Recent Posts
I know. As if what the world needed was yet another blogpost about LLMs and AI tech. Yet there is a pile of things which have been on my mind, and I haven't seen them laid out elsewhere in the way I'm going to write them, and so here we go. I still don't use genAI to write my articles, fwiw. Here or anywhere else. These rambly words are my own. The tower tilts I read The Tower Keeps Rising…
At the moment I am writing this, bad internet bills are being proposed across the US, Canada, Europe, and the UK. They're using the usual tactics: they claim they're fighting for kids or fighting security risks, but in general, that's what surveillance and censorship bills have always claimed. But something feels different. There's so much happening at once, for one thing, it feels like there's a…
I posted something about the challenge with my writing that seemed worth capturing: A wise person tumbles a stone until smooth, makes a few choice cuts. I foolishly chisel so many facets into it again that unless you zoom in, it appears as rough as the original stone. Then I suppose, in the interest of self-reflection, I should leave this blogpost at that.
I'm convinced that the first AI worm/virus is months away, if that. We've seen the first major evidence of "claw" style agents, which have only been around very briefly, acting in highly malicious ways. See the AI agent publishing a hit piece on a FOSS developer series, and also the hackerbot-claw attacks , etc. But the first real hint of an AI agent worm just happened, even though it isn't…
This is a fictional letter, grown out of me musing about "what would a person ten years ago think about 2026? What would they expect?" No time travelers were hurt in the making of this letter. Hey future me! How's it going? I'm writing this letter now for you to open ten years later. So much is changing in the world that it feels like a good time to write things down, have something to come back…
I've refrained from blogging about recent trends in AI stuff, not because I don't have opinions (I have tons), but because there's enough out there. Most of the hype around AI is coming from a marketing perspective, and a push to have to use AI tooling as a replacement for human labor. My feelings about that are generally negative. But the internet is full of hot takes about that, and so I haven't…
Right now I'm reading The Little Learner . Like how The Little Schemer introduces fundamental concepts of how computing and programming languages work, and The Reasoned Schemer teaches logic programming, and in each you build your own implementation of the language in question at the end, The Little Learner is like that but for deep learning neural networks. I tend to be vocally skeptical of the…
Close to a year ago I wrote about making two songs in Milkytracker . Well today, I have a new one! An Ode to Cleaning Robots : (Here's a direct link , if the audio tag above doesn't work!) And here's the Milkytracker source file should you want to look at it. This song is released as CC BY-SA 4.0 International , so have fun with it. The goal here was to test out the new Milkytracker synthesizer ,…
Held apart across a crystal divide A chariot holding me made of glass I should be so lucky as to ride inside this thing I can see but I cannot touch I can travel and I cannot go home How long until it shatters? What will happen as I fall?
Do you feel the allure of becoming a cyborg? Are you one of those people who loves computing, but hates what computing has become? Do you wish to become one with your computing environment, without having to give into an immersively curated dystopian corporate version of computing we experience today? Throw off the shiny shackles of Apple, dismiss the metaverse garbage Mark Zuckerberg is trying to…
A few weeks ago I wrote How decentralized is Bluesky really? , a blogpost which received far more attention than I expected on the fediverse and Bluesky both. Thankfully, the blogpost was received well generally, including by Bluesky's team. Bryan Newbold, core Bluesky engineer, wrote a thoughtful response article: Reply on Bluesky and Decentralization , which I consider worth reading. I have…
Recently due to various events (namely a lot of people getting off of X-Twitter), Bluesky has become a lot more popular, and excitement for its underlying protocol, ATProto , is growing. Since I worked on ActivityPub which connects together Mastodon , Sharkey , Peertube , GotoSocial , etc, etc, etc in the present-day fediverse, I often get asked whether or not I have opinions about ATProto vs…
I got my MNT Pocket Reform . In short, it's an absolutely gorgeous device and lovely for doing some light hacking or chiptune tracking or etc. It's incredibly built and also feels like it has a lot of potential. It's very clearly upgradeable which is a refreshing change of pace from modern electronics. On the downside, if you get an MNT reform today , you will probably find that you will need an…
Recently I've been making some music in Milkytracker , a decidedly oldschool piece of music tracking software. I've made two songs which I am proud of, one of which is original, the other is a cover. Here's the original piece, titled "A Fairy Leaves Home" (released as CC BY-SA 4.0 , source file ): I'm fairly proud of this one. It's the first ever piece of original composition that came out the way…
I appeared on a PBS's NOVA documentary, Secrets in Your Data ! (It's also on YouTube and, well, on broadcast television I suppose!) This actually aired a few days ago but I hadn't really had time to write anything about it and well, I still don't, but I wanted to mark the time before too much time passed and I never wrote anything. The documentary maker was Structure Films and I have to say,…
My moon and my stars Guided me through dark nights My moon and my stars Sang me sweet songs I had found my muse I found my song My moon and stars were there One night the clouds came, darker than before My moon and stars she called for me to help My moon and stars called out How to help, how to guide that which guides you, finds you peace? The clouds closed in and I tried But I could not stop the…
Making a claim that it's time to reclaim: "sucks" as an insult is over, it's a compliment now! Why are we insulting people who give or receive blowjobs? Let's push back against queerphobia... it's time to change the narrative! You can help. Here are some example uses of "sucks" as a compliment! "Damn this music is awesome, it sucks so hard!" "It must suck to be you, because honestly you're the…
Two and a half years ago I wrote a blogpost coming out as "nonbinary trans-femme" . It was a big moment for me, but much has happened since, and I thought I'd take some time to talk about those changes and what my experience has been. To open things, I don't go by "Chris" anymore... "Christine" only. And while I still somewhat identify as nonbinary, I don't put nonbinary at the front of things the…
Today my girlfriend Vivi Langdon (EncryptedWhispers) and I released the music video In Unexpected Places, available on YouTube and on PeerTube both. It's based off of Vivi's song by the same name, available on BandCamp and on Vivi's Funkwhale instance ! It features some kind of retro video-game'y aesthetics but its story departs from what you might expect from that while leveraging that, more on…
Last month I made a blogpost titled Guile Steel: A Proposal for a Systems Lisp . It got more attention than I anticipated, which is both a blessing and and curse. I mean, mostly the former, the curse isn't so serious, it's mostly that the post was aimed at a specific community and got more coverage than that, and funny things happen when things leave their intended context . The blessing is that…