Index

osmarks' website

What part of ∀f ∃g (f (x,y) = (g x) y) did you not understand?

Blog

Read my opinions via the internet.

Maghammer: My personal data warehouse
2023-08-28 / 2.39k words
Powerful search tools as externalized cognition, and how mine work.
Other things you may like
2020-06-11 / 2.07k words
A nonexhaustive list of... content/media... which I like and which you may also be interested in as a visitor of my site.
Minoteaur
2023-06-06 / 2.41k words
The history of the feared note-taking application.
Programming education, tacit knowledge and LLMs
2023-07-02 / 1.53k words
Why programming education isn't very good, and my thoughts on AI code generation.
Site tech stack
2022-02-24 / 899 words
Learn about how osmarks.net works internally! Spoiler warning if you wanted to reverse-engineer it yourself.
Against being against rote memorization
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.
RSS: good and useful
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.
Against the "Online Safety Bill"
2021-07-08 / 1.03k words
In which I get annoyed at yet more misguided UK government behaviour.
'Problem Solving' Tasks and Computer Science
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.
FTL tips
2017-08-16 / 940 words
We are not responsible if these tips cause your ship to implode/explode. Contains spoilers in vast quantities.
Not Everyone Must "Code"
2018-08-14 / 689 words
Why I think that government programs telling everyone to "code" are pointless.
New site design!
2020-01-25 / 145 words
It's slightly different now!
On Phones
2018-06-01 / 278 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.

2023-09-24

I suddenly feel nostalgic for these old Cube World things. Apparently nobody has reverse-engineered the things significantly. A shame. I think one of my friends has some somewhere so I might look into it.

2023-09-22

ImageBind can apparently embed audio (and also thermal camera output, depth sensor output and IMU traces...?) into the same embedding space as Meme Search Engine's CLIP model. I could plausibly add a search-by-audio option.

2023-07-11

Did you know? According to some leaks, GPT-4 has as many parameters* as there are molecules in 3.6*10^-14kg of water.

  • ish
2023-07-11

@theking@mathstodon.xyz Well, they don't seem to have actually done this yet.

2023-07-02

Twitter is apparently now hilariously broken. I do wonder what's going to replace it, if anything. No offense intended toward the designers and implementers of ActivityPub, but the Fediverse is more technical than most users are likely willing to put up with or comprehend. Bluesky is apparently also vaguely unusable.

2023-06-06

If you've ever wondered what I was referring to when I alluded to Minoteaur and its history of being rewritten a lot, I finally wrote it up: https://osmarks.net/minoteaur/

Experiments

Various web projects I have put together over many years. Made with at least four different JS frameworks. Some of them are bad.

Apioform Game
A game about... apioforms... by Heavpoot.
Arbitrary Points
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.
AutoScorer
Automatic score keeper, designed for handling Monopoly money.
Colours of the Alphabet
Colorizes the Alphabet, using highly advanced colorizational algorithms.
Emu War
Survive as long as possible against emus and other wildlife. Contributed by Aidan.
Flying Thing
Fly an ominous flying square around above some ground! Includes special relativity!
FractalArt
A somewhat unperformant generator for pleasant watercolor-y "fractalart" images. Ported from a Haskell implementation by "TomSmeets".
GUIHacker
My fork of GUIHacker. Possibly the only version actually on the web right now since the original website is down.
Game of Life V2
Obligatory (John Conway's) Game of Life implementation.
Heav's Game
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.
Idea Generator
Generates ideas. Terribly. Don't do them. These are not good ideas.
IncDec
The exciting multiplayer game of incrementing and decrementing! No cheating.
Infipage
Outdoing all other websites with INFINITE PAGES!
JHLT
Tells you how late Joe's homework is.
Lorem Ipsum
Lorem Ipsum (latin-like placeholder text), eternally. Somehow people have left comments at the bottom anyway.
Political Opinion Calendar
Instead of wasting time thinking of the best political opinion to hold, simply pick them pseudorandomly per day with this tool.
RPNCalc v2
A Reverse Polish Notation (check wikipedia) calculator, version 2. Buggy and kind of unreliable. This updated version implements advanced features such as subtraction.
RPNCalc v3
Reverse Polish Notation calculator, version 3 - with inbuilt docs, arbitrary-size rational numbers, utterly broken float/rational conversion and quite possibly Turing-completeness.
RPNCalc v4
Reverse Polish Notation calculator, version 4 - increasingly esoteric and incomprehensible. Contributed by Aidan.
Site Theming
Apply custom CSS to most pages on here.
Tic-Tac-Toe (4³)
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!
Websocket Terminal
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.
Whorl
Dice-rolling webapp. Not very useful pending me writing a good parser.
osmarkscalculator
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 at my git hosting.

From other blogs

Target Based Drug Discovery - A Waste of Time?

This new paper is going to annoy a lot of people, but I think that's fine. Its author, Arash Sadri, has undertaken an extensive review of the origins of all approved small-molecule drugs (1144 of them). His claim is that only 123 of them were discover…

via AAAS: Keyword search for query 21/09/2023
M2_LRPT_DECODER Version 59 Released

Thank you to Carl Reinemann for writing in and sharing with us that the Meteor M2 LRPT decoder by Oleg (Robonuka) was recently updated. The Russian Meteor M2-3 weather  satellite was launched in June of this year and is currently the only operational Mete…

via rtl-sdr.com 18/09/2023
Hyprland is a toxic community

Hyprland is an open source Wayland compositor based on wlroots, a project I started back in 2017 to make it easier to build good Wayland compositors. It’s a project which is loved by its users for its emphasis on customization and “eye candy” – beautiful gra…

via Drew DeVault's blog 17/09/2023
Promos and PSAs

Just a couple of quick announcements while I finish scribbling argumentative notes in the margins of Eric Hoel’s book on consciousness. First, there’s this guy called Guy d’Andigné, runs sfss: a classy, minimalist little site that reprints science fiction…

via No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons 07/09/2023
Finding Domains That Send Unactionable Reports in Mastodon

One of the things we struggle with on woof.group is un-actionable reports. For various reasons, most of the reports we handle are for posts that are either appropriately content-warned or don’t require a content warning under our content policy–things lik…

via Aphyr: Posts 03/09/2023

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