i wrote a big thing about privacy and cybersecurity and the law and justice and other unfairness baked into the structure of society. it was long winded. the jist is i dislike that everything on the computer can, will, and is currently being used against me; retroactively and into the future. But it only really will be used that way if you get in the way of a powerful institution. and i think that notion produces a melancholic effect in people. i know it does for me. maybe i'm thinking about it…

Someone writing an article for the Israeli press about “people abroad who love Israel but might be worried” emailed me the following questions: “1. What is something about Israel that you admire/appreciate over the years? 2. What are you worried the most about Israel these days?” So I replied as follows: “It’s hard to know where to start with either of your questions! But briefly: Tiny Israel standing up for itself, against an often hostile and unjust world, is a huge part of what’s given me…

I recently ran once more into the tangle drasvi recorded here; litmus is: From Middle English litmose, lytmose, litemose, from Old Norse litmosi (“moss used for dyeing”), from lita (“to dye, stain”), from litr (“colour, dye, blee”), from Proto-Germanic *wlitiz, *wlituz (“appearance, blee”), from Proto-Indo-European *wel- (“to see”) + mosi (“moss”). Cognate with Old English wlite (“appearance, form, brightness, countenance”). And Dutch lakmoes is: From Middle Dutch lecmoes (1252), Middle Dutch…

It feels like the band is getting back together, with all the tooling I used to use coming back into my life. Earlier this this month I started using OmniFocus again on account of it working the same way my brain did. In a similar vain, I was surprised and happy to see Zachary’s Notational Velocity, and Brett Terpstra’s nvALT fork both get updates, which let them run on modern macOS. Notational Velocity was another tool I first learned about from Back to Work in the early 2010s. It’s…

Someone stated in the early days of the war, a feeling that was reciprocated by the soldier in khaki and the sailor in blue, that a mechanical device would be the determining factor in ending the world conflict, favorably, of course, for the United States and her allies. 1 One of my common topics is the history of nuclear weapons. The "atom bomb" is a rich vein of history because its impact has been as much cultural as technical. Dramatic depictions like Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer have…

While I mentioned a few weeks back that I'm now recovering from AI Psychosis, that doesn't mean I've given up on the technology completely. I'm writing more emails, and engaging with human beings as much as I can, and that part's been great. I still use agents as a glorified typewriter to generate code, and still very much get my hands in the dirt and sling code myself. I've also gotten quite obsessed with the idea of writing backend services in Go, and bundling all of the frontend code and…

Watched the livestream from Paris of the route presentation for next year's Tour de France, which will pass through Scotland, England and Wales. I probably won't make it to the Grand Départ in Edinburgh given the eye-watering hotel prices, but fortunately the next two stages start and finish within a couple of hours' drive of my parents. I joined a friend in Leicester Square on Thursday for a stand-up comedy show by Generation Z comedian Finlay Christie. I came away with mixed views on the…

Needed to warm the car up today so went for a little drive and an ill-advised walk.76 words · 5 images

This guy looks unthreatening enough even for me. Brian Whitehouse, CC BY-SA 4.0 image via Wikimedia Commons. I’m in the midst of one of those semiregular attempts to determine what it is about ghost lore and supernatural horror that pulls me in, especially when a good part of it leaves me terrified in its wake, unable to sleep, sometimes for a few nights running. Why in the world do I expose myself to such things when I know what will happen? What’s so overwhelmingly fascinating here that I’ll…

Maladaptive daydreaming is an intense mental habit where a person gets lost in detailed, vivid inner worlds for hours at a time. Maladaptive daydreaming is common, I'm not special for doing it. My daydream world started young, and was not maladaptive to begin with. Instead of playing on a nonexistent Wii (I didn't know they existed), I made up an “imaginary world”. For me it wasn't imaginary, it was real but just not visible to anyone else but me. I called it Invisible World. And one of my…

A busy work week with: The eMudhra certificate compromise The PHP CVE Was wild keeping on top of the situtation with Chainguard breaking the embargo early, but I'd prefer to avoid saying anything too much about it publicly Spent a lot of Wednesday afternoon re-running sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade repeatedly on my Matomo deployment And helping a friend with a site of theirs Morph's been truffling on my big fleece - thinking it's a nice blanket - which has been very cute Seems to have been…

Also, I have some great news. the label Spinout Nuggets will be releasing The Darkside Truth in April next year. I sent the final mixed tracks to Lee Grimshaw a couple of day ago, and it's all systems go! They will be mastered by Ian Button, and then I'll get the artwork sorted properly.Here are the pre-release gigs before Christmas, when I'll be taking a break for a couple of months to sort out a tour to support the release:12th November: The Old Hairdresser’s, Glasgow, with Lorraine…

This post is a continuation of my history with computers, after learning hexadecimal to cheat at SimCity 2000. GORILLA.BAS In the ancient past, software occasionally included delightful hidden gems or "Easter eggs" (as opposed to the modern trend of hiding personal data exfiltration). MS-DOS 5+ included two bonus games, if you knew how to find them: A Scorched Earth-like artillery game, GORILLA.BAS A snake game, NIBBLES.BAS GORILLA.BAS (1991) Both of these games targeted QBasic, a development…

A lot of Web Development has changed almost overnight and I didn’t quite realise it was happening. When I started to write this post in August, there is a lot of discussion about loops, graphs, goals and autoresearch, with the general gist that you give your LLM and agent harness an objective or some endstate and your tools will keep iterating until the goals have been achieved. While I’ve been putting it to the test on a couple of projects, what I didn’t see coming was what happens when anyone…

I just finished reading Don't Call It Art by Austin Kleon, and I loved every part of it. It talks about learning from kids. If you're an artist, don't say you're making art. Just make stuff. Do things. It felt like a continuation of something I wrote last year, your experience is making you dumber. How the walls go up as you get good at something. I still see the walls in me. A lot of times it happens when someone talks to me about the space I've been in for years. They tell me how they're…

I’m recording this for posterity, and for my own memory. The spectrum of ideal shot noise is flat because the events producing it are statistically independent. In particular, the occurrence of one event provides no information about when the next event will occur. Consider photons arriving at a sensor according to a homogeneous Poisson process with mean arrival rate \(\lambda\) photons per second. We can represent the arrival process as a train of impulses: \[ x(t)=\sum_k \delta(t-t_k) \]…

A fabulous documentary about Andy Warhol / a Pride Poppy pin / a lovely blog post about product people / the new Apple home screen is the least elegant smart home display I’ve seen in a long time / John made some lovely cards for anyone looking to work on their climate work / a great visualisation of who is financially benefitting from the Palestine genocide / I don’t know what an erotic engineering retreat is but it sounds great / a show about protest art during the AIDS crisis / I am…

I used to AI to create a free quick online 4X strategy game, you can play it here: themarchland.comThe game is named “The Marchland” since a marchland is a border region between two countries or realms. The game is similar to another game, Polytopia, but it uses a hexagonal board, has slightly simpler rules, can be played online, and the bots play decently. It also has a few unique twists, and it lets you set a daily timer to avoid playing too much. I used the following process to develop the…

When autumn comes, you have to grab it by the windy, rainy horns. Yes, it's tempting to sit inside with a cup of tea and watch whatever grot the TV throws at you, or read an Ian Rankin book for the umpteenth time. But if you do that, then that is going to be your fate for the whole winter. You need to be out there in the weather wearing the Weather Clothes, striding through the puddles and allowing the rain to completely soak your trousers, probably.What was tempting was the exhibition in the…

A cartoon coded in CSS from comiCSS.

It's the 1980s, deep in the Peruvian Amazon. Anthropologist Jeremy Narby went to live with the Asháninka to learn how they identified which plants cured what and to document their knowledge. They said the plants themselves told them. At that point he decided to take a more emic approach to anthropology and delve into their customs to understand their claims a little better. He tried the concoction and followed their ceremony, and in one of his visions, he saw two enormous intertwined snakes.…

Let’s look at a quick timeline of the major LLM model announcements from both OpenAI and Anthropic over the past few months. All pricing numbers provided are input MTok / output MTok / cache read MTok. June 26, 2026 OpenAI announced GPT-5.6 Sol and Luna. Sol is the direct successor to GPT 5.5 at the same price of $5 / $30 / $0.50, while Luna is a small model specifically designed for cheaper use cases at $1 / $6 / $0.10. They also announced a Terra model that’s in between those two models, but…

This week was dominated by vulnerabilities in PHP and Node.js. I led some work on the Node.js one and felt good about it – I do a good job with comms and organising under pressure, if I say so myself. A lot of D&D this week. Critical Role Season 4 continues to be amazing; I got to play in Luke’s weekly game again, great fun; and I’ve been planning and worldbuilding for my own campaign like a man possessed. My player characters are about to make a few interesting decisions and I’ve had to plan…

Blog followers have their own code: STRAWWHIMSEY

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The mirror was flawless. It was also the wrong shape.In 1990 we lifted a telescope above the atmosphere, which is the single greatest upgrade in the history of looking at things, and discovered that its primary mirror was ground to the wrong curve. Not wildly wrong. Wrong by roughly two micrometres at the edge, a deviation you could not detect by staring, licking, or praying, but more than enough to smear every point of light into a fuzzy halo. The error is not the interesting part.…

The busy beaver function asks a seemingly simple question: how long can a program run before it halts? We dive deep into this topic: why does it have a whole online community dedicated to it, and why can’t we ever know the full answer?

The kids like to yell out of nowhere “SWEET LARINDA!”. Not sure why. Something related to Mrs Frisby and the rats of NIMH maybe? SWEET LARINDA rules are that you just have to yell it suddenly and for no reason and then other people in the rest of the house have to yell it back. I want a base layer that has thumb holes but they seem hard to find. So I have ordered some chartreuse jersey and am making my own. Annoyingly I have made it too tight. I look like a lime green sausage, especially after…

My friend Mary Bartlett, writer and author of Throw a Great Party, among other works, recently posted an essay about how to host a gathering. I thought it was incredibly appropriate, not only with the holidays rapidly approaching, but because gathering with friends can help us feel loved and cared for in these fraught times. With holidays approaching, some of us are starting to think about giving a party. Others of us are hoping to go to one (or more). Socializing is a great way to bolster good…