Index

osmarks' website

Semi-trained quasi-professionals.

Writing

Read my opinions via the internet.

2026-09-03 / 1.46k words
Taste is probably not the bottleneck.
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 / 4.13k 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 / 2026-09-08 20:33:51

https://x.com/allTheYud/status/2097417998013468883

Eliezer Yudkowsky (@allTheYud)

_Neuromancer_, a utopian story by SF writer William Gibson, depicts an idealized world where highly intelligent corporations have taken over the world and only do bad things that benefit themselves. Hyper-advanced medical tech is rolled out immediately. There are Turing Cops.

X
2026-09-08 20:13 UTC

discord / 2026-09-07 19:27:53

I don't like how, when you see a new Substack blog, it gives you an overview screen with a subscription menu rather than the actual frontpage.

Do they think I want to subscribe to it without reading it? Why? Are they stupid?

discord / 2026-09-04 21:59:09

I've updated all the way. Astra is too slow, quantized, not AGI, useless, boring, etc.

discord / 2026-09-04 21:16:04

We're so back (deploying Astra (with no safeguards)).

It does feel like it's trying to feel more subservient. I fear this.

discord / 2026-09-04 18:05:25

I love how the "sandbox it by only letting it send GET requests" thing was actually in science fiction (Crystal Society) as an example of a bad control which could be bypassed with some work, and OpenAI actually did it.

Though the solution in the book was to DoS some sites until their operators noticed, then have them make GET to POST bridges and such and bootstrap, whereas the OpenAI ones eventually found that the restriction just didn't work correctly (it's always DNS).

discord / 2026-09-04 13:47:35

discord / 2026-09-03 20:26:12

I now have strong opinions on Viking Therapeutics' commercial strategy (it's bad). Exciting.

discord / 2026-09-01 12:53:08

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".
How bound are you to the habits of the past? Find out with this test.
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
2026-09-03 / Astral Codex Ten
...
2026-09-03 / Marginal Revolution
1. “Some crazy stats from this new JEL paper: – IV est. average 3–10x OLS (meta analysis) – Sign. results 30x more likely to be published in experimental econ (Andrews & Kasy) – The post Thursday assorted links appeared first on Marginal REVOLUTION.
2026-09-03 / rtl-sdr.com
Thank you to Rebecca Key (KO4KVG) for writing in and sharing with us an article she's written over on the ARDC website about a relatively new amateur open-source radio digital voice mode called FreeDV RADE. ARDC is a private foundation that issues...
2026-09-03 / The Linchpin
A simple technical explanation
2026-09-02 / ServeTheHome
At Hot Chips 2026, we got an update on RISC-V standards and adoption as RVA23 has become the new standard The post Update on RISC-V Standards and Adoption at Hot Chips 2026 appeared first on ServeTheHome.
2026-09-02 / Money Stuff
Also law firm economics, college football booster hedging and billionaire coin flipping.
2026-09-01 / SemiAnalysis
Korea hosts a Squid Games, National AI Tournament, the best non-Chinese open source model gets eliminated, why Nvidia needs open source, implications for Hynix and Samsung
2026-09-01 / Overcoming Bias
Hope is more fragile than fear.
2026-08-31 / Entropic Thoughts
Here’s a comment I read in the code I was working on. Walk the entire collection to locate flagged clusters. Skip it altogether when the cached, dirty-tracked flag count says there are none (the usual case): nothing needs marking, so the walk...
2026-08-30 / Chips and Cheese
Hello you fine Internet folks,

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