> A hover-based clock, such as the one in Jane Ori's CPU Hack, is fast and stable, but requires you to hold your mouse on the screen, which some people claim does not count as turing complete for whatever reason, so I wanted this demo to be fully functional with zero user input.
That hover clock post is from 2023 and the "some people claim does not count" post is 2022. They were probably talking about the ones that make you check thousands of boxes to drive the logic forward.
I'm curious to know what you would rate as the most important features to make this work? It seems like calc+if do a lot of the heavy lifting, but the new function syntax is what makes instruction lookup tractable.
Very cool. The horsle demo made me think, how hard would it be to add a virtual memory address (or a non-8086 RAND instruction) that returns a random byte (that would allow it to pick a random value and get a standard wordle working in principle)
I see CSS random() is only supported by Safari, I wonder if there's some side channel that would work in Chrome specifically? (I guess timing the user input would work)
This is a cool demo, but it tells me that CSS might be too complex now. Why should you be able to emulate a CPU with a styling language? I’m not sure what you get by using a Turing complete language for visual styling.
Predictably, all the same people who bemoan JS ubiquity feel the need to express their distaste for advances in CSS in this thread. Nobody is actually doing stuff like this in real applications, it’s just a demo, for fun.
Your grumpiness contradicts itself. To the extent that it's just for fun, it's not an advance.
And CSS being Turing complete doesn't make it suitable to replace any JS it couldn't already replace, so why can't JS-haters dislike the idea? If I didn't like a language and people offered an even worse to use replacement I'd be justified in having distaste for it!
28 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 56.7 ms ] thread[0]: https://caniuse.com/wf-function
Completely unrelated but somehow unsurprising:
Zero-day CSS: CVE-2026-2441 exists in the wild - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47062748 - February 2026 (233 comments)
Also: wow.
Sorry to see internet regressing to Internet Explorer days.
Edited to add: This is the message I get when using Firefox.
CSS should NOT be becoming turing complete. Nor any other DSL.
That hover clock post is from 2023 and the "some people claim does not count" post is 2022. They were probably talking about the ones that make you check thousands of boxes to drive the logic forward.
Anyway, very cool advancement.
I'm curious to know what you would rate as the most important features to make this work? It seems like calc+if do a lot of the heavy lifting, but the new function syntax is what makes instruction lookup tractable.
I see CSS random() is only supported by Safari, I wonder if there's some side channel that would work in Chrome specifically? (I guess timing the user input would work)
Can it mine bitcoins or run worms?
I get the feeling some people just hate the web.
And CSS being Turing complete doesn't make it suitable to replace any JS it couldn't already replace, so why can't JS-haters dislike the idea? If I didn't like a language and people offered an even worse to use replacement I'd be justified in having distaste for it!