May 2025
- How to cook frozen chips
Frozen chips are underloved and also most people cook them wrong.
- The wheel turns
The Wheel of Time is not good literature. I still have feelings about it.
- No
'Learning to say no' is treated as one skill, but it's actually about fifteen different ones.
- Studying specifics
On the strange productivity of thinking much harder about something than it deserves.
April 2025
- Heavy up front learning requirements
I tried an extra thumb. It took some getting used to, which turned out to be the interesting part.
- Where are your limits?
On doing things even when you don't feel like it, and whether 'need' is even real.
- Motivation gradients
There's the depression where everything feels impossible, and then there's the one where everything just feels... flat.
- Speaking from the heart
On Focusing, felt sense, and the difficulty of saying what you mean when thinking is faster than feeling.
- More ways to work out sums
Still calculating the sum of the first n integers, now with generating functions. I'll stop eventually.
- Introducing a parameter to work out sums
It turns out there is a direct way to calculate the sum of the first n integers, it just requires calculus I didn't want to assume last time.
- A brief introduction to mathematics with one example many times
Gauss's famous classroom problem, used as an excuse to show several different ways of thinking mathematically about the same thing.
- What is probabilistic programming?
A genuine attempt to explain what probabilistic programming actually is, as opposed to what the field claims it is.
- Algebra and insight
A proof can be correct without being enlightening — here's a case where the insightful proof and the algebraic proof are usefully different.
- Resuming habits
The solution to resuming a habit after a break is to do it in the lowest-effort way possible. Like this.
- Sometimes things are actually important
Not everything is just a story you're telling yourself. Some things actually matter, and pretending otherwise is its own kind of problem.
- Moving the consistency bubble around
In theory, being a morning person is simple. In practice, I do not want to do this.
- Recovering desire with care
Reading Harry Frankfurt on love and desire, written by the guy who also wrote On Bullshit, which is apparently what he's known for now.
- Real examples are messy
A book about caring has an example so smugly frictionless it almost broke me.
- Lessons from win streaking: Learning reliability skills
Getting my Slay the Spire win streak from two to nine taught me things about reliability that apply somewhat beyond card games.
- An improvised meal
Everyone assumed someone else had sorted dinner. I got home at 7:15. We ate at 8.
- Anytime Projects
Projects that can be interrupted at any point and still leave things better than before — and why that's worth designing for.
- Stable state
A piece of short fiction about a village near a City that offers everything, and what something being missing might mean.
- The scent of reality
Sometimes when I'm alone, I like to smell myself. There are good reasons for this.
- When I learned to read
Lisa handed me a battered worthless paperback and was not prepared for my reaction.
- Asking for purpose disrupts action
There's a useful distinction between what an action is *for* and what it *is*, and asking the wrong one tends to break things.
- Python has structural pattern matching
Python has had structural pattern matching since 3.10 and it turns out it does something quite neat that I didn't know about.
- Digital object permanence
Digital objects stop existing for you when you stop looking at them. This is more consequential than it sounds.
- Good queues and bad queues
A follow-up on sources and sinks: queues exist everywhere in your life, and some of them are quietly ruining it.
- Sources, Sinks, and Flows
A very computer-flavoured way of thinking about the stuff in your life and where it goes.
- Why do you do things?
A philosophy video and some Harry Frankfurt got me thinking about whether 'why' is always the right question.
- Threads of existence
I don't have depersonalisation, I'm just... a person... intermittently.
- Building a library of stories
Someone told me my chicken anecdote was great, and I realised I don't have many great anecdotes. I should probably fix that.
- You create rules, rules create you
On Beeminder, commitment devices, and what happens when you try to change a rule you made about yourself.
February 2025
- You only need shallow justifications
A concept I've been trying to articulate for ages finally started making sense when I had a hit tweet about salary negotiation.
- How do LLMs work?
An explanation of how LLMs work, without metaphors, at the level of 'the engine makes the car go'.
September 2024
- Set operations on SAT problems
A neat trick for performing set operations on SAT problems without adding extra variables, offered with the disclaimer that it's undertested and may be buggy.
March 2024
- Finding exercise motivations that work
I finally found exercise motivations that actually work for me: specific movements I want to be able to do, including crow pose, which looks really fucking cool.
February 2024
- Silently losing critical life infrastructure
A bad period revealed which bits of my mental health infrastructure held up under pressure and which had quietly fallen apart before I needed them.
- The obligation to be who you are
Some philosophy-adjacent notes on moral relativism and realism, and how strong abstract realism can be compatible with practical relativism.
- Taking responsibility for failure
There's a basic social norm that I find blindingly obvious and that is clearly not widely shared: if you fail at something you were relied on for, you acknowledge it.
- Yelling at the problem usually doesn't work
A months-long debugging saga in which I did not, in fact, do any debugging.
- Invitations and exclusions
The obvious-to-me but apparently backwards way to design Discord channels: as invitations to start a conversation, not as topic cages.
- Help is easy to find these days
Turns out finding reliable tradespeople is embarrassingly easy, and the answer was Facebook all along.
- Learning to walk right
I have had flat feet my whole life, and apparently the fix is to just... not walk that way.
- Anomaly report: The David that didn't cough in the night-time
I travelled for twelve days, surrounded by people, completely worn down, and somehow didn't get ill. I have a theory, and I don't fully believe it.
January 2024
- Learning from experts in having problems
People with serious recurring problems get very good at managing them out of necessity — and that expertise turns out to be useful even if your problems are more occasional.
- Computer ghost stories
My computer spontaneously opened a web browser to show me an XKCD comic. I have an explanation, and it is not flattering to VS Code.
- Adaptive planning and grid systems
The fastest route through a city grid isn't the one Google Maps gives you — it's the one that takes advantage of information you only have in the moment.
- Visible parts of internal states
I write a lot about emotional progress, and I'm genuinely not sure how much of it is real versus very convincing theorising.
- Restrictions
I walked down sixteen flights of stairs in a hotel fire alarm and have decided not to let this become a policy.
- The Candle Exercise
An exercise in pure observation from a chemistry class: light a candle, and write down everything you can see. You can probably fill ten thousand words.
- Noticing things as life happens
Someone nearly poisoned me at a buffet, and I didn't take it seriously enough until I'd already walked away.
- Layers of being bad at things
I've been bad at standing on one leg my whole life. Turns out I was just not using the right muscles — and now that I am, it's much harder.
- I don't wanna
On the particular texture of not wanting to do things — stubborn, recursive, and suspiciously childlike.
- Landmarks
Problems are useful not just for solving, but for giving you something to navigate by when you're in unfamiliar territory.
- Drawing on resources
Creativity isn't something you generate — it's something you draw on, and the pool runs dry if you're not replenishing it.
- Developing new capacities
A capacity isn't just whether you can do something — it's how easy it is, and that difference matters more than it looks.
- Shared frustrations
On the quiet irritation of watching people do things wrong, and what happens when you finally just tell them how the instant pot works.
- Something isn’t working
A lot of coaching reduces to asking 'have you tried solving the problem?' and the embarrassing answer is usually no.
- Cheeseburger Ethics
Some bad things are bad like murder, and some are bad like eating a cheeseburger. These require very different ethical frameworks.
- Journaling as a foundational practice
Every time I've kept a daily journal it's been important and transformative. I keep stopping anyway.
- Things I believe about ethics and personal development
A list of beliefs about self-work and ethics that I usually write around rather than say directly — here stated plainly, for ease of disagreement.
- Defining definition
An abandoned attempt at a book, rescued to make a point about what definitions actually are and what they're for.
- Writing good programming abstractions
The standard intuition about when to create an abstraction is almost entirely wrong.
- Working hours: A report on an anomaly
I've long claimed I can only do a couple of hours of real work a day. Recently I've been doing six to eight. I notice I am confused.
- Thinking in memes
A post about memes — the internet kind, mostly, though a bit of the Dawkins kind too. Cultural context required; non-nerds may wish to bail early.
- Showing people the door
On running a community and the depressing necessity of occasionally asking people to leave it.
- Safety Advice and Judgment in Emergencies
Safety advice exists for good reasons, and understanding those reasons is genuinely dangerous — so read carefully.
- The skill element of (not) working harder
Yesterday I said the key to improvement was diligent effort. Then I actually tried it and discovered the real skill is knowing when diligent effort is worth it.
- How to be better at everything
The bottleneck on getting better at things usually isn't skill — it's whether you can be bothered to do the fiddly bits.
- Disingenuous Advice
A lot of advice isn't designed to help you — it's designed to discharge someone's sense of obligation while making the problem clearly yours.
- Reason as a moral mechanism
An overambitious philosophy piece on Kantian ethics and what reason actually does in moral reasoning. Inside baseball, but hopefully worth it by the end.
- Honesty is kinder than lying
Reassuring someone that their performance is fine when it isn't doesn't help them — it just makes sure that when the truth eventually arrives, they have no time to do anything about it.
- Some Philosophy of Mathematics
An abandoned attempt to explain mathematical incompleteness, starting with why the standard philosophical presentation of axioms gets in the way.
- Is philosophy bad?
A draft that didn't work, featuring Chavid Dapman, a fictional approximation of David Chapman's opinions on philosophy, who David Chapman confirms does not reflect his views at all.
- January is a daily writing month
I haven't written in months, I'm busy and depressed, so naturally I've committed to writing every day in January.
July 2023
- Adaptive parallel test-case reduction
Writing up the adaptive parallel deletion algorithm I use for test-case reduction, which I think of as standard and keep forgetting nobody else uses.
June 2023
- Larger selves
Self is not a simple thing. It's large, and fractal, and exists at every scale. You are one scale, an important one, but it's equally important to appreciate how selves scale up and down.
February 2023
- My current protocol for energy levels
People kept asking about my recent dramatic increase in energy and mood, so here's the full write-up — mostly Inositol, with a bunch of caveats.
November 2022
- Examples of missing support networks
A tweet went popular; people asked for examples. Here are some, though the real answer is that it's pervasive in ways that resist listing.
May 2022
- Intelligence problems
A draft I abandoned because the subject makes me nervous and I expected to get shouted at. I've posted it anyway. Please don't shout at me.
- Victims of metonymy
Most people who think they're bad at reading books are not bad at reading books. They're just doing it wrong, and the name is lying to them about that.
- What every programming tutorial gets wrong
Programming tutorials teach you steps to follow. They mostly forget to teach you what's actually going on.
- The costs of being understood
When something you write goes unexpectedly viral, the cost of each individual response is small — the problem is there are a hundred of them, and you're the only you.
- Leaving shiny things behind
My phone is a shiny thing. Not interesting, exactly, just impossible to ignore — and there's a difference.
- Promethean work
On the strange experience of stealing obvious-in-retrospect ideas from complicated disciplines and handing them to people who have never heard of the discipline.
- How to be lucky
Draft bankruptcy extracts from a piece on luck — including a distinction between luck, happenstance, and circumstance that I think actually matters.
April 2022
- Beef and lentil stew "recipe"
A recipe I'd completely forgotten I used to make regularly, rescued from draft purgatory before deletion. It's not a recipe in any strict sense, but it is delicious.
January 2022
- Soul death
A tweet about IFS therapy was obviously a joke. The fact that people found it threatening is more interesting than the joke itself.
- Ladders between communities
On asking someone to leave a community when they haven't technically done anything wrong.
- Learning and teaching
Most people are shockingly bad at learning from each other. This seems like a problem worth taking seriously.
- Irritation and fascination
Fascination and irritation feel similar because they might be the same thing — both pulling you towards a problem you need to defeat.
- The kindness of strangers
After getting lost on the way to hospital, I rented a car and promptly didn't know how to reverse it. Strangers were, once again, very helpful about this.
- Failing to resist temptations
I'm bad at finishing things. Crisps are the notable exception.
- Seeing clearly
I've known for months that not wearing my glasses was giving me headaches. I still didn't put them on until I had to drive a car.
- Other people's needs
On the Levinas problem: once you start taking responsibility for someone, where does it stop? This is why I don't give money to beggars, and I'm not proud of it.
- Holding yourself tightly
I express my emotions very well, actually. Just exclusively in words, in a perfectly calm voice, with a completely neutral expression.
- Projects that you can't run out of
Some projects can absorb as much work as you're willing to put in without becoming pointless. These feel very good to have.
- The usefulness of things you don't use
The things you stop using because you don't need them are often the reason you don't need them.
- Difficulty finishing things
I do 90-99% of the work on things and then stop. I don't know exactly why, but I published this anyway despite the part of me insisting I shouldn't.
- Fulfilling work
Work can be genuinely fulfilling, but most of what people experience at work is a cruel caricature of that experience.
- Curiosity is a team sport
I keep picking interests that nobody else shares, and then being surprised when I have nobody to share them with.
- Being an ideas guy
I'm an ideas guy, that much maligned creature. Here's my complicated relationship with that fact.
- Walls of people
People who stand around obliviously in tube stations annoy me to an irrational degree. Jung has thoughts on why.
- Regrets and interventions
I've been thinking about writing a letter to my past self, but first I need to know what model of time travel we're working with.
- Coffee as a way of life
I broke my caffeine addiction. I then very deliberately got it back. An investigation.
- Being fragmented
Being human is weird and I don't really get it — particularly the parts of my own mind I don't have direct access to.
- Being unreliable
One of the worst things about me is that I'm fairly unreliable. An honest account of what that's like and why it's so hard to fix.
- Memory and yearning
I'm told normal people remember their childhood. I'm not sure I believe them.
- Grappling with vastness
Drifting might just be a freeze response to having too many choices — specifically, to confronting just how little freedom you actually have.
- Writing as yourself
The fully general method for doing anything: be the sort of person who can do the thing, then do the thing. This is, as promised, simple.
- Drifting away the time
Drifting is like evil flow — it absorbs you completely and leaves you feeling entirely unnourished.
- Ready for less than you think
A trip to the hospital for a knee X-ray that went wrong in every incremental way you'd expect if you hadn't left the house properly in two years.
- Being a brain at night
On panic attacks, and the particular cruelty of a brain that only misbehaves when you close your eyes.
- Relearning curiosity
It turns out I'm not actually that curious. Except I might have been wrong about that.
- Wanting (to) help
I am a very helpful person. This is not entirely straightforward.
- Writing from the heart
On the difference between bleeding onto the page and actually writing something good.
December 2021
- The landscape of
What even is misery, as an emotion? An attempt to map out the territory from the inside.
November 2021
- Social reality as a game
I walked through the streets carrying a ceramic mug of coffee, which is weird in a way that a paper cup or travel mug isn't — and I've been thinking about why ever since.
- My conception of parts work
What I actually mean by parts work, written out in theses after tabooing the words 'Self' and 'part' for clarity.
- I'm not trapped in here with you
A dark-but-in-a-productive-way piece about what happens when a part of you has been imprisoned by your own psyche for so long that being freed feels like a betrayal.
- Writing is (from the id)
On a mode of writing where you find a feeling in your subconscious and just pull on it to see what comes out. Can't recommend it exactly, but it sure is interesting.
October 2021
- Probably enough probability for you
A working explanation of probability for people who don't already know it, with the philosophical positions stated upfront and the usual academic hedging skipped entirely.
- How is laughter social?
Kierkegaard thought you had to be 'a little more than queer' to laugh on your own. I laugh harder on my own than in company. I think Kierkegaard needed to read funnier books.
- A simple model of depression and "depressive realism"
Depressive realism is often cited as evidence that depressed people see the world more clearly. I don't think that's what's going on.
- Learning how to tell a joke
On the two-stage art of joking, why some jokes don't survive being written down, and why the two stages aren't actually separable.
- We must imagine the steelman happy
I'm frustrated enough with virtue ethics's account of eudaimonia that I've written my own version of it. It's possible I've just reinvented theirs.
- The problem of Susan
Julia Annas poses a thought experiment about whether Susan had a happy life. The answer, I think, is that 'happy' is not something a life can be — and the confusion is doing a lot of work.
- Scurrying
My Alexander Technique teacher caught me scurrying — moving in a way that signals you want to get this over with and get to the important thing. It turns out I do this a lot.
- On Julia Annas's conception of happiness
Working through Julia Annas's chapter on happiness in Intelligent Virtue, with live commentary that occasionally takes things back.
- Revisiting Intelligent Virtue
A second pass at Julia Annas's Intelligent Virtue, chapter by chapter, because I keep coming away from it feeling I haven't done it justice.
- What's up with the unity of the virtues?
A speedrun through the doctrine of the unity of the virtues, which it turns out means thirty different things and none of them are quite right.
- What does a good person look like?
Being pleasant and harmless is not the same as being good — Socrates was deeply disagreeable and they killed him for it, but he was the one worth admiring.
- Book Speedrun: Intelligent Virtue by Julia Annas
One hour, one book on virtue ethics: what you get when you treat being a good person like any other skilled practice.
- Notes on moral disorder
On the possibility that the reason you feel like a bad person is that you're a bad person — and why that's actually a more tractable problem than it sounds.
- Book speedrun: On Humour by Simon Critchley
An hour with a book about the philosophy of humour, including a strong stance against corporate fun.
- On feeling blocked, redux
Writer's block, revisited: it's not wanting to write, or wanting not to write, and moving the complexity doesn't make it simpler.
July 2021
- Unlearning
Schools don't just fail to teach things—they actively teach children that they can't learn them.
- Can you throw money at the Collatz Conjecture?
Inside baseball on whether prize money could actually help solve a famously pointless but unsolvable maths problem.
- The changing nature of sick days
It turns out the reason to call in sick was never about toughness.
- You can't write life down
On stories that can only be told in the dark, and what gets lost when we try to preserve them.
- You have to do the easy bits first
A seven-year-old asks why jigsaws are harder for her than for me, and it turns out there's really only one trick.
- The edge of the familiar
A poet claims there are no new ideas. He is wrong.
- You can solve your problems, but you don't have to
You're a small and finite person and the world will cheerfully consume all of your capacity if you let it.
- First decide what's good enough
Two separate questions: how good does it need to be, and how good would you like it to be. Most people skip the first one.
- Learning from the real
Complex systems that have been running for a while have the shape they do for a reason, and it's not always a bad one.
- The trauma model of talent blocks
People who tell you they were bad at maths at school are telling you something real, even if they don't quite know what.
- Making life less irritating
Small irritants add up, and most of them are actually fixable if you bother.
- Would you like some advice?
You're going to get some whether you like it or not, but that's different from giving it when no one asked.
- Clearing hurdles in learning
Getting better at a skill isn't a smooth curve—it's mostly easy, occasionally a cliff face.
- Spiraling outwards
I start with something small, decide to do it justice, and suddenly it's a month-long project.
- A lack of shared projects
On picking redcurrants with my family and the strange scarcity of doing useful things together with people you care about.
- Source: The noosphere, impersonal communication
Where did I get this idea from? Honestly, no idea. Could be anything.
- A library of recurring ideas
A lot of thinking is just pattern-matching against a library of ideas you already have. Here's part of mine.
- You open one of the 999 boxes on this floor and find...
A collection of increasingly unsettling things you could do with surplus rooms in a house.
- What does one do on bad days?
On being a bit meh and writing anyway.
- Heading towards the ouch
A therapeutic technique that involves deliberately heading toward the thing that hurts. Not entirely safe. Possibly useful.
- Studying the mundane
Most of what I write about is extremely ordinary, and I think that's actually the point.
- Start from amazing
When someone says you've probably just never had a good example of the thing you claim not to like, they might actually have a point.
- Why do we need new terminology?
On why you sometimes need to make up new words — written partly in the upgoer five editor, which only allows the ten hundred most common words.
- The humour test for expertise
If you actually understand something, you should be able to find the jokes funny.
- No shortage of things to write about
There is always more to write about. The problem is something else entirely.
- People are bad at defining things
Philosophers love defining their terms and are almost universally terrible at it.
April 2021
- Remastery Training
On the specific problem of being stuck at Ascension 20 in Slay the Spire when you know the right strategy but are simply bad at it.
December 2020
- Reducing Weird Tests
When your interestingness predicate is basically a hash function, test-case reduction is going to have a bad time — and there's not much you can do about it.
August 2020
- Ensuring Downward Paths
Working through some half-formed ideas about what it means for a test-case reducer to generalise, and how to make sure it has somewhere to go.
- From a Certain Point of View
All communication is a kind of performance, and we simplify and reshape more than we like to admit — memory sees to that.
July 2020
- Standardised Facts
States need facts that can be aggregated and compared, which means they need facts that have been stripped of most of what makes them interesting.
- Politics as long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror
Well-functioning politics is boring in a way that democracy is almost uniquely ill-suited to handle.
- Inclusivity and Onboarding
Every community for people with a specific shared background is inherently a little exclusionary. You can manage that tension but you can't dissolve it.
- Seeing Your Working
The finished product hides the work that made it — and that's a problem, especially if you're trying to learn from it.
- Thinking Outside Your Head
Good tools don't just support mental models, they help distribute the model between your head and the world.
- Notes on Reduced Output
On why the daily notebook posts have been less daily lately, and what to do about it.
- An Annoyingly Hard Algorithm to Beat
I love clever solutions. This algorithm is not clever. I resent how well it works.
- Questions to Ask When Bored
Boredom is not one thing, and figuring out which flavour you have turns out to be most of the solution.
- Habit Overload
Some habits have been slipping. An honest attempt to figure out why and what to do about it.
- Nice Problems to Have
They're pretty rarely actually nice to have.
- Living Room Rules
You don't need a code of conduct to run a healthy community. You can just treat it like your living room and be the host.
- Automatic Boltzmann Sampling for Context Free Grammars
A shower thought about random sampling from context-free grammars that turns out to actually work, modulo the usual caveats about untested code.
- Learning to use the system
Both the technician frustrated by incompetent users and the users refusing to learn have a point, and understanding why is instructive.
- Precarity and Conformity
Conformity promises safety but delivers a particular kind of anxiety — the kind where the threat never fully goes away.
- The Possibility and the Actuality of Change
Knowing how to change is not the same as changing. Wallace Stevens knew this too, apparently.
- Indexing a DFA in shortlex order
Bad news feelings-readers, it's another technical post — this time about how to efficiently index strings in a regular language without enumerating exponentially many of them.
- Getting Test-Case Reduction Unstuck with Automaton Inference
A great idea for test-case reduction that doesn't work, and a way to salvage something useful from it anyway.
- Death of the Reader
It is very hard to read a text as it would have been read at the time. We can't un-know what we know.
- From Maintaining to Making
Maintenance teaches you things about what you're maintaining that the original manufacturer never knew, and that turns out to matter.
- Cultivating the Skills of Context
The best jokes, analogies, and tools are often ones that only work in a very specific context. That's not a flaw.
June 2020
- Free and Open Source Social Technology
The techniques of being human are being developed collaboratively, outside the market, and you can't patent them — let's keep it that way.
- I'm not actually that curious
Correcting a misconception: the reading is mostly driven by stress, not curiosity, and a Christian theology book about capitalism is in fact a perfectly reasonable response to a problem.
- Ideas Get You Unstuck
Ideas aren't the main ingredient in doing work, but they're what you reach for when you don't know how to proceed.
- Find a forking path
The fork in the road where both paths are an improvement on standing still is a gift, and most people respond to it by sitting down and crying.
- Subsetting Life
You're not experiencing all of what you're capable of experiencing. You're running on a subset, and you've built a wrong but mostly functional mental model of that subset.
- Trying out this thing called Hypothesis
Not the property-based testing library — the web annotation one. It's now embedded here, go wild.
- Books are never finished, only abandoned
A book isn't done when you've read it — it's done when you no longer need it as a thinking tool, which is a different and usually later moment.
- Speech and Writing
Something gets lost when you write things down. Socrates knew it, Plato was suspicious of it, and I'm feeling it right now.
- Non-Experts and Status in Expert Communities
Expert communities depend on the non-experts they serve, and they hate that about themselves.
- Fake Olds
History is mostly records left by people with power and an agenda, which means a lot of what we call history is propaganda that's been aged long enough to seem respectable.
- Conversations in a public
The culture of suspicion has made genuine public inquiry nearly impossible, and this is depressing even when you expected it.
- Chatting with your consciences
Your conscience isn't one voice, it's several, and the goal isn't to get them to agree — it's to help them argue better.
- Surviving is good
Survivor's guilt is understandable, but surviving is good, and you should not feel guilty about it.
- Uploading friendships to the cloud
It turns out some friendships have an in-person component that was load-bearing in ways that weren't obvious until it was gone.
- Help isn't always helpful
Jonathan Strange saved a ship using magic, which was great, except that it completely reconfigured the harbour's sandbeds. A meditation on visible help, invisible problems, and who gets to decide which matters.
- Morality tests as self-fulfilling prophecies
A feedback loop in which correcting someone's bad argument becomes indistinguishable from attacking their politics, and how we got here.
- Losing the story for the style
Gary Provost thinks any subject can be made fascinating by a good writer. He's wrong, and the fact that he thinks this tells you a lot about what he writes about.
- Don't anthropomorphise fate, it hates that
The Fates are called cruel because they pay no heed to anyone's wishes — which is, you know, pretty on brand for impersonal forces of nature.
- A Book is a Tool for Thinking With
A book isn't just a container for information — it's a tool you use to have thoughts you wouldn't otherwise have.
- A Guide to Starting a Daily Writing Practice
Apparently I'm now the person who talks people into daily writing practices, so here's a daily writing about that.
- A Meta For Computers
A metaphor for how computers work, for people who don't understand software but do understand archives staffed by extremely rule-bound bureaucrats.
- Testing Positive For vs Having
Testing positive for something and having it are not the same thing, and this matters more than you might think — especially when you're doing the Bayesian maths on your own COVID status.
- The Virtue Ethics of Potato Growing
On how Andean potato farmers, virtue ethicists, and James C. Scott are all making the same point about rules versus practical wisdom.
- Popular Culture Reference, David
On not having seen the thing everyone's seen, the running joke this creates, and what our shared cultural objects say about which voices get amplified.
- Some Useful Emotion Management Principles
A set of working principles for understanding emotions — not necessarily all true, but probably about 90% there, and more useful than most alternatives.
- Being friends with your coworkers
Being friends with your coworkers makes everything better, and currently we only make it easy for the people who already have it easy.
May 2020
- Norms of Excellence
What does the opposite of the social obligation to be bad at things look like? Some thoughts on moral norms that actually push toward excellence rather than mediocrity.
- Knowing what to look for
Knowing a thing—really knowing it—changes what you see when you look at it.
- Defects are the responsibility of programmers
Hillel says defects aren't programmers' fault. I think that's mostly right, but the framing matters.
- Key Performance Indicators
Drunk, self-indulgent, and thinking about what victory actually looks like.
- Life is neither poker nor tennis
Thinking in Bets is a good book, but 'life is poker, not chess' isn't quite right either.
- The Inner Pedestal of Tennis
A quote from Gallwey that gets at exactly what David thinks Gallwey gets wrong.
- Attractive People on Magazine Covers as Hermeneutical Marketing
Magazine covers are doing something sneakier than just making you feel bad about your body.
- Identity and Legitimisation of Knowledge
On who gets to decide what counts as knowledge, and what happens when the gatekeepers are the problem.
- Feet as a Foundational Skill
You probably think you know how to use your feet. You probably don't.
- Feeling Good About Being Good
Morality is usually experienced as guilt and shame, but there's a case that feeling good about doing well is just as important.
- Against the Classification of Books
Adler and Van Doren want you to classify books before you read them. I'm not sure this is as useful as they think.
- Morality and Emotion
Ethical theory tells you what to do. Moral education is about how anyone actually learns to do it.
- How I fix anxiety triggers
A sketch of the skillset I use to deal with anxiety—with honest caveats about when it doesn't work.
- Parts of you are missing
Grief isn't just about people. It's about the parts of your distributed self that are no longer there.
- Working with the audience
A Vorkosigan novel, bug butter, and the underappreciated importance of not naming your product after the disgusting creature it comes from.
- Bug Fixes and Performance Improvements
Version 37.0 of the DRMacIver software system is here, and yes we do practice continuous deployment.
- Requiem for a pair of trousers
I spent 45 minutes taking apart a dying pair of trousers. It had more to say about repair and loss than I expected.
- Truth and the Ghost Library
On fundamentalism, interpretation, and the hidden library of texts that shapes what we're able to say.
- Notes on Acedia
Notes on acedia—the medieval sin of spiritual torpor that turns out to describe a lot of contemporary experience.
- Teach me of your human notions of love
Let's consult a few books about love and see if any of them help.
- Joy in Sadness
On the strange fact that sadness and pleasure aren't always as far apart as they should be.
- How to read a book
How to Read a Book never actually tells you how to read a book. Here's what it missed.
- Why are things hard?
On the new newsletter, and on the relationship between the notebook and it.
- Building and Rebuilding Foundational Skills
Being kinda OK at statistics is, it turns out, a real problem for getting better at statistics.
- How to be a better person
Knowing what the right thing to do is turns out to be the least of your problems.
- Initial Notes Towards a Manifesto
I don't have a full manifesto yet, but here's the direction it points: we are fucking this up.
- Separating Impulse from Action
I buy too many books. Here's a trick I found for dealing with that—and probably other impulse problems too.
- Easy changes and Uncomfortable Reflections
My bedroom is a mess, and fixing it turned out to be more emotionally complicated than expected.
- Cleaning up the fnords in your environment
Your environment is full of things quietly making you anxious. Most of them can be removed.
- Making Success Trivial
Set your bar for success so low there's no excuse for missing it. This is not lowering your standards; it's raising your consistency.
- Model Monocropping
Models are toy worlds, and like any monoculture, relying too heavily on one kind is a bad idea.
- Numbers and Feelings
I tried to do some maths and ended up mostly processing feelings instead. Fair warning: this one's more for me than for you.
- Strategy, reliability, and impersonality
Three tarot cards walk into a post about Personal Construct Psychology.
- Adoptive Identities
The idea might be wrong, but the problem it was pointing at is real.
- On not behaving like other people
Wellington on magicians, and what that has to do with being genuinely weird.
- Ritual and Freedom
The Nine of Pentacles and I have a complicated relationship.
April 2020
- Care Work and Fixing Things
A tarot reading during COVID leads somewhere useful: thinking about care work, the people who do it, and what it costs them.
- The Casting of Leaders
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, the Magician tarot card, and colonialism walk into a post.
- There is no moral obligation to be exhausted
Taking care of yourself is not a moral failure. It never was.
- Masculinity as a source of sexual hang ups
The idea that men are straightforwardly comfortable with their sexuality is, charitably, optimistic.
- Telling each other stories
Every story we tell each other slightly rewrites the ones we already had.
- Fixed and growth relationships
Romantic love as a way of freezing each other in flattering amber, and why that's not ideal.
- 78 Thinking Hats
De Bono's Six Thinking Hats, extended via tarot to seventy-eight, by someone who finds de Bono insufferable but not entirely wrong.
- The conditional love of a small town
bell hooks loves small towns; queer neurodivergent people tend to have a somewhat different experience of them.
- Democracy isn't just voting
Voting is what you do when actual democracy has already failed.
- Proportionality and identity
Random jury selection is fair on average, which is cold comfort if you're not average.
- Power, baby, power
On the gendered scripts around finding power attractive, and why men aren't supposed to admit they do.
- Does a fish have a face?
Whether you care about fish suffering turns out to depend heavily on whether you're currently looking at one.
- The Accelerator/Brake Model
A model from a book about sex that turns out to explain procrastination just as well.
- Notes on becoming a cis man
On doing the gender introspection and ending up pretty much where you started, but understanding it better.
- Dust Motes and Electric Plugs
Incommensurability is real, but you still have to choose.
- Ubiquitous Incommensurability
Your top ten favourite books are impossible to list, and this isn't a failure of effort.
- Capabilities can be coerced
If you can do it, someone can make you do it — which means not being able to do it is a form of power.
- Spock is a Lie
Reasoning without emotions doesn't make you more logical — it makes you worse at deciding what matters.
- The memetic domus
A half-formed idea about the ecology of concepts, working in public before it quite makes sense.
- Intuition as search prioritisation
Intuition as the order in which you search through possibilities — not whether you find the answer, but how fast.
- Trivial irritations as inhibiting factors
I thought I didn't like podcasts. Turns out I just didn't have wireless headphones.
- Maybe everyone was right all along
Mocking people for saying COVID proves their ideology right is fun, but they're probably actually right.
- The rule of three twos
A simple combinatorial trick for improvising food that actually tastes good.
- What's cooking?
A half-arsed recipe involving cashews, apples, and raisins, and some thoughts on improvised cooking during a pandemic.
- Being safe for others
On how to be the kind of person people can actually tell things to.
- Anxiety vs Worry
Anxiety and worry are different things, and confusing them makes both harder to deal with.
- Teleology is fake
Asking "what is this for?" is useful, but the answer you get isn't quite real.
- The problem of deduction
Deduction isn't actually a form of reasoning — it's a logic of what follows from what, and there's a difference.
March 2020
- Vampire bats as a model for flirting
Vampire bats have a lot to teach us about reciprocity, trust, and — yes — flirting.
- Desire as a driver of growth
Safety makes growth possible. Desire is what makes you actually bother.
- Everything is a teachable moment
Posts ostensibly about cats, showers, and codebases are never really about cats, showers, and codebases.
- On having different thresholds
Waiting until things are bad enough before you act is a very common habit, and a very bad one.
- Competence is sexy
On what actually draws people in, and why competence is a bigger part of the answer than most people admit.
- Pragmatic Problem Solving (aka Kludges)
The shower broke. We fixed it, sort of. More importantly, there's a general principle here.
- Notes on Running a Mutual Support Group
A mutual support group is one of the better things you can build into your life. Here's how.
- Trust beyond reason
On trusting people more than the evidence strictly warrants, and why it tends to work out.
- Life as an anytime algorithm
An anytime algorithm gives you its best answer whenever you stop it. Life works better when you treat it the same way.
- Leaving knowledge in the box
Everything is potentially relevant to everything else, which means you can never know enough — and that's fine.
- The Inner Game of Celeste
The Inner Game of Tennis is surprisingly good, and Celeste is a better illustration of its ideas than tennis is.
- On feeling blocked
On the specific horror of knowing exactly what you need to do and being completely unable to do it.
- Good strategies often fail
Stockpiling food for Brexit and not needing it isn't evidence the stockpiling was wrong. Good strategies fail all the time.
- Safety as an enabler of growth
The rich can afford to make risky investments. The same principle applies far beyond money.
- Everybody is looking for permission
A surprising amount of social life makes more sense once you realise everyone is waiting for someone to say it's okay.
- Berkson's paradox is everywhere
Most of the correlations you see in daily life aren't real — they're artifacts of how you're looking at things.
- Alief/Belief Coherence
Introducing the word 'alief'. You're welcome — you'll see it everywhere now.
- Communication: Collaboration and Conflict
Every conversation contains both collaboration and conflict, and pretending otherwise is how things go wrong.
- Books should be taken seriously but not literally
Self-help books work best as useful fictions, not accurate descriptions of reality.
- Suspension of annoyance
A thoroughly annoying book that turned out to be immediately useful. A review.
- Homophily and the tyranny of false positives
We select for friends who are like us not because others are bad, but because we can't tell who the good ones are.
- The art of not having opinions
Most people have strong opinions about complex systems they don't understand. There's a better way.
- You can't actually explain everything to laypeople
The Feynman thing where you explain it to a five-year-old or you don't understand it is, unfortunately, wrong.
- You can't actually run out of ideas
Ideas are generated, not found. Two books about how.
- Stuff just happens and you probably don't know why
The causes of most things are complicated, nondeterministic, and probably not what you think they are.
- If a task is impossible, try making it harder
Sometimes the problem isn't that something is too hard — it's that it's not hard enough to hold your attention.
- Be the more decisive person
One of the most underrated favours you can do for people is just making the decision when nobody else will.
- Computer games as therapeutic tools
Celeste, Slay the Spire, and Untitled Goose Game: a practical guide to games as emotional regulation.
- Install cut out switches in your mind
Some beliefs self-reinforce in ways that make them impervious to evidence. Here's how to break the loop.
- Nerding
Nerd is not a category of subject matter. It's a way of relating to things.
- COULDDO vs TODO
TODO lists feel like obligations. COULDDO lists feel like options. This turns out to matter a lot.
- Untangling moral concepts
Must, should, obliged, permissible, virtuous — these are not synonyms, and conflating them causes a lot of trouble.
- Touch starvation and group responsibility
Touch starvation is a serious problem, and it's not one that individuals can solve on their own.
- Depression as felt restriction on emotional range
Depression isn't sadness — it's the feeling that certain feelings are no longer available to you at all.
- Seeking out existence proofs in everyday life
Before worrying about how to solve a problem, it's worth first establishing that it can be solved at all.
- Skirting the edge of disaster
Complex systems constantly teeter on the edge of failure. This is not an accident — it's a structural feature.
- Your emotions are valid but probably wrong
Your emotions are responding to something real, but probably to a situation that no longer exists.
- Legibility as a relationship
Legibility isn't a property of a thing. It's a relationship between a thing and whoever is trying to read it.
- There are no deterministic voting systems
People say they don't like nondeterminism in voting. Bad news: all voting systems are nondeterministic.
December 2019
- Notes on Conscious Experience
My fairly eccentric views on consciousness, including why I hold something like bounded materialist panpsychism, written up because I keep promising to and finally got around to it.
- Almost every set is immune
Immune sets — infinite sets from which no computer program can print an infinite subset — sound exotic, but it turns out almost every infinite set is one.
September 2019
- Faster SAT model counting
A trick for speeding up #SAT model counting that I figured out but haven't deployed, written up with the caveat that this is a notebook post and you should expect nothing polished.
- How To Make Good Coleslaw
The trick is to lengthen the mayonnaise rather than drown everything in it. Yes, I have opinions about coleslaw.
August 2019
- Expected Time To Hit A Score Difference
A probability problem that looked hard until I thought about it in the shower, at which point it turned out to be quite easy and to have a surprisingly clean answer.
- A Fun Puzzle
A maths puzzle from Twitter about two random number game strategies, with the perhaps surprising result that player two wins 5/9 of the time.
July 2019
- Two Player TickTalk
What happens when your group discussion format is designed for four people and only two show up — turns out it works pretty well with some tweaks.
- Separating Sampling and Removal
A data structure I'm fairly sure I invented, which does three things in O(1) that you wouldn't expect to be able to do in O(1) simultaneously.
June 2019
- Notes on Disagreement
Notes from a TickTalk session on disagreement — practical advice on when to be curious, when to be adversarial, and when to just block people.
- Notes on the Legibility War
Half-formed notes on a thesis I've been mulling for six months: that much of life and politics is a conflict over how we make people intelligible to each other.
January 2019
- Reducing the Reduction Pass Ordering Problem
The reduction pass ordering problem might be mostly an illusion caused by passes being too large — make them small enough and the ordering stops mattering much.
- Vegan Chartreuse Hot Chocolate
A recipe for hot chocolate that is both excellent and entirely vegan, mostly because green Chartreuse and 90% dark chocolate do a lot of heavy lifting.
- Recipe Write-Up: Not really Soboro
I heard about a Japanese dish, had never tasted it, and then mangled the recipe completely using none of the intended ingredients. The result is good enough that I don't feel too guilty about it.
- Book Review: Every Cradle is a Grave by Sarah Perry
A book about antinatalism and suicide rights that I would have expected to find persuasive, and didn't — the case it makes is weaker than the subject deserves.
- Book Review: A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit
Rebecca Solnit on how people actually behave in disasters (better than you think) and who causes most of the damage (the people in charge).
- Onion, Bacon, and Potato Pancakes
Experimenting with wheat-free pancakes — potato starch turns out to work remarkably well, and adding bacon and onion pulls them toward something more interesting than the bland baseline.
- Some female SFF authors to read
Someone's bookshelf was too male-dominated and asked for recommendations. Here's the list I gave them.
- Reducer Pass Budgeting
A solution to the expensive test-case reducer pass problem: give each pass a budget of unsuccessful calls and cut it off when it exceeds that budget.
- Brexit Prep
My somewhat haphazard Brexit food stockpile, shared because a friend asked and it's better than nothing, even if I've already spotted problems with it.
- Book Review: Aphantasia: Experiences, Perceptions, and Insights, by Alan Kendle
A book about aphantasia that was mostly obvious to me as someone with aphantasia — probably more interesting if you find its existence mind-blowing.
- Recent Fiction Reading
A roundup of recent fiction — some decent, some pretty good, a few great, and one that is utterly terrible and I love it.
- Using unsound A\* search to improve a greedy algorithm
Using an improper A* search as a way to find better test-case reduction pass orderings than greedy search alone — it works within about 10-20% of optimal.
December 2018
- Book Review: The Cooking Gene by Michael W. Twitty
Good but not great, which is a shame, because the good parts are very good.
- Derivative of a polynomial with real roots
A theorem about polynomials and their derivatives, with a proof that is less annoying than the obvious one.
- Flying Lessons
On instructions that consist of individually reasonable steps but somehow omit the crucial bit.
- Test-case reduction as graph search
An underdeveloped idea about test-case reduction, pass ordering, and graph search. Poorly explained, by the author's own admission.
- Etymology of property-based testing
QuickCheck was invented in Haskell, but 'property-based testing' was invented in Erlang. These are not the same thing.
- Another attempt at brownies.
The brownies lacked structural integrity and were too sweet, which I'm blaming on forgetting the salt.
- Privacy as Friction Reduction
Privacy isn't mainly about hiding things. It's about creating conditions in which your own mind will tell you the truth.
- When is it OK for a book to be long?
My strong prior is that books should be short. Here is when I'll make an exception.
- Placeholder
Beeminder can't judge quality. This post is proof of that.
- Levy's theorem
A theorem about polynomials and Bernoulli random variables that is frustratingly stated without proof. Here is the proof.
- Wheat-and-Dairy-Free Brownies
Brownie experimentation under dietary constraints. Results: promising but inconclusive.
- Book Review "The Tao of Pooh and the Te of Piglet" by Benjamin Hoff
The Tao of Pooh was faintly annoying. The Te of Piglet can fuck right off.
- Book Review: How to Improve Your Foreign Language Immediately Paperback by Boris Shekhtman
Fundamentally a book about how to have a conversation. I liked it even though I can't verify it works.
- Democracy Can't Work
A puzzle about voting theory, expertise, and why whoever designs the system has already won.
- Crispy Spicy Green Beans
Oh gods these are like crack.
- Book Review: Learn to Write Badly by Michael Billig
Not a writing advice book, but a book about why academic social scientists write the way they do. Dense but worth it.
November 2018
- You Can Do Anything (But You Can't Do Everything)
You can understand almost anything given time and resources. Most of the time you don't have those.
- Teach People How To Do Things
Hard work is not sufficient for success, and telling people it is causes real harm. I am quite angry about this.
- Book list from CUP.
Books I photographed instead of buying at Cambridge University Press, for your browsing pleasure.
- Building Friendships
Stop thinking about making friends and start thinking about building friendships. It's a small shift that helps.
- The people that live in your head
Fiction is good for filling your head with people worth having there.
- How to build a superintelligence
We've had the capability to build useful superintelligences for about 100,000 years. They're called groups of people.
- Reading a Paper
A points-based system for deciding whether a paper is worth reading properly.
- Book Review: Rereadings, edited by Anne Fadiman
I wanted to like it. The essays were really stories about the authors' lives, and I just didn't care.
- Miscellaneous Notes on Vegetarian Cooking
I'm not a vegetarian any more, but the food is great and the anti-vegetarian takes are boring.
- Book Review: Rewriting the Rules
A book I mostly liked but have a specific problem with, relating to length.
- Notes on Queer Life as Combat Epistemology
Two concepts I've been chewing on: illegibility and marginalisation as combat epistemology. They're both more useful than they sound.
- Book Review: 100 Ways to Improve Your Writing, by Gary Provost
I bought it for one passage. It mostly justified the purchase.
- Testing if nearness is an equivalence.
A small complexity theory puzzle about pseudometrics. I'm reasonably confident about the answer.
- Not the Box
An analogy about confusing a part for the whole, waiting for somewhere to land.
- Book Review: Trans Like Me
This book is very good and I think you should read it.
- Notes from TickTalk
Notes from the first TickTalk playtest, which generated an unusual density of good conversation.
- How to write when writing is hard
Find things you can already do that are like the things you can't. Then close the gap one step at a time.
- Dietary Experimentation
Person on a diet talks about the diet he is on. (He warned you.)
- Book Review: The Knowledge Illusion
Eighty percent great, twenty percent red flags — not an average, just a great book that needs salting.
- Notes on Lagrangian Duality
I've failed to understand Lagrangian duality for years. I think I've finally got it, and the problem was everyone filling their explanations with distracting details.
- Pork Meatballs with Ground Almonds
I'm on a restriction diet, which means my cooking has gone a bit weird. Here are some meatballs.
- Doing Mathematics to People
Modelling people as mathematical systems is tempting, somewhat effective, and goes badly in a number of important ways.
- Notes on "Towards a general mathematical theory of experimental science"
First-pass notes on a paper that didn't clear my threshold for a close reading, which was a shame.
- Book Review: The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up
Much weirder than I was expecting. I enjoyed it and won't be following the system.
- Frequentist Statistics as a Tool of Critique
A framing of frequentist statistics I like: the model-based critique. Probably not novel, but I find it clarifying.
October 2018
- Notes on Blocking Sets
Some combinatorics I was playing with for test case reduction. Mostly notes to myself.
- Notes from London Liberating Structures 2018-10-30
Notes from a workshop using Liberating Structures—two different facilitation techniques, with observations on how they played out.
- The No Genies Conjecture
There are no tools that are both powerful and flexible without a lot of work. Probably.
- Book Review: "An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth" Chris Hadfield
Not pop science trash. The life advice would have been unbearable without the space stories; fortunately there are a lot of space stories.
- Book Review: A Field Guide To Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit
A lovely, melancholy book that I could never have written—not just because Solnit is a better writer, but because her relationship with memory is entirely unlike mine.
- Deleting larger intervals in test case reduction
A surprising fact about test-case reduction: going for something stronger than one-minimality turns out to be cheaper, not more expensive.
- Book Review: Thinking in Systems by Donella H. Meadows
A decent introduction to systems thinking. Preaching to the choir for me, but genuinely useful if you don't already think this way.
- Vegetarian Lasagne Recipe
A vegetarian lasagne with four ingredients, one of which is a very red sauce. Crown Prince Squash only, butternut need not apply.
- Book Review: All The Lives I Want by Alana Massey
Essays about famous women, written with a kind of clear-eyed empathy I don't usually encounter. Past-me made a good call ordering this.
- Book Review: Writing to Learn
The recurring theme is writing to learn, but the book mostly advocates for a personal storytelling style I'm not entirely sold on.
- Compare and Contrast: Big Capital vs Radical Markets
Reading Big Capital helped me figure out why the property model in Radical Markets is so dangerous: it charges people for community.
- Big Capital: Who is London for? by Anna Minton
A good book about London's housing crisis that I can't quite bring myself to recommend—not because it's wrong, but because it's very depressing and being sad and angry is most of what you'll get out of it.
- Book Review: We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Short, persuasive, and a good read even if you've been paying attention.
- Book Review: How to Talk about Books You Haven't Read, by Pierre Bayard
Surprisingly not a joke book. A literature professor thinks seriously about what it means to have 'read' something, and makes some good points.
- Book Review: How to understand your gender
A good, compassionate book on gender that I didn't personally get a huge amount out of—mostly because I'd already done a lot of this reading.
- Books
Some Twitter threads asking for book recommendations, with the results collected here.
- Implicit vs Explicit
The Zen of Python is a great document that people mostly ignore when it's inconvenient for them.
- Beeminder for Enforced Participation
I've been using Beeminder to make commitment devices contagious—spreading the 'you can't just quietly give up' property to other parts of my life.
- Teaching from worked examples
A link-saving note on why minimal guidance during instruction doesn't work, and why worked examples are better than problem-solving for learning.
- Beware Threshold Effects
There's no magic line you have to cross before it's OK to need help. Everyone needs help.
- Communicating Knowledge
A Twitter thread saved before it disappeared, about the frustrating gap between tacit knowledge and things that can actually be said.
- Stories about Data
You can tell whatever story you want about your data. Just be honest about which stories are valid and which ones aren't.
- Auto-parallelising test-case reduction
On pessimistic parallelism: parallelize by assuming your attempts will fail, then be pleasantly surprised when they don't.
- Try not to think about it
If you have to make a decision every time, you'll eventually make the wrong one. The fix is to stop having to decide.
- Branch and Consolidate
An implementation idea for writing code that can be both a randomized algorithm and a dynamic programming solution. Very much a note to self.
- Maybe these two great flavours go together
Test-case reduction might be a useful frame for debugging. A short note on a possibly useful connection.
- Things you didn't know you can be bad at
There are a surprising number of things you've never been taught and have simply assumed you're doing correctly.
- Vegetables and diet
Notes on a diet that is mostly just 'eat vegetables for five days a month', which turns out to be harder than it sounds.
- Questions
A link to a comic about questions and answers, saved so I can find it again.
- You Can't Trust Lawful Good
A YouGov poll found that almost nobody thinks they're evil. Separately, Lawful Good is probably the least trustworthy alignment.
- The Duties
I'm deeply suspicious of normative ethical theories. So naturally I decided to build one.
- On Formal Mathematics
Formal logic is a great model of deducibility but a poor model of how mathematicians actually think. Some thoughts on what that means.
- Notes on Interviewing
Your interview process is probably almost entirely noise rather than signal. The good news is that this is actually freeing.
September 2018
- What is a neural network?
Notes on explaining neural networks to people who don't want to hear about backpropagation.
- Liberating Structures
Notes from a meetup I attended, posted before I lose them entirely to the void.
- Principles of (Social) System Design
Everything works in high-trust environments. Nothing works in low-trust ones. Design accordingly.
- Homo economicus as a user persona
Homo economicus is a bad descriptive model of humans, but a surprisingly useful persona for stress-testing system design.
- Group Decisions on Names
We used Majority Judgment to name our cats. Here's the voting record.
- Lightweight RPG Systems
A thread about lightweight RPG systems I'm saving here so I can actually find it again.
- Switching between models
The skill isn't picking the right model — it's knowing when to switch between them.
- The structure of a programming language revolution
On Richard Gabriel's argument that engineering and science in programming languages are more entangled than we usually admit.
- Some of my favourite PyCon UK talks
I don't go to PyCon UK for the talks, but some of this year's were genuinely good.
- Lean Coffee at PyCon UK
We ran a randomized lean coffee at PyCon UK sprints. Here's how it went.
- Notes on Tweeting Too Much At Conferences
I accidentally became the unofficial scribe of PyCon UK. Here's what that was like.
- Implication chains and probability
A worked example of unreliable implication oracles, mostly for my own benefit.
- Some hung parliament jokes
Some jokes from Twitter that I'm archiving here, with a conscience-saving disclaimer.
- What might a continuous rational agent look like?
I said I didn't care about this problem, which obviously meant I immediately started thinking about it.
- Programming vs Mathematics
Programmers have opinions about terse notation. Mathematicians have not noticed.
- Physical and Topological Limitations to Rational Choice
Von Neumann-Morgenstern utility theory has some gaps that don't get discussed enough. Here's what I mean.
- NP-hardness in preference elicitation
A cleaner write-up of why NP-hardness creates real problems for classical rationality axioms.
- Self-defeating objects and diagonal arguments
Terry Tao's posts on the no-self-defeating-object argument are a nice unified account of why a lot of things can't exist.
- How complex systems fail
Very good. Read it.
- Towards a definition of mathematics
Most definitions of mathematics are terrible, so here's my attempt at a better one.
- Laptops in the classroom
Laptops hurt focus and distract your neighbours. My social group disagrees. My social group is wrong.
- When come back bring pie(s)
On the pie-enlarging metaphor, what it actually means, and where it quietly goes wrong.
- Two cultures of mathematics
Gowers distinguishes theory-builders from problem-solvers. I think the distinction runs deeper than mathematics.
- Trolling and devil's advocacy
Devil's advocacy is useful. Trolling is not. The difference is whether you're actually trying to find the truth.
- STV-based talk scheduling
A follow-up on how something closer to STV could work for conference talk selection.
- Mechanisms for talk scheduling and voting
Conference scheduling is a voting problem, and most conferences are solving it wrong.
- My parents, Ayn Rand and God
A note about grammar, the Oxford comma, and one very unfortunate book dedication.
- Asshole filters and self-selecting scams
Three pieces on how the structure of your system determines who shows up to use it.
- Fiction for Kristian
A short list of fiction I've written that I'd actually stand behind.
- Modes of writing
Two very different takes on writing tools, and why having both in your life might actually be the point.
- Can a machine design?
A 1989 paper about architectural design and automation that turns out to still be asking the right questions.
- Notation for test-case reducers
Working out a compact notation for describing test-case reduction passes and how they compose.
August 2018
- Some free user experience consulting for Google
Google Maps's navigation is bad in specific, fixable ways. Here's my free advice, which they will not take.
- The Brzozowski derivative
The Brzozowski derivative is a lovely idea that deserves to be more widely known.
- Mathjax and Python Markdown
Getting MathJax and Python Markdown to cooperate is easy, once you know how, and annoying until you do.
- Porting the research notebook
Moving some maths over from the research notebook, starting with a theorem about harmonic numbers.
- Notes on tiling with polyominoes
Some thoughts on backtracking, exact cover, and when SAT solvers are too expensive to be useful.
- First!
A new experimental notebook, cobbled together out of spit, bailing wire, and Python.