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In Japan, riding a steam train through outer space is a melancholy symbol of the human journey. Like the gentle drift of the sakura petal, the whistle of a train means a transition in life. That human quality... those melancholy, bittersweet coming of age lessons... were inherited from renowned writer Kenji Miyazawa's Night on the Galactic Railroad, whose own life was a tragic and all-too

Humble brag, but I have jetlag, and therefore I find myself wide awake at gone 2am. Seems as good a time as any for an update. Recently: We just got back from a trip to Australia, for Web Directions Summit. Alex spoke, mostly about the lost decade and the cost of JavaScript on the web eco-system (the market for lemons). The usual. I had screen printed him his very own …

A few weeks ago, the database publisher Gale organised an online symposium on the archives of social movements called ‘Power to the People‘. I took part with a talk on online radical archives. You can view the video below:

Very few LPs radiate a level of spiritual grandeur quite like the 1974 summit between Alice Coltrane and Carlos Santana, Illuminations. With Coltrane’s harp and soaring orchestration, uncharacteristically patient, technically precise lead work from Santana, and an aura of calm, fluid interaction among a top-tier rhythm section anchored by Dave Holland and Jack DeJohnette, the album is equally humble and humbling. Aurally transcendent by design. Illuminations was not necessarily new …

There are those who believe that advanced AI poses a threat to humanity. The argument is that when AI systems become intelligent enough, they may hurt humanity in ways that we cannot foresee, and because they are more intelligent than us we may not be able to stop. Therefore, it becomes natural to want to regulate them, for example limiting which systems can be developed and who can develop them. …

A recent paper of mine performs an intersection test in a ray tracing shader. To this end, I had to compute all real roots of a polynomial of moderately high degree (10 to 26). Overall, computing polynomial roots is an extremely well-studied problem where many highly accurate and reliable methods are available [Press2007]. However, implementations of such methods on GPUs are rarely found. After experimenting a bit with different options, …

Abstract Cixin Liu’s “Wandering Earth” is a more recent depiction of Earth being used as a Starship. Like Stanley Schmidt’s “Lifeboat Earth” (1976) it does seem like something of a rush job – the Sun was about to undergo the Helium Flash in Liu’s tale and – and so there was no time to create … Continue reading "A Work In Progress – Starship Earth"

The post Mad Doctor (Commodore 64) – the Frankenstein Junior sandbox appeared first on The Genesis Temple.

Open Academic Publication Posted 10/28/2023 I’m currently at a workshop on open practices across disciplines, and one topic of discussion is how to change the academic publishing process to be more accessible to both authors and readers. I’ve also had a few friends outside of academia ask me how publishing research papers works, so it’s a good opportunity to write a post about the messy world of academic publishing. The …

The following piece was written months ago, right after the “We Are Developers World Conference” took place in Berlin. So far I have not been reached out to for providing feedback to the conference, and I am not expecting it will ever happen, so I am going to publish this (unedited) here on my blog instead. There are some (at least one) swearword in here, for those of you who …

I help maintain a couple of projects and one aspect I find surprising — and a bit troubling — is how often people ask for features without explaining their problem. Maybe it’s already in the name, “Feature request”. Despite asking for a feature, often it’s not what’s needed. What’s needed is a solution to a problem and many problems have more than one solution.

I have been working on moving a collection of about 20-30 AWS accounts from two different AWS Organizations into a new AWS Organization with Control Tower enabled. During the process I have run into a number of different blockers and issues which have not always had the most obvious solutions due to cryptic errors that the AWS Control Tower enrollment process shows. This blog post lists out some of the …

Once upon a time on Twitter: I was on the road and groggy with cold meds when this conversation happened, so I told my friend Rushkoff I’d get back to him when I was home and rested up. I thought that would be a week or so later. It’s been 2 months and I haven’t stopped thinking about it, in fact I’m still not entirely sure how to answer it. …

Now is Better by Stefan Sagmeister, soft-cover book and slipcase (Phaidon Press, 2023). The book continues Sagmeister’s life-long interest how design can best speak to people and improve their lives. Initially conceived in 2020 as the world entered a global pandemic, Now is Better looks at quality of life issues through collected statistics and information. WOMAN I, from Now is Better. Percentage of countries in which women have the right …