Bruno Ferreira is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware. He has decades of experience with PC hardware and assorted sundries, alongside a career as a developer. He's obsessed with detail and has a tendency to ramble on the topics he loves. When not doing that, he's usually playing games, or at live music shows and festivals. ","collapsible":{"enabled":true,"maxHeight":250,"readMoreText":"Read more","readLessText":"Read less"}}), "https://slice.vanilla.futurecdn.net/13-4-17/js/authorBio.js"); } else { console.error('%c FTE ','background: #9306F9; color: #ffffff','no lazy slice hydration function available'); } Bruno Ferreira Contributor Bruno Ferreira is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware. He has decades of experience with PC hardware and assorted sundries, alongside a career as a developer. He's obsessed with detail and has a tendency to ramble on the topics he loves. When not doing that, he's usually playing games, or at live music shows and festivals.
Sam Hobbs JavaScript and WASM are not tomfoolery. If anything is tomfoolery then the x86 CPU emulator in plain CSS is. Reply
hwertz Gross, just reading it almost made me queasy (the idea that CSS is Turing complete just hits me wrong.). But at the same time very cool and kudos to the developer! Reply
xenovector Very cool achievement, even if it isn't practical in any normal sense. I genuinely hope she keeps adding features purely out of spite. I'd honestly love to see a browser running on that emulator with enough capability to parse and execute JavaScript. As for the claim that "vibe coding" couldn't have produced something like this: that's just wrong. Could a lazy prompt do it? Of course not. "Generate an x86 emulator in CSS with no JavaScript" would produce something laughable. But that's not a meaningful test. If you can articulate the architecture, constraints, and implementation details in technically precise terms, AI-assisted coding can prototype almost anything. The catch is that this still requires real competence: you have to know what to ask for, how to steer it, and how to evaluate and refine the output. I've been programming for 27 years. I use vibe coding (Codex, Gemini CLI) to rapidly prototype ideas and flesh them out, not as a replacement for skill, but as a force multiplier for it. You can literally write psuedo code very quickly and it'll convert it to real code with your exact structure, faults and all. Tell me that's not powerful. Reply
hwertz xenovector said: As for the claim that "vibe coding" couldn't have produced something like this: that's just wrong. Could a lazy prompt do it? Of course not. "Generate an x86 emulator in CSS with no JavaScript" would produce something laughable. But that's not a meaningful test. If you can articulate the architecture, constraints, and implementation details in technically precise terms, AI-assisted coding can prototype almost anything. The catch is that this still requires real competence: you have to know what to ask for, how to steer it, and how to evaluate and refine the output. I'm not 100% sure vibe coding could actually do this (at present.) Just due to thee simple fact that 'coding via CSS' like this is just plain unusual and I'm not sure the AI models would have any code samples or examples of this type of thing to reference when writing their own code. That said, a) The user could provide info on how 'coding via CSS' is done, at which point it would have the infomration it needs. b) Maybe it WOULD have the info. I did see the example where someone asked for this program that would compile and run on like Linux, MacOS, and version 7 UNIX on PDP-11. , with some further PDP-specific request htat it use I think 64KB memory segments, something like that. And it did it after a few rounds of back-and-forth to fix things up. So maybe it'd handle this odd use of CSS perfectly fine. Reply
George Pearson Enter the slew of virus writers using her techniques to write style sheet virus. This seems to be a massive proof of concept. Running the virus inside the browsers environment. Hopefully there are safety rails in place in most modern browsers to stop execution. Reply
Key considerations
- Investor positioning can change fast
- Volatility remains possible near catalysts
- Macro rates and liquidity can dominate flows
Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/software/programming/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/software/programming/enterprising-developer-somehow-writes-an-x86-cpu-emulator-in-plain-css-no-javascript-no-wasm-just-stylesheet-computing#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com
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Informational only. No financial advice. Do your own research.