Index

osmarks' website

Disclaim. Marinade. Overshadow.

Writing

Read my opinions via the internet.

2026-04-23 / 859 words
Against creating free will as a cause area.
2026-04-06 / 4.26k words
A new vision for housing in Great Britain.
2026-02-23 / 2.52k words
Trying exotic parallel processing hardware which is dead for fairly good reasons.
2025-09-09 / 3.42k words
Chatbots will likely develop as general life advisers.
2025-07-20 / 1.35k 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 / 816 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 / 4.10k 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.

Microblog

Short-form observations.

discord / 2026-07-31 13:16:06

https://hughhowey.com/the-end-of-an-era/

Hugh Howey

The End of an Era - Hugh Howey

We knew this day would come. Some of us have known for decades, have been writing and pontificating about this since Ken Jennings lost at Jeopardy and Kasparov lost at chess. The writing was on the wall, and now the writing is everywhere. Literally. Artificial Intelligence is writing about as well as humans — at […]

Hugh Howey

discord / 2026-07-31 08:39:20

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fYIm72GqrE

Josh Thor

"Last Friday Night" but it's the AI apocalypse

If you don't want it to be our last year alive, go here: https://controlai.org/take-action

Last Year Alive is my parody of Katy Perry's "Last Friday Night"

Featuring Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares (authors of "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies")!

Lead vocals: Josh Thor Background vocals: @futurebriefing , @camdenwyeth316 Vocal recording...

Video

YouTube

discord / 2026-07-31 06:45:23

discord / 2026-07-30 19:35:21

I've been evaluating things, and I'm not sure whether to remain in my current mid-status British city, go to a more expensive higher-status sort-of-better one (Edinburgh), or go to a less expensive lower-status totally irrelevant one to save money for other goods and services.

It is hard to price the things I would be getting out of each one.

discord / 2026-07-30 13:54:09

https://nickvsnetworking.com/simple-trick-to-increase-coverage-lying-to-users-about-signal-strength/

Nick

Simple trick to increase coverage: Lying to users about signal stre...

Nick vs Networking

I love telecoms.

discord / 2026-07-30 08:47:24

https://x.com/malonehedges/status/2082654728568373377/

malone (@malonehedges)

you can play Minecraft in ChatGPT Work

X
2026-07-30 02:29 UTC

discord / 2026-07-30 07:20:24

https://theonion.com/study-finds-over-55-million-deaths-could-be-prevented-a-1838916083/

The Onion Staff

Study Finds Over 55 Million Deaths Could Be Prevented Annually By S...

MADISON, WI—Concluding that such a breakthrough would greatly improve the prognoses of patients with terminal conditions, a new study released Wednesday by the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine found that more than 55 million deaths could be prevented each year with an immortality serum of some kind. “We would likely see a dramatic ...

The Onion

discord / 2026-07-29 09:24:51

https://fixupx.com/zetalyrae/status/2082372141060878360

Fernando Borretti (@zetalyrae)

Another normal day of using normal technology.

Quoting Life of a Shoggoth (@Notopossum1) ︀ Oh no

**❤️ 11 👁️ 615 **

FixupX
2026-07-29 07:46 UTC

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! 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
2026-07-09 / Marginal Revolution
That is the theme of my latest Free Press piece, here is one excerpt from it: Government-run systems often (not always) do a perfectly fine job setting a broken arm or administering a long-standing, well-known medication. They do much less well...
2026-07-08 / Don't Worry About the Vase
We have a respite, so I thought I’d tackle various thoughts on children, phones and screens.
2026-07-08 / Money Stuff
Also merger arb, SRT insurance, World Cup hedging, Polymarket refunds and index rebalance windfalls.
2026-07-08 / ServeTheHome
The Samsung PM1763 is a PCIe Gen6 NVMe SSD that the company said has entered production to support new AI servers The post Samsung PM1763 PCIe Gen6 Enterprise SSD in Production appeared first on ServeTheHome.
2026-07-08 / Astral Codex Ten
...
2026-07-08 / SemiAnalysis
Anthropic’s Opportunity is Theirs to Lose
2026-07-07 / Sixty Degrees North
Polar Star continues to solely support Operation Deep Freeze; U.S. Coast Guard continues to test Storis; National Security Cutters from California and Hawaii continue deployments to the Bering Sea.
2026-07-07 / rtl-sdr.com
Thank you to Ivan (NO2CW) for submitting news about how he added HD Radio decoding capability to his FM DX Webserver receiver. The FM DX Webserver is a community of worldwide FM broadcast-band online receivers that mostly use SDRs based on the...
2026-07-06 / Entropic Thoughts
Alternative titles: … earns you a high-risk pregnancy … earns you an ascent of Matterhorn … earns you 10,000 km on a motorcycle … earns you two BASE jumps … earns you a day on the frontline in Ukraine These are all about equivalent to the...
2026-07-06 / Overcoming Bias
The website InTheWeights.Com rates people on a 0-1000 scale re how well they are known by LLMs.

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