Relentless verbiage.
2026-07-31 I've managed to make it to my mid-20s without ever petting a dog, or interacting with one in basically any way. I never grew up with dogs, and as a child I had a fear of them. As I got older I became unafraid, but still tried to avoid them. This morning, though, I was walking a footpath beside a brook when I encountered an old lady walking 2 dogs, without leashes, who approached me,…
2026-07-25 It's been 1 year today since the generously-named Online Safety Act's age verification duties went into effect in the UK. The widespread outrage about it seems to have died down, and the country is continuing on the normal trajectory of slow, painful degradation of privacy and free speech. I have still never verified my age and never will. If I turn off my VPN, plenty of websites become…
2026-07-03 I grew up on the English-speaking internet, where everyone is American, and as such have unthinkingly absorbed a bunch of Americanisms. More recently I've been trying to un-learn them, but they seem to be endless. Some are obvious. I once found a preserved chat-log from years ago where I spelt colour without a U, which I definitely don't do anymore. Some are more subtle, like the…
2026-06-06 I frequently see people use the term "new web" or "modern web" to refer to mainstream sites, with phone-centric web design and mountains of JS you have to run for basic functionality, all funded by surveillance capitalism. You know, 5 websites all filled with screenshots of the other 4. They're very similar to each other because they have the same advertising-based incentive structure.…
2026-05-17 I enjoy low-level asm/C programming. I'm the kind of person who prefers learning about things in a bottom-up way, but in practice I started with higher-level languages and slowly moved to lower-level ones, eventually settling on C as my go-to language for serious programmes. On the way down I used C++ for a while but never got good at it; I think I've never grasped object-oriented…
2026-03-27 About 10 years ago, in 2016, I wrote a cellular automaton simulator called Reasoning Realm, which was not very good. I was an inexperienced programmer at the time and ended up implementing an algorithm (referred to in the programme as "Ignore Non Changing Cells") which simulates only cells in a pattern that have changed, or whose neighbours have changed, in the previous generation. I…