Recently updated blogs

Highlights I’m finding it easier to balance my time as a new father. I moped about two of my blog posts doing poorly, and then they did well. I experimented with a stacked diff workflow for software development and liked it except for git’s weaknesses. Goal grades At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals: Enjoy family time …

Greetings from the New Management! I'm currently up to my elbows in The Regicide Report (coming to you in 2026). In the meantime, I wrote a bundle of world building notes that won't ever make it into a novel because they're far too policy-oriented (translation: deathly boring to normal readers). After all, it's a civil service/politics satire series, and to give it some substance I had to work out what …

This is a personal collection, subject to change at any time. A Pattern Language, by Christopher Alexander, Murray Silverstein, and Sara IshikawaA classic on architecture and urban design that you’ll find on many lists like this. What keeps it here for me — as a text that has shaped my technological worldview — is the very notion of describing problems and solutions or needs and constructions as patterns, and building …

Indie pop trio ENY explores the realms of electropop and guitar music with conviction and has a seriously majestic sound. Hailing from Hereford, the project is led by Sharon Kosobucka. Originally born in Poland, she has been in the UK for five years and is gracing the country with their punchy dream-like pop. Releasing new single ‘Die Like This’, ENY combine catchy melodies and powerful synths to draw you into …

A great escape Developers: Atari Games, Tengen (SAM Coupé version) Publishers: Atari Games, Domark (all the computer ports except SAM Coupé), Enigma Variations (SAM Coupé), Ocean (Amiga, C64, ZX Spectrum re-releases) Release Years: 1989 (Arcade), 1990 (Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, Commodore 64, DOS, SAM Coupé, ZX Spectrum), 1991 (Budget re-release for Atari ST), 1992 (Budget re-releases for Amiga, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum) Available On: Arcade, Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Atari …

[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.]In June of 2000, the power shut off across much of the San Francisco Bay area. There simply wasn’t enough electricity to meet demands, so more than a million customers were disconnected in California's largest load shed event since World War II. It was just one of the many rolling blackouts that hit the state in the early 2000s. …

Photographed with a Fujifilm X-T5 + XF150-600mmF5.6-8 R LM OIS WR – 150 mm focal length – 1/210″ at f/8 – ISO 125 Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming, United States – Newe Sogobia (Eastern Shoshone), Cayuse, Umatilla and Walla Walla, Shoshone-Bannock, and Tséstho’e (Cheyenne) land This photograph, titled “Prospectors Mountain, Grand Teton National Park. November, 2024.”, was originally published on All-Encompassing Trip.

In health and medicine, we have many government agencies, and private philanthropies, devoted to many specific medical conditions, and also to studying and reforming medicine in general, at a meta level. In education and research, we also have many government agencies, and also private philanthropies, devoted to many specific topic areas, and also to studying and reforming education and research as a whole. Regarding commerce and markets, we also have …

The news recently came through that the Guardian was unhooking itself from the drip drip drip of the Twitterverse. It was coming for a long time, they said, a decision that “the benefits of being on X are now outweighed by the negatives.” It made headlines, unsurprisingly—and seems to be a vanguard in a fresh exodus away from Twitter after the dispiriting election results in early November. The news meant …

Today I learned how to use shell scripting to activate my virtual environment automatically when I change directories. Automatically activating virtual environments Since I can remember, whenever I cd into a directory that contains a virtual environment folder .venv, I always want to activate that virtual environment. I typed source .venv/bin/activate so often that I even created an alias so that typing activate was enough. Today, I wondered if there …

What’s the best way to write your next paper – or, to ask a simpler question, the best way to construct your title, write the opening sentence of your Introduction, or plot the pivotal data set? The bad news is that there isn’t a best way. The good news is exactly the same. When I […]

Wow! This is magical: a map of the Reddit. Each dot represents a subreddit. Two dots within the same cluster are close to each other if multiple users frequently leave comments on both subreddits. Created by Andrei Kashcha.

Sophie mourned the loss of Poli. I can’t remember her exact words but it went something along the lines of why-should-she-ever-go-back-Kings-Heath-again-when-the-only-thing-she-ever-loved-is-gone. Or something like that. It’s me, I’m likely hyperbolising. The point was she was distraught, in mourning in an all-black attire usually reserved for those who say they are emo when really they’ve been turned away from Berghain for smiling. They should have witnessed the fall of the Poli …

Before I had the habit of writing a blogpost discussing a new preprint, Shinnosuke Okawa, Andrea Ricolfi, and I (together with Wendy Lowen for the appendix) uploaded Moduli spaces of semiorthogonal decompositions in families. Shortly afterwards, the pandemic started, and we neglected to do anything with the paper. At some point we also discovered that there was an issue with the proof of the result in Subsection 8.3.3 (of v1), …

From the Daily Mail: Viral social media rumours claiming that Sir Keir Starmer represented the father of Southport suspect Axel Rudakubana in an asylum case are untrue, Downing Street said today. The claims were yesterday circulated widely on X, formerly known as Twitter, by users who were citing them as evidence of an alleged cover-up over the true circumstances of the Southport stabbings in which three girls aged six to …