Recently updated blogs

Thanks Luis Villa for this write up of the current Vizio case (GPL enforcement). The head of the National Audit Office, Gareth Davies, gave a thoughtful speech to Parliament on why good governance matters, especially for the UK's public sector, now. Trust and AI was the topic of Bruce Schneier's September talk at the Harvard Kennedy School: Trust is essential to society. Humans as a species are trusting. We are …

The Azores are nine volcanic islands in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and make a wonderful destination for hikers. Each island has its own personality and this post highlights the best hikes in the Azores by island. This diverse archipelago sits between the United States and Portugal and boasts crater lakes, hot springs, waterfalls,...

The Times has reported that next month the UK will to deploy 20,000 military personnel across eastern Europe as part of the NATO exercise Steadfast Defender. They will be accompanied by one of the Royal Navy’s two aircraft carriers, eight other warships and F35 fighter jets. The article quotes Grant Shapps, the UK Defence Secretary, as warning that the world had moved to a ‘prewar’ phase as global conflicts escalated. …

I've updated my 2023 reading list with the 105 books I read over the course of the year. Highlights were The Future, by Naomi Alderman, Station Eternity by Mur Lafferty and Titanium Noir by Nick Harkaway

Enregistration is the process by which linguistic features become associated with particular contexts. For example, light novels having long, sentence-length titles is now so established that it's an easy way to parody light novels. Phonology can also be 'enregistered,' such as the vowels that make up Indie Girl Voice. While these two examples are obvious because they 'stick out', enregistration also applies to more subtle cases we take for granted. …

Find all previous and future episodes listed here or in your podcast app under “Barbican Station”. This week we are back to talk about Mick Herron’s latest book – The Secret Hours! I’m pleased to welcome The Sunday Times Senior Political Commentator Tim Shipman to the show. In the first half of the show we stay relatively spoiler free on The Secret Hours as we talk politics and Herron, British …

I wrote the following introductory text for my personal ChatGPT account when I wanted to use it to help me brainstorm (???) ideas for my new YouTube channel. As I’ve already found with prompt writing, it was clarifying to describe myself to an LLM for this very specific purpose. I’m much more honest/blunt than I would be in writing a description of myself for human consumption. Putting it here for …

While distant reading has taught us a lot about the history of fiction, it hasn’t done much yet to explain why we keep turning pages. “Suspense” is the word we use to explain that impulse. But what is suspense? Does it require actual anxiety, or just uncertainty about what happens next? If suspense depends on […]

This is the script for “The charges against Binance”, a video about the legal actions against Binance and its former CEO, Changpeng Zhao. On November 21, the United States announced a landmark resolution to multiple years-long investigations into the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange: Binance. The company’s founder and CEO, Changpeng Zhao, agreed to plead guilty to a felony, pay a fine, and resign. Binance itself pleaded guilty to three charges, …

After 25 years of running this blog under various names — all of which can be lumped under the "Archidose" monicker — I've decided to shut it down, moving this hobby, this labor of love, to Substack, which I have used since mid-2021 and where I will continue to send out weekly newsletters focused on architecture books, but in a new format. (You can subscribe to my newsletter here or …

In this chapter, we’re going to learn about ARIA live regions — the accessible notifications system that enables us to make dynamic web content more accessible to screen reader users. Without live regions, some rich web applications would be more challenging to use for screen reader users. So if you’re building web applications such as Single Page Applications (SPAs), you need to understand live regions so that you can utilize …

We're happy to announce the immediate availablity of [Spark 5.0](https://spark.laravel.com) for both Paddle and Stripe. Spark Paddle 5.0 introduces support for Paddle Billing, Paddle's next-generation billing API. New Laravel applications can utilize Spark to quickly integrate with Paddle's latest APIs. Unfortunately, Paddle does not provide...

I’m here to provide a look at the financial side of Critical Distance. In 2022 we needed to run an emergency GoFundMe to fix our tax status, and that’s not a place I want us to be again. After fixing our tax status, I spent 2023 getting our financial status in order. Our goals are to be stable, and to get a few extra things added to the site to …

That’s it, I’m no longer posting to this site. New blog posts can now be found over on Substack at Andrew Old’s Education Battleground, or sign up to receive them as a newsletter. Details of signing up for paid content can be found here. Since the last time I posted on this site the following […]

The launch of ChatGPT on November 30, 20221 marks the beginning of the new AI era. We’ve had many AI cycles in the past going all the way back to 1966. However, the last year has been particularly exciting. Today, everyone can have a compelling experience for free with ChatGPT 3.5 or Google Bard, with added amazement if you pay OpenAI to get ChatGPT 4 and DALL-E. I expect this …