manifestos names concrete claims and outcomes: Donna Haraway’s gender abolition via cyborg metaphors; VNS Matrix’s slogan-laced art… | ||
| Corruption in the Data Center! TCP can fail to keep your data safe! | Evan Jones | 10m |
Datacenter packets turn into wrong payloads because intermediate switches sometimes mutate packets and recompute a valid Ethernet CRC so corrupted payloads… | ||
| What the heck time is it?!? | Joel Potischman | 11m |
NTP claims to give usable time despite physics by measuring round‑trip latency to servers, cutting latency in half and slewing clocks instead of stepping… | ||
| HDR Photography in Microsoft Excel?! | Kevin Chen | 12m |
Implements the Berkeley HDR linear-equation algorithm inside Microsoft Excel, recreating the camera response curve via a large system of equations and a matrix… | ||
| I got the computer to find words with good anagrams and....!! | Mark Jason Dominus | 13m |
A program that searches a dictionary for anagrams moves from a brute-force mapping that needed hours to a graph-based method that builds incompatibility edges… | ||
| Serious Programming with jq?! A Practical and ...! | Charles Chamberlain | 10m |
Shows concrete examples: user-defined functions and modules (winter.jq imported into main.jq and produced the expected list), demonstrates piping, mapping and… | ||
| What Alien Invaders, Birds, and Computer Simulations have in Common: Flocking!! | Jan Mitsuko Cash | 10m |
Shows a concrete claim: simple local rules produce realistic flocking. Implements a net logo agent simulation that changes only headings and demonstrates three… | ||
| We Are What We Celebrate: The Joy, Excitement, and Surprise of Who is Making Things... | Limor Fried | 44m |
Company Adafruit is profitable, 100% woman-owned, and makes electronics in a 50,000+ sq ft NYC factory with pick-and-place machines and a 270°C reflow oven… | ||
| Synthesizing Video and Turning it into Music! | Jes Wolfe | 09m |
Uses WebGL and the Web Audio API to generate frames on the GPU, reads pixels off the GPU back into JavaScript, then sums columns into audio samples so each… | ||
| PUSH THE BUTTON! 🔴 Designing a fun game where the only input is a BIG RED BUTTON! 🔴 !!! | Mahtab Sabet | 12m |
A weekend hackathon yields an open source game called PiKit that uses a single input the BIG RED BUTTON to teach mechanics and assist physical rehabilitation… | ||
| Simulated Gravity Comes from Within!! | Paul Frazee | 09m |
Claim: local clock slowdown that modulates internal forces produces a net attraction and stable orbits without gravity. Built a simulation of two point masses… | ||
| BEEP!! See AppleSoft BASIC and 6502 assembly language written on an actual Apple IIc ... | Richard Harrington | 13m |
Actual Apple IIc boots to an AppleSoft BASIC prompt and a blinking cursor then a live BASIC animation loop is typed that reads joystick via the paddle I/O… | ||
| Om! Nom! Nash! | David Turner | 11m |
An AI solver for Om Nom Nom claims optimal play by combining Nash equilibrium reasoning with tree search implemented in Python; the raw branching is 36 then 25… | ||
| The emoji that Killed Chrome!! | Julian Squires | 10m |
An office-wide Chrome crash traces to a printer advertising an emoji over mDNS; capturing traffic with tcpdump and shrinking it with tcpreplay isolates the… | ||
| Islamic Geometry: Hankin’s Polygons in Contact Algorithm!!! | Yomna Nasser | 12m |
Hankin’s Polygons in Contact algorithm is explained with concrete examples: a 6‑6‑6 honeycomb and a 4‑6‑12 tiling, two interactive JavaScript demos, and the… | ||
| How Merkle Trees Enable the Decentralized Web! | Tara Vancil | 10m |
Merkle trees let a dataset be addressed by a root hash (typically 32 bytes) and verified by hashing leaves and concatenating left/right children up the tree… | ||
| Where Are All the Space Robots?! | Lisa Ballard | 11m |
A searchable site listing over 30 active space probes that updates with near‑real‑time distances using an undocumented NASA DSN XML feed. Built with Jekyll for… | ||
| Interpolation Search Can Be Fast, in Some Situations, Sometimes, If You Try! | Ruchir Khaitan, worse Irish | 13m |
Claims that interpolation search beats binary for large, mostly-uniform sorted arrays by grouping values into bucketed by value range segments, storing bucket… | ||
| No battery, no (watch) life!! | Michael Kwan | 14m |
Small, concrete failures decide what to watch: OLED pixels cost lots of power and an always‑on screen causes ghosting; an endless UI spinner caused CPU to stay… | ||
| A Punch Card ate my Program! | Walt Mankowski | 11m |
Recreates a production bug: a stray period in column 73 terminates a COBOL sentence unexpectedly because COBOL uses COBOL sentence termination (periods end… | ||
| DHCP: IT’S MOSTLY YELLING!! | Mindy Preston | 15m |
DHCP boots a host by broadcasting from 0.0.0.0 source, 255.255.255.255 dest and tracking conversations with a random transaction ID; the exchange is DHCP… | ||
| How !!Con Came to be!! | Erty Seidohl | 10m |
A joke chat four years ago becomes a real conference: a website is registered for five years, two domains bought including bangbangcorn LLC, a simple CFP… | ||
| ENHANCE! Upscaling Images with Neural Networks | Geoffrey Litt | 12m |
Claims that modern GANs can plausibly upscale low-res photos into sharp outputs, using a convolutional generator and discriminator trained on 200,000 celebrity… | ||
| nothing matches | ||