It's a great flaw of the WCML that the most important destinations (Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool) are not actually on the core route, so lots of services skip them and changes are required. But rerouting it through them would obviously add significant delay. The obvious solution is instead to relocate Manchester and Birmingham and Liverpool, but our politicians lack vision.
Writing
Read my opinions via the internet.
2026-02-23 / 2.52k words
Trying exotic parallel processing hardware which is dead for fairly good reasons.
2025-07-20 / 1.35k words
Also note-taking applications again, embeddings, and blog organization.
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).
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.
2025-03-02 / 4.13k words
The TAM for God is very large.
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?
2024-10-06 / 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.
2024-04-22 / 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.
2023-07-02 / 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.
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.
discord / 2026-08-17 20:31:01
"Oh no, my Health Number has dropped. Time to roll back 50% of lifestyle changes I made in the last 6 months to bisect it." - people who get regular blood tests?
microblog / 2026-08-14 10:02:55
Chinese email spam keeps trying to get me to buy ion exchange resins. Western email spam keeps trying to get me to run "guest articles". I know which civilization I would bet on.
discord / 2026-08-12 21:02:06
Embarrassingly for GPT-5.6, its matrix multiplies are actually 3x or 6x less efficient than the Graphcore SDK's (depends on shape). But it does seem to have implemented better memory management and attention.
I'm contributing*.
They had better give me a limit reset soon.
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".
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.
Other blogs
View list
- Astral Codex Ten
- astrid dot tech
- benjojo blog
- BLDGBLOG
- BOFH
- Cameron Harwick
- Chips and Cheese
- citrons
- Construction Physics
- Dominic Cummings
- Drew DeVault
- Entropic Thoughts
- Factorio
- Fernando Borretti
- Graphcore Research
- Igor's Blog
- Jay Carlson
- KGOnTech
- Libertarian Development
- Marginal Revolution
- Mariven
- Max Barry
- Metal Ivy
- Money Stuff
- Mythic Beasts
- Nanofactory Project
- Nick vs Networking
- Nicole Kornher-Stace
- Overcoming Bias
- Peter Watts
- phils web site
- Pylon of the Month
- Real World Tech
- rtl-sdr.com
- SemiAnalysis
- ServeTheHome
- Sixty Degrees North
- Stanichor
- Tales from the Void
- The Eldraeverse
- The Electric Grandma
- The Linchpin
- The Worlds of John Bierce
- Things Of Interest
- ToughSF
2026-08-20 / Marginal Revolution
Eh, only in the short run: We study the causal impacts of income on a rich array of employment outcomes, leveraging an experiment in which 1,000 low-income individuals were randomized into receiving $1,000 per month unconditionally for three years,...
2026-08-20 / Fernando Borretti
Why the post-scarcity utopia is unlikely.
2026-08-19 / ServeTheHome
Cerebras this week has introduced a major upgrade to its hardware ecosystem. The company is launching their first rack-scale AI inference system, the CS-4, which is powered by the upgraded WSE-3 Turbo processor The post Cerebras Intros Faster WSE-3...
2026-08-19 / rtl-sdr.com
Back in July, we posted about VibeSDR, an AI vibecoded open-source mobile SDR client for rtl_tcp and UberSDR/KiwiSDR/OpenWebRX servers developed for iOS and Android. In that post, Stuart also mentioned that he was developing an Apple Watch app...
2026-08-19 / SemiAnalysis
Double the Performance with Double the Power
2026-08-17 / Entropic Thoughts
It is common for promotional pamphlets aimed at children to contain a themed variant of snakes and ladders. This is the “game” where the players toss a die, move as many places as the die says, and then some spots on the board have an event that...
2026-08-15 / Overcoming Bias
There is a vast literature near the topic of this post, much of which has developed specialized vocabularies and concepts.
2026-08-15 / Construction Physics
Home price declines, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, The Boring Company fundraising, and more.
2026-08-15 / Pylon of the Month
August’s Pylon of the Month comes from the Sperrin Mountains in Northern Ireland where I spent a few enjoyable days earlier in the month. After the sustained heat in the south of England, it was almost pleasurable to be rained on and to have...