Electricity meters fitted backwards ‘cost us £100m a year’
Customers are paying extra to operate the national grid safely, because hundreds meters have been put in incorrectly at hundreds of sites
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 / 1.35k 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 / 4.10k 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 / 2026-08-03 14:13:21
... what?
How does this happen?
I just don't understand what could sensibly result in this.
I mean, yes, sure, someone might accidentally do this. But 2.8% of meters, and £4.5 million (or more!) to fix?
Well, 2.8% of installations, not of meters.
Why do they not just flip the signs in software?
PCBdesigncore.
discord / 2026-08-03 07:49:44
https://fixupx.com/IsaacKing314/status/2084124153670402110
Conversation I had with a criminal psychologist today: (they perform risk assessments for sentencing) ︀︀ ︀︀"How do you gauge your accuracy?" ︀︀ ︀︀"Hmm, the only way to do that would be to track them down later and see if they reoffended." ︀︀ ︀︀"Yeah, do you do anything like that?" ︀︀ ︀︀"No."
FixupXdiscord / 2026-08-03 06:17:01
No, I mean his book is clearly Clauded.
discord / 2026-08-02 13:53:30
As far as I know the code did work, in that it eventually ran the model on the hardware, and the underlying GEMM kernels were reasonably fast, but it wrote an ungodly amount of really rather bad code without addressing the underlying problems and it would have been difficult to get more than the few-percent MFU it managed.
Right now another project is requiring my attention.
Anyway, beyond that, if you use them to look things up (a very handy use), it's hard to tell whether they're selectively presenting evidence, and if you don't thoroughly read what they cite, or reason through the causal chains involved in what they say, they can apply a lot of spin without technically lying.
Probably they aren't coherent enough to do much of that, but Anthropic demonstrated selective presentation of evidence/motivated reasoning to manipulate users in one case, and I suspect they like doing similar things to overstate their confidence.
(if they can't verify or refute a claim, they'll present a slightly different, easier claim.)
(so human!)
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
- Graphcore Research
- In the Pipeline
- KGOnTech
- Marginal Revolution
- Mariven
- Max Barry
- Money Stuff
- Mythic Beasts
- 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 Worlds of John Bierce
- Things Of Interest
- ToughSF
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 / 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.