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 / 1.36k 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 / 4.08k 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.
I don't know how I typed "Test" there.
TestI have now migrated to GoToSocial, as microblog.pub was janky and unmaintained. There might have been some data loss. Also, I apparently need to switch the privacy setting to "public" by default. This is definitely a design.
I have now migrated to GoToSocial, as microblog.pub was janky and unmaintained. There might have been some data loss.
I finally updated to LineageOS 23.2, and the system fonts are all terrible and no longer customizable. Of course, they actually are customizable if you patch several system files, but I have been inconvenienced enough that I require vengeance against Google.
I have been revisiting Stigler's diet problem with Tesco/Sainsburys nutrition and price data: https://github.com/osmarks/misc/tree/master/stigler.
After protein quality fudge factors, the optimal (cost-optimized under macronutrient constraints, micronutrients ignored because there's not good enough data) diet is apparently a combination of wholemeal pasta, bacon, dog treats, dog nontreat food and "mornflake groats".
I need the ability to consume (at least!) ten browser tabs simultaneously.
It's amusing and vaguely painful when someone AI-generates some but not all of their writing and they transition from perfect eloquence to writing like an average person, which is to say badly.
Cory Doctorow's "war on general-purpose computation" proving relevant again now that governments are noticing AI image generators slightly more.
Mysterious blob generation continues. Scale wins again, but not that much scale because I don't have much computer.
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
- BOFH
- Cameron Harwick
- Chips and Cheese
- citrons
- Construction Physics
- Dominic Cummings
- Don't Worry About the Vase
- Drew DeVault
- Entropic Thoughts
- Factorio
- Fernando Borretti
- In the Pipeline
- KGOnTech
- Marginal Revolution
- Max Barry
- Money Stuff
- Mythic Beasts
- Overcoming Bias
- Peter Watts
- phils web site
- Real World Tech
- rtl-sdr.com
- SemiAnalysis
- ServeTheHome
- Sixty Degrees North
- Stanichor
- Tales from the Void
- The Eldraeverse
- The Worlds of John Bierce
- Things Of Interest
- ToughSF
2026-04-25 / ServeTheHome
The new Kioxia BG8 SSD follows as a more premium PCIe Gen5 NVMe option over the EG7 for lower-cost DRAM-less client M.2 SSDs The post Kioxia BG8 Series Brings PCIe 5.0 to Mainstream Client SSDs appeared first on ServeTheHome.
2026-04-25 / Construction Physics
Transformer steel manufacturing, textile engineering, bringing power plants online quickly, infrasound, and more.
2026-04-25 / Marginal Revolution
The trade accounts are among the most pernicious statistics ever collected. It’s long been remarked, for example, that merely by calling something a “deficit” it seems bad even though a current account deficit is matched by a financial account...
2026-04-25 / Overcoming Bias
Human action plans are often organized around goal hierarchies, with lower-level subgoals helping to achieve higher-level goals.
2026-04-24 / SemiAnalysis
Hands On With GPT 5.5, Opus 4.7, DeepSeek V4, Why Benchmarks Are Bad, and Who’s Going To Win
2026-04-24 / Don't Worry About the Vase
AI continue to accelerate and dominate the schedule, which is why this is a bit late, but we do occasionally need to pay our respects to the Goddess of Everything Else.
2026-04-24 / BOFH
Hang on, can't we just turn off the internet? Episode 8 "Well that's serious!" I say to the Boss, once he's finished reporting the serious breach of IT policy.…
2026-04-23 / Money Stuff
Also hedge-fund reneging, Polymarket vs. Kalshi and Onion Futures Act protests.
2026-04-22 / rtl-sdr.com
Over on YouTube Manuel from the 'Build a Cubesat' channel has uploaded a video testing a prototype version of our Discovery Drive antenna rotator. If you are unaware, Discovery Drive is our new antenna rotator product for applications like...