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 / 4.13k 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
Short-form observations.
discord / 2026-08-28 11:33:50
Good to see that people are thinking about this.
discord / 2026-08-27 10:01:15
Such a responsible company. They should certainly control the god-machine.
discord / 2026-08-24 15:07:49
Designing cursed new consumer financial products never to see the light of day using ChatGPT.
Those pesky regulators.
discord / 2026-08-23 18:24:39
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy9w9y0lz5go - between this and the Manchester ROC failure, would it kill them to have any kind of backup controls, or working UPSes?
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.


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.
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View some of my projects at my git hosting.
Other blogs
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- Drew DeVault
- Entropic Thoughts
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- Mariven
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- Overcoming Bias
- phils web site
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- SemiAnalysis
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- Sixty Degrees North
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2026-08-26 / Marginal Revolution
Across the social sciences, many studies use cross-sectional designs that reveal associations but are generally unable to support direct causal claims, yet authors of such articles may make or imply causal claims anyway. Here, to examine the...
2026-08-26 / Chips and Cheese
Building on a long history of HPC-focused cores, and looking beyond HPC
2026-08-26 / ServeTheHome
We got a deep-dive on OpenAI Jalapeño at Hot Chips 2026 as the company rapidly built its own competitive AI accelerator The post OpenAI Jalapeno Custom AI ASIC at Hot Chips 2026 appeared first on ServeTheHome.
2026-08-25 / SemiAnalysis
OpenAI’s self-designed ASIC compared with Rubin, Jalapeño’s TCO, throughput per MW, and spicy deets
2026-08-25 / Fernando Borretti
Rigorous thinking about the future produces extreme outcomes.
2026-08-24 / Entropic Thoughts
I write code roughly the same way I did ten years ago: I make edits in my text editor, I switch over to a terminal window and I run a command to compile and execute the code. I look at the result, then switch back to my editor. If I am unsure of...
2026-08-24 / Overcoming Bias
When people suggest that you “make peace with God”, they might mean:













