Recently updated blogs

I read Sam Freedman’s Failed State: Why Nothing Works and How We Fix It with a mixture of nods of recognition and gasps of disbelief. It’s all too apparent that – as the subtitle puts it – nothing works in aspects of life in the UK dependent in some way on the successful design and implementation of government policy (which is most aspects tbh). Those of us who have engaged …

It’s so easy, watching on the news, to scream at people who don’t evacuate ahead of oncoming storms. I get it. I scream at them, too. It’s often a fitting reaction.And yet.Evacuation is a process. It’s not “throw a handful of things in an overnight bag and floor it.” You still need to put in the time, money, and effort of preparing your house (or condo, or apartment) for the …

Elite Hoops has hit the one year mark! I had a few buddies ask me some questions around getting those first paying customers, the kinds of marketing I’ve tried and other similar things. In short, indies talkin’ shop. So, here is a point-by-point brain dump of what I think the twelve most helpful things I’ve learned or tried are. I’ll try to keep each one around a few sentences to …

Or: what I drank on my holidays. In our perversely unseasonal family holiday in Swanage last year, I ticked off four of the town’s seven pubs and had beers from three different local breweries. This year’s perversely unseasonal return trip to Dorset took us to Weymouth, a much larger town and a considerably more serious proposition for the ticker; they’ve got two separate J.D. Wetherspoon’s! Dorset beer was considerably thinner …

I listen to a lot of game development-flavored podcasts, and one thing that has really stood out to me for a long time was how basically none of the podcasts were actually about development. There are plenty dedicated to creator interviews that discuss inspiration, design, etc., but practically none about the actual specifics of programming games. Beyond that, I’ve had my own pet interest in the concept of data tooling …

Was able to get some time this week to catchup with Bryan Boyer. We talked about some of the work he was doing with his students, particularly challenging them to think about design interventions and prototyping those across the ‘pace layers’ as famously depicted by Stewart Brand in his book “How buildings learn” The image is totemic for design practitioners and theorists of a certain vintage (although I’m not sure …

What am I Talking About If you've been shell scripting for some time you have most probably seen the following construct: [ -n "$something" ] && foo This runs the foo command, but only if $something isn't empty, a very useful and common thing to check for in some scripts. So far no problem. Another useful thing in scripts is set -e which aborts the whole script if some "line" …

Crazy amounts of money continue to be spent in San Francisco to shift the city rightward. We saw it in March with the purge of progressives on the Democratic County Central Committee after a heavily funded campaign by moderates under the ‘Democrats for Change’ slate. Astroturf (fake grassroots) groups like GrowSF, TogetherSF, StopCrimeSF, Neighbors for a Better SF (backed by a Republican mega-donor), Families for a Vibrant SF, and Committee …

Programming note: Bits about Money has been a bit irregular recently.I’ve recently booted up the Complex Systems podcast. It is now up to more than a dozen episodes, including interviewing my dad on real estate development (which is something of a BAM deep (curb) cut). The podcast features Bryne Hobart and other guests you’d probably enjoy on a weekly basis. Since I am more of a writer and very plausibly …

We held a YC event a couple of months ago where Brian Chesky from Airbnb gave a passionate talk about his experience running Airbnb over the last 17 years. He believed that as Airbnb hired more professional managers, he lost a close connection with the details of the end product and the company suffered as a result.It clearly touched a nerve with a lot of people present. It was uncomfortable …

Our latest version of WriteFreely is out now! This is a minor update, but with some important bug fixes, especially around navigation and federation. Note: The official release binary will not work on older systems, e.g. Ubuntu 18.04 or earlier. See #1064 for more information and a way to work around it. Download v0.15.1 now, or read on to see what’s new in this version. User-Facing Changes Fix “subscribed” date …

Of course they do, and of course they don’t. This originally published 2016-10-07 by Springer-Nature at their “Science of Learning ” research community. By re-publishing here I assert my rights as author and release the text under a Creative Commons (CC-BY 4.0) license. Putting a student at the centre of their own learning seems like fundamental pedagogy. The Constructivist approach to education emphasises the need for knowledge to reassembled in …

I disappeared again – I’m sorry. I’m trying to decide whether I’m done with this whole blogging malarky – there are aspects I miss – but I get overwhelmed with the effort it takes me now. So, if I do stick around, I might need to change the kinds of posts I publish and focus less on the long review posts I used to write, and would prefer to write …

Traveling in Kham • Jashideley! • Burial in the sky • Kangding, the gateway of Tibet • The Love Song of Kangding • The monastery of Tagong • The Buddhas of Drakgo The city of Drakgo, in Chinese Luhou, is located on the road from Tagong to Garzê, on the banks of the Xianshui, i.e. Freshwater River, which runs along the road. The name of the city seems to come …

A month’s worth of movies to help you stay awake Every October, I put together a big schedule of horror films to watch, focusing mostly on ones I haven’t seen before. The schedule, a mix of theatrical screenings and home viewings, is published for posterity and for the sake of anyone who might like to join me. This year I seem to be nostalgic for the age of Satanic panic, …