Read my opinions via the internet.
2025-09-09 / 3.42k words
Chatbots will likely develop as general life advisers.
2025-07-20 / 1.36k words
Also note-taking applications again, embeddings, and blog organization.
2025-06-03 / 653 words
A short story about the importance of robust invariants.
2025-05-27 / 1.83k words
The many technologies modern servers have which your desktop doesn't.
2024-02-25 / 3.61k words
How to run local AI slightly more cheaply than with a prebuilt system. Somewhat opinionated.
2025-05-18 / 1.86k words
How it's made (automatically) (in computer games with Minecraft-like recipe systems).
2025-05-02 / 812 words
At last, data-driven numerology.
2022-02-24 / 973 words
Learn about how osmarks.net works internally! Spoiler warning if you wanted to reverse-engineer it yourself.
2025-03-27 / 654 words
Generalize land value tax to short names.
2025-03-22 / 1.30k words
Why I think they're not popular, and what they need.
2025-03-02 / 4.08k words
The TAM for God is very large.
2024-07-06 / 1.62k words
I got annoyed and rewrote everything.
2025-02-10 / 1.55k words
My new main router.
2025-01-26 / 1.84k words
Predicting the post-social world.
2025-01-24 / 4.19k words
Downloading and indexing everything* on Reddit on one computer.
2025-01-09 / 1.35k words
Computer algebra systems leave lots to the user and require task-specific manual design. Can we do better?
2024-11-01 / 2.65k words
Has Minecraft become easier?
2024-10-16 / 665 words
A slightly odd pattern I've observed.
2024-10-06 / 2.99k words
Or: why most AI hardware startups are lying.
2024-10-06 / 1.08k words
As ever, AI safety becomes AI capabilities.
2020-06-11 / 5.03k words
A nonexhaustive list of media which I like and which you may also be interested in.
2023-08-28 / 2.59k words
Powerful search tools as externalized cognition, and how mine work.
2024-05-12 / 1.29k words
What exactly is "magic" anyway?
2024-04-27 / 848 words
Please stop making chatbots.
2024-04-22 / 1.54k words
Absurd technical solutions for problems which did not particularly need solving are one of life's greatest joys.
2024-03-27 / 1.86k words
RSAPI and the rest of my infrastructure.
2023-09-24 / 1.64k words
This is, of course, all part of my evil plan to drive site activity through systematically generating (meta)political outrage.
2023-06-06 / 2.49k words
The history of the feared note-taking application.
2023-07-02 / 1.61k words
Why programming education isn't very good, and my thoughts on AI code generation.
2023-01-28 / 407 words
A common criticism of school is that it focuses overmuch on rote memorization. While I don't endorse school, I think this argument is wrong.
2022-05-14 / 462 words
RSS/Atom are protocols for Internet-based newsletter/feed services. They're surprisingly well-supported and you should consider using them.
2021-07-08 / 1.07k words
In which I get annoyed at yet more misguided UK government behaviour.
2020-05-20 / 582 words
Is solving Sudoku and similar puzzles by hand really useful in building computer science ability? We don't think so.
2017-08-16 / 940 words
We are not responsible if these tips cause your ship to implode/explode. Contains spoilers in vast quantities.
2018-08-14 / 686 words
Why I think that government programs telling everyone to "code" are pointless.
2020-01-25 / 145 words
It's slightly different now!
2018-06-01 / 737 words
My (probably unpopular in general but... actually likely fairly popular amongst this site's intended audience) opinions on smartphones today.
Short-form observations.
Real scaling has never been tried.
I wonder how much stolen parcels add to the costs of online retail and/or delivery services. It must be at least a percent or so.
I like how physically delivering this government project is an afterthought at the end of the description of what they're doing.
Prank idea: secretly collect DNA samples from someone's dog, keep the DNA on file, use the DNA to make a clone upon the death of the original, and style the new dog to look like the original did in its youth.
London currently has 2 Crossrails: Crossrail (Paddington/Liverpool Street) and Thameslink (St Pancras/London Bridge). However, there are 14 terminal stations, leaving us an entire 5 Crossrails short. I think every terminal should be paired with one on the opposite side of the city, with all trains rescheduled to run through to the other side. This may require massive disruption and tunnelling and hugely complicate the timetables, but it would be very funny.
Modern AR optics are designed to minimize eye glow, and I'm told it's mostly gone from Meta's new display glasses. However, it's correct for glasses to glow ominously when you're accessing the internet, as it looks cool. I urge designers to reconsider.
Amusing that Goldman Sachs, the "great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity", has apparently lost billions of dollars to fairly basic consumer lending because of Apple.
Natural languages use tree structures, reminiscent of Lisp or also mainstream programming languages. A conlang from a science fiction webcomic I once saw used a stack. Who's building the register machine language?
Various web projects I have put together over many years. Made with at least four different JS frameworks. Some of them are bad.
A game about... apioforms... by Heavpoot. 
Collect Arbitrary Points and achievements by doing things on this website! See how many you have! Do nothing with them because you can't! This is the final form of gamification. 
Automatic score keeper, designed for handling Monopoly money. 
Colorizes the Alphabet, using highly advanced colorizational algorithms. 
The Limitless Grid screensaver (kind of) implemented in a somewhat laggy pixel shader. 
An unfinished attempt to replicate an Apple screensaver. 
Survive as long as possible against emus and other wildlife. Contributed by Aidan. 
Fly an ominous flying square around above some ground! Includes special relativity! 
A somewhat unperformant generator for pleasant watercolor-y "fractalart" images. Ported from a Haskell implementation by "TomSmeets". 
My fork of GUIHacker. Possibly the only version actually on the web right now since the original website is down. 
Obligatory (John Conway's) Game of Life implementation. 
It is pitch black (if you ignore all of the lighting). You are likely to be eaten by Heavpoot's terrible writing skills, and/or lacerated/shot/[REDACTED]. Vaguely inspired by the SCP Foundation. 
Generates ideas. Terribly. Don't do them. These are not good ideas. 
The exciting multiplayer game of incrementing and decrementing! No cheating. 
Outdoing all other websites with INFINITE PAGES! 
Tells you how late Joe's homework is. 
Lorem Ipsum (latin-like placeholder text), eternally. Somehow people have left comments at the bottom anyway. 
Instead of wasting time thinking of the best political opinion to hold, simply pick them pseudorandomly per day with this tool. 
A Reverse Polish Notation (check wikipedia) calculator, version 2. Buggy and kind of unreliable. This updated version implements advanced features such as subtraction. 
Reverse Polish Notation calculator, version 3 - with inbuilt docs, arbitrary-size rational numbers, utterly broken float/rational conversion and quite possibly Turing-completeness. 
Reverse Polish Notation calculator, version 4 - increasingly esoteric and incomprehensible. Contributed by Aidan. 
Apply custom CSS to most pages on here. 
Your favourite* tic-tac-toe game in 3 dimensions, transplanted onto the main website! Technically this game is solved and always leads to player 1 winning with optimal play, but the AI is not good enough to do that without more compute! 
More dimensions. More confusion. Somewhat worse performance. 4D Tic-Tac-Toe. 
A basic implementation of the WFC procedural generation algorithm. 
Type websocket URLs in the top bar and hit enter; type messages in the bottom bar, and also hit enter. Probably useful for some weirdly designed websocket services. 
Dice-rolling webapp. Not very useful pending me writing a good parser. 
Unholy horrors moved from the depths of my projects directory to your browser. Theoretically, this is a calculator. Good luck using it. Get updates to the blog (not experiments) in your favourite RSS reader using the RSS feed.
View some of my projects at my git hosting.
View list
I happened to come across my 2011 review of the Steven Soderberg movie, Contagion and was surprised at how much I was thinking about pandemics prior to COVID. In the review, I was too optimistic about the CDC but got the sequencing gains right. I...
Recently Kalshi’s CEO Mansour said: “[Our] long-term vision is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion”.
In our QNAP QSW-M7308R-4X review, we see how this low-cost, quiet, and low-power 25GbE and 100GbE switch performs The post QNAP QSW-M7308R-4X 8x 25GbE and 4x 100GbE Managed Switch Review appeared first on ServeTheHome.
3D printed legos, exploding wire detonators, the David Taylor model basin, multi-point metal forming, and more.
A look at the reality (and not the hype) concerning Russia's newest class of Arctic patrol vessels.
Equinix AM5 is strangely absent from most “what to do on a night out in Amsterdam” guides, but this was the destination for three of our team who went on a company-funded all-nighter back in October. We acquired our Amsterdam presence in 2017 as...
DeepSeek v3.2 is DeepSeek’s latest open model release with strong bencharks.
Continuation funds, Amazon drivers, a narrow bank, Trump accounts, crypto gambling and PDT puzzles.