Index

osmarks' website

Do not pity the dead; pity the ones who failed to upgrade their RAM.

Blog

Read my opinions via the internet.

2024-11-01 / 2.62k words
Has Minecraft become easier?
2024-10-16 / 665 words
A slightly odd pattern I've observed.
2024-10-06 / 2.96k 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 / 4.67k words
A nonexhaustive list of media which I like and which you may also be interested in.
2024-07-06 / 1.58k words
I got annoyed and rewrote everything.
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.
2024-02-25 / 3.08k words
How to run local AI slightly more cheaply than with a prebuilt system. Somewhat opinionated.
2024-03-27 / 1.87k 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 / 2.50k 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.
2022-02-24 / 949 words
Learn about how osmarks.net works internally! Spoiler warning if you wanted to reverse-engineer it yourself.
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 / 463 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 / 688 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.

Microblog

Short-form observations.

It begins.

Real computers pull several kilowatts and can be heard from several rooms away. Real computers need GPU power viruses to even out variations in power draw in order to not take down the grid. Real computers have to have staggered boot sequences to avoid destabilizing the radiation pressure/gravity equilibrium in the Sun.

Apparently the CalDAV server I use, Radicale, can in some circumstances permanently lock up and begin rejecting all requests to add or edit events with a 400 error, which it then doesn't explain due to poorly configured logging, and which then turn out to be buried three layers deep in libraries. In other news, I'm wiping that install and switching to an alternative ideally not written in Python.

Georgism is not going far enough. We need to apply Georgism to the akashic records and all mathematical abstractions in order to land-value-tax domain names, copyright, etc.

This is a very clean explanation of much of the modern media ecosystem: https://cameronharwick.com/writing/high-culture-and-hyperstimulus/. My read is basically that hard-to-replicate entertainment is higher-status because if you enjoy easy-to-produce things you're more open to exploitation (spending too many resources on those easy things).

I love how science fiction authors who are explicitly and intentionally writing an optimistic future apparently cannot imagine a world with reliable, stable, secure software. It's easier to imagine the end of the world humanity as a single-planet species than it is to imagine the end of capitalism broken software.

I like Rust most of the time, but borrow checking really does not lend itself well to game development.

@suricrasia@lethargic.talkative.fish It would be very nice until someone gets lazy and you die horribly, yes.

Experiments

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 via a slightly horrifically manual process! 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.

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View some of my projects atmy git hosting.

Other blogs

View list
2024-11-06 / ServeTheHome
We dive into the Ampere AmpereOne A192-32X and discuss what this Arm-based CPU offers, how it performs, and what it means for competition The post Ampere AmpereOne A192-32X Review A 192 Arm Core Server CPU appeared first on ServeTheHome.
2024-11-06 / rtl-sdr.com
Over on her website, Charlie Gerard has uploaded a page showing how she was able to perform a replay attack on a car's wireless entry system using a HackRF and a JavaScript browser app she wrote. Previously, Charlie had already written a JavaScript...
2024-11-05 / Money Stuff
Also CVA hedging, the private credit boom, copycat ETF names, KPMG layoffs and an Elon Musk divestiture theory.
2024-11-05 / KGOnTech
I divided the two-hour AR Roundtable into three parts, with this being the last and, I think, in some ways, the most interesting part. We discussed more of the motivations for Meta and Snap announcing these concept products. Brad shared some...
2024-11-04 / The Eldraeverse
As a brief cultural note, today, I happened to be looking something up on the Atomic Rockets Future Mythology page, and was reminded of Crazy Eddie.(The one from Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye, obviously. Even if, sad to say,...
2024-11-01 / Chips and Cheese
Up to Haswell’s 2013 release, Intel’s “tick-tock” strategy seemed unstoppable.
I spend a lot of time reading about manufacturing and its evolution, which means I end up repeatedly reading about the times and places where radical changes in manufacturing were taking place: Britain in the late 18th century, the US in the late...

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