Mostly tech. Subscribe through RSS.

All Posts

• No-One Escapes the Permanent Underclass
  25 June, 2026 · Capital won't save you from disempowerment.
• On Vulgar Materialism
  21 June, 2026 · Or, sufficiently advanced cynicism is indistinguishable from naïveté.
• Human Routers of Machine Words
  13 June, 2026 · On people who use AI to think.
• How To Read More
  4 June, 2026 · How text can outcompete the screen.
• Human Bottlenecks
  18 May, 2026 · Why AI won't augment human capabilities much.
• The Applicability of Spaced Repetition
  17 May, 2026 · On factual vs. conceptual knowledge.
• Notes on the Hantavirus Outbreak
  8 May, 2026 · Cruise ships are bad for the world.
• Some Data Should Be Code
  31 January, 2026 · On Make, CloudFormation, and GitHub Actions.
• Letting Claude Play Text Adventures
  12 January, 2026 · Experiments in cognitive architecture.
• There Is No New Aesthetics
  5 January, 2026 · On the exhaustion of man.
• 1Password Dependency Breaks Syntax Highlighting
  27 December, 2025 · Why does a password manager need a syntax highlighter?
• Using the Brother DS-640 Scanner on NixOS
  27 December, 2025 · I suffer so you don't have to.
• Books I Enjoyed in 2025
  22 December, 2025 · A short list.
• Coarse is Better
  21 December, 2025 · Make AI weird again.
• I Wish People Were More Public
  10 December, 2025 · On sharing more of yourself.
• Ad-Hoc Emacs Packages with Nix
  16 November, 2025 · Creating ad-hoc Emacs packages in a few lines of code.
• Linux on the Fujitsu Lifebook U729
  15 November, 2025 · A short review and troubleshooting guide.
• Agda on NixOS
  14 November, 2025 · Troubleshooting notes.
• Hashcards: A Plain-Text Spaced Repetition System
  5 October, 2025 · Announcing my latest open-source project.
• Adding Planets to Celestia on macOS
  29 July, 2025 · A beginner's guide to modding Celestia.
• Notes on Managing ADHD
  12 June, 2025 · Strategies and tactics for staying productive.
• Inboxes are Underrated
  24 May, 2025 · On inboxes as application-specific todo lists.
• You Can Choose Tools That Make You Happy
  20 May, 2025 · Stop falsifying your motivations.
• Two Years of Rust
  15 April, 2025 · Reflections on using Rust professionally for two years.
• My Backup Infrastructure, 2025 Edition
  13 April, 2025 · How I back up my personal data.
• We Live In a Golden Age of Interoperability
  8 April, 2025 · On the growth of open standards.
• Domain-Agnostic and Domain-Specific Tools
  3 April, 2025 · Software that can do everything does any one thing poorly.
• Non-Fiction Has Bad Incentives
  3 February, 2025 · On publishing as a play for status and legitimacy.
• Composable SQL
  24 January, 2025 · Better SQL through typed, composable query fragments.
• Adding Colour to macOS Folder Icons
  17 January, 2025 · A short experiment with Python, ImageMagick, and iconutil.
• Implementing FSRS in 100 Lines
  10 January, 2025 · A tiny implementation of the most advanced spaced repetition algorithm.
• How I Use Claude
  1 January, 2025 · Exploring Anthropic's data export.
• Implementing SM-2 in Rust
  27 December, 2024 · An implemenation of the SuperMemo-2 algorithm.
• Ephemerality in User Interfaces
  21 December, 2024 · On hypermedia, UI design, and user agency.
• Client Freedom
  24 November, 2024 · On the decline of open protocols.
• The Best Emacs Microfeature
  5 June, 2024 · Why I keep using Emacs in 2024.
• The Design Space of Wikis
  2 June, 2024 · An exploration of the design space of wikis.
• Type Inference Was a Mistake
  29 March, 2024 · On type inference as an academic computer science lab leak.
• Thoughts on LLM Agents
  5 January, 2024 · Entropy, criticality, and complexity classes of cellular automata.
• You Need More Constraints
  30 July, 2023 · A checklist of useful SQL constraints.
• Type Systems for Memory Safety
  22 July, 2023 · A survey of type systems for memory safety.
• Why Checked Exceptions Failed
  15 July, 2023 · Programming language features are never orthogonal.
• Test Against Reality
  8 July, 2023 · Against mocking.
• Test Autodiscovery is a Silver Bullet
  24 June, 2023 · To encourage good practices, make them frictionless.
• Second-Class References
  12 June, 2023 · On Graydon's Rust, Hylo, and mutable value semantics.
• Depth-First Procrastination
  9 June, 2023 · When subgoals recur infinitely.
• Why Lisp Syntax Works
  5 June, 2023 · On uniform vs. specific syntax.
• Sketch of a Post-ORM
  2 June, 2023 · A better way to interact with databases.
• Language Pragmatics Engineering
  30 May, 2023 · On best practices and gradient descent.
• What is a Software Engineer?
  27 May, 2023 · Blake, Newton, Turing.
• Typing Persian in Emacs
  25 May, 2023 · A tutorial introduction to farsi-transliterate-banan.
• Language Tooling Antipatterns
  14 May, 2023 · We will build a tower of Webpack wrappers to reach heaven.
• Return Reasons, Not Booleans
  11 May, 2023 · A short post on a consequence of Boolean blindness.
• NixOS for the Impatient
  7 May, 2023 · Using NixOS for a more tractable computing setup.
• How Capabilities Work in Austral
  5 May, 2023 · A walkthrough of Austral's capability-based security features.
• Two Years of OCaml
  30 April, 2023 · My thoughts on OCaml after two years of building a compiler with it.
• Dependency Resolution Made Simple
  23 April, 2023 · Resolving dependencies with a homebrew SAT solver.
• My Experience with Bupropion
  18 April, 2023 · Autism, antipsychotics, and the striatum.
• The Best of Orion’s Arm
  16 April, 2023 · Summarizing ten thousand years of future history.
• Effective Spaced Repetition
  10 April, 2023 · “To flash conviction on the mind.”
• Spaced Repetition is Checkpointing for Learning
  6 April, 2023 · Effective autodidactism for the scatterbrained.
• Design of the Austral Compiler
  9 March, 2023 · A high-level walkthrough of the Austral bootstrapping compiler.
• The Gallery of Sand
  5 March, 2023 · Sampling image space with DALL-E.
• And Yet It Understands
  22 February, 2023 · In high-dimensional vector spaces, numerical optimization is omnipotent.
• Building a DIY Clozemaster
  19 February, 2023 · Replacing Duo the owl with a simple Python script.
• Shells are Two Things
  1 February, 2023 · Command languages and scripting languages are and should be different things.
• How Austral’s Linear Type Checker Works
  29 January, 2023 · A walkthrough of Austral's linearity checker algorithm.
• Better XML Editing for Emacs
  13 January, 2023 · Improving completion in nXML mode.
• A Brief Defense of XML
  6 January, 2023 · On the difference between markup and data exchange languages.
• Roam, Twenty Years Before Roam
  3 January, 2023 · Wikipedia has had bidirectional links for twenty years and nobody noticed.
• Introducing Austral: A Systems Language with Linear Types and Capabilities
  28 December, 2022 · Introducing a new programming language.
• Unbundling Tools for Thought
  26 December, 2022 · Disparate thoughts on personal information management after traversing the hype cycle.
• Astronomical Calculations for Hard SF in Common Lisp
  19 December, 2022 · Hard SF worldbuilding with the HYG database, Dijkstra's algorithm, and Lisp.
• You’re Not Going Anywhere
  20 November, 2022 · Twitter, Dante, and the World State.
• Simplicity and Survival
  2 September, 2022 · How do programming languages survive indefinitely?
• First Impressions of Mochi
  17 August, 2022 · Mochi is a new multi-platform spaced repetition app.
• Lessons from Writing a Compiler
  5 July, 2022 · Collected tips from building the Austral compiler.
• Signed Integers are Asymmetrical
  11 October, 2021 · An edge case in integer safety.
• Reading a File in OCaml on Windows
  12 September, 2021 · Adventures in officially unsupported architectures.
• Languages are not Ecosystems
  2 September, 2021 · The size of language ecosystems obscures the inherent design problems of programming languages.
• Parsing with Menhir, Part I: Forth
  26 August, 2021 · A tutorial on parsing Forth with Menhir.
• Parsing with Menhir
  25 August, 2021 · A tutorial series on parsing with the Menhir parser generator for OCaml.
• Linear Types and Exceptions
  7 August, 2021 · On the incompatibility of linear types and traditional exception handling.
• Compiling LLVM IR to Binary
  10 November, 2019 · A note to my future self.
• Forth and Complexity
  7 November, 2019 · On the unsustainable complexity of modern computing.
• The Uselessness of the Accept-Language Header
  6 November, 2019 · Old man yells at cloud.
• Linear Types and Safety
  6 January, 2019 · An example of hardening an API using linear types.
• A Bibliography of 2018
  28 December, 2018 · Every paper I read this year.
• FreeBSD with Encrypted ZFS and X11 on a Laptop
  24 August, 2018 · My installation notes.
• Portable Backups with Duplicity and GnuPG
  17 August, 2018 · Managing on-site Duplicity backups with a secure GPG key.
• A Case Study in Propositional Logic
  13 May, 2018 · Design decisions, and using types to prevent illegal states.
• Calling C from MLton
  5 April, 2018 · A tutorial on MLton's foreign function interface.
• February Updates
  28 February, 2018 · Changes in this website for February 2018.
• Libraries: The Database Engineering Perspective
  22 February, 2018 · Evolving a schema for libraries one counterexample at a time.
• The Twelve Islanders Problem
  10 February, 2018 · A brain teaser implemented in OCaml.
• Inheritance and Disjunctions
  16 December, 2017 · A case study in porting a compiler.
• A Wishlist of Zero-Cost Abstractions
  5 March, 2017 · A wishlist of language features, their use cases, and how they affect language complexity.
• Using LMDB from Common Lisp
  7 April, 2016 · Announcing an LMDB binding, and a tutorial.
• State of the Common Lisp Ecosystem, 2015
  25 August, 2015 · The state of Common Lisp's library ecosystem, from the perspective of a contributor.
• Common Lisp with Travis and Coveralls
  7 June, 2015 · How to set up Travis CI and Coveralls.io with a Common Lisp project.