Too slippery. Also cold.
Writing
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
compend / 2026-11-08 20:41:37
I was optimistic about these, but apparently the killer usecase is sports gambling, and they don't really estimate useful things.
compend / 2026-11-08 19:02:26
A nice idea. Though they really should map to numbers in a more predictable way.
While programming languages are increasingly irrelevant now, it was a good one, aside from the compile times, somewhat excessive quantity of not-particularly-general features and supply chain attacks.
Great idea, but I think the implementations are often bad market-microstructurally. Though this usually doesn't matter much.
Very interesting idea, but also obviously wrong.
compend / 2026-11-08 14:41:55
Terrible standard. Far too many degrees of freedom, lots of vulnerabilities, bloated format.
Pretty okay sea. Nothing special, though.
Telecoms people are unable to make any protocol which is not profoundly evil. At least it's better than the physical telephone wires.
compend / 2026-11-08 11:32:33
One of my favourite kinds of plastics.
Sure, it serves useful purposes, but the human body overuses it. "Secrete mucus" is its answer to far too many problems, and it just isn't very well-implemented.
An okay city, but I think overhyped, and very bad transit.
Reliable and very versatile.
I wanted to like this, and it's a clever idea, but it's not fast to input using this.
Factor analysis is cool, and this probably gets at something deep about the nature of intelligence.
They do look cool, but are overused now, and are dangerous to make.
Experiments
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.
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
- Alex's blog
- 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
- ggb
- Graphcore Research
- Igor's Blog
- In the Pipeline
- Irrational Analysis
- 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
2026-11-08 / Marginal Revolution
1. Among the Wagner fanatics. 2. Does AI instead commodify jobs? 3. The digital world is making Islam more diverse (The Economist). 4. “An affair with an economist exposed the calculus of modern dating.” (New Yorker) 5. “How Much Economic Value Do...
2026-11-07 / SemiAnalysis
A wind-powered 800MW campus, 120MW built within a year, a 5MW SST-native 800V DC pilot and a cooling design without central chillers
2026-11-07 / ServeTheHome
We check out the ASRock Rack DMRD16-2L+ which is a 16-channel Intel Diamond Rapids Xeon motherboard with 128x PCIe Gen6 lanes over MCIO The post ASRock Rack DMRD16-2L+ Spotted with 16 DDR5 Slots for Diamond Rapids appeared first on ServeTheHome.
2026-11-07 / Construction Physics
Florida’s property tax rollback, projected PCB shortages, the end of Tesla’s Cybertruck, the lack of progress in carbon storage, and more.
2026-11-06 / Astral Codex Ten
Finalist #15 in the Book Review contest
2026-11-06 / KGOnTech
Last month at MicroLED and ARVR Connect, I gave a “Master Class” on the conference’s first day. In Part 2, I discuss the trends I noticed in 2026 for both Reflective and Diffractive waveguides.
2026-11-05 / Nick vs Networking
Recently we rolled out WiFi Calling with one of our operators. The question came in about how would MMS be handled when a customer is relying just on WiFi – It’s a good question and one I didn’t know the answer to (Sidebar, yes, still talking about...
2026-11-05 / Money Stuff
Also black swan funds, data center delays and billable hour valuation.
2026-11-05 / rtl-sdr.com
Thank you to Simpli for writing in and sharing a set of free radio decoders that run entirely in the browser. There are pages for Morse, RTTY, PSK31, SSTV, weather fax, NAVTEX, APRS and the DCF77/MSF time signals, plus a signal identifier that...