Now it's implementing a transit time router so I can know the population within X minutes' travel time. The ONS could never.
Writing
Read my opinions via the internet.
2026-09-12 / 4.05k words
Forward and reverse ML engineering on unfamiliar hardware by LLMs.
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 / 2026-10-02 09:21:25
Well, it's using an off-the-shelf one and plugging in the datasets, but still.
discord / 2026-10-02 08:45:45
Having GPT-6 write unnecessarily convoluted mapping tools, probably more sophisticated than what the government uses, to decide where to move to unreasonably slowly.
I feel like you could replace several government statistics offices with GPT-6-fast.
discord / 2026-10-01 11:17:19
An application* for my box of spare ESP32-C3s!
discord / 2026-09-30 20:04:42
Someone has made an LLM-psychosis version of my website. Exciting.
It's not actually related to my website.
discord / 2026-09-30 17:59:13
https://fixupx.com/SpaceKoala/status/2105024698027528412
What, a homing beacon? So your precious Royal Navy can target my location? ︀︀ ︀︀You disappoint me. The location of this island at 0 degrees latitude and longitude will not be accepted by targeting software designed to prevent launches without entered coordinates, Mr. Bond.
Quoting MacCallister Higgins (@macjshiggins) ︀ relatedly, if I ever become a billionaire I’m going to create Null Island for real.
FixupX
discord / 2026-09-30 13:42:18
Academia has failed us in many ways (whenever academia doesn't answer some incredibly contrived technical question or set of technical questions I want to know about, it's failed everyone).
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".
How bound are you to the habits of the past? Find out with this test.
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
- In the Pipeline
- 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
2026-09-27 / Marginal Revolution
The shortages have gone on for so long that they are aggressively driving down how much carbon is being released into the atmosphere, a Washington Post analysis of data from the International Energy Agency shows. People worldwide are using...
2026-09-26 / ServeTheHome
This week Qualcomm unveiled its next generation of high-end mobile SoCs: Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6, and Elite Extreme Gen 6. The flagship chips bring a slew of new features to the table, including new Oryon CPU cores, GPU matrix cores, and LPDDR6...
2026-09-26 / SemiAnalysis
Looking inside Intel 18A and Intel’s Panther Lake. A free SemiAnalysis STEEL teardown.
2026-09-26 / Construction Physics
ASML’s lack of European sales, a California distributed power plant, Starlink as a planetary barometer, and more.
2026-09-25 / Astral Codex Ten
Finalist #10 in the Book Review Contest
2026-09-25 / Overcoming Bias
I asked Grok4.6 to summarize the usual human pattern of “othering”:
2026-09-25 / rtl-sdr.com
Thank you to Attila Zsellér, who has submitted his latest Python program called "Demod Analyzer". This program is designed for analyzing BPSK/QPSK/QAM16 signals in recorded IQ samples. Atilla writes: I'm developing OpenStint, an SDR-based lap...
2026-09-25 / Factorio
Hello, we have very unusual Friday facts for you. Journey to the physical world Pard It all started in the hot summer of 2024 when we worked really hard to finish the Space Age DLC. The game was almost ready, but we wanted some...
2026-09-25 / Stanichor
In Factors of Attraction Toward Men, Apple Pie conducted surveys on romantic preferences, asking participants to rate several traits based on how attractive they are. The following is a replication of the analysis using confirmatory factor analysis...
2026-09-24 / Money Stuff
Pipelines, force majeure, private equity malaise, credit card risk tranching, egg futures, and Medicaid gambling.