Posts on Consumption Exhaust

EvoLab

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 07:56:35 +1100

I spent a few hours yesterday developing an evolutionary computation simulator.

It’s called EvoLab:

EvoLab: Browser-based neuroevolution sandbox

Here’s the code project:

EvoLab on GitHub

It’s your classic “evolve a creature for an environment” thing.

Here’s a screenshot:

Back in the day I tried to develop something like this for iphone and it took weeks just to get the physics and creature working.

The first working version of EvoLab was developed in a few minutes using Claude Opus. Then there were a few iterations of refining the user interface and evolutionary mechanisms.

Quake Engine Black Book

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 09:02:59 +1100

It looks like Fabien Sanglard is writing a Quake Engine Black Book.

This will sit along side is excellent Doom and Wolf3d engine black books:

See the series here, which includes free PDF downloads. I read his “The Book of CP-System” book, but it was not as nostalgic as the other two.

He has not come out and declared the Quake book, but he’s been writing a lot about Quake recently (~4 months), for example:

Quake Rally Archive

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 08:56:04 +1100

I’ve developed some new Quake archive projects.

The first is a Quake Rally archive:

Quake Rally Archive

This includes all releases of Quake Rally, all third-party maps, and even precursor mods and extension mods.

One of the precursor mods was “Quake Kart” by Quake Command, an early quake mod group that later went on to work for Valve and work on Half-Life.

Very little of Quake Kart surrives and I found it fascinating. I ended up going deep and writing a research essay on it:

New Year

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 07:00:48 +1100

New year, new goals.

Write more.

Blog posts.

Monographs.

Answers on forums.

Write more.

It’s good for you.

Small Tech Press

Tue, 23 Dec 2025 05:37:06 +1100

Building on yesterdays idea of a Quake Press, a small tech press does sound fun.

I guess I did already, with SuperFastPython for Python concurrency.

But other niches might be fun to explore, especially a tiny niche where I could cover it completely and move on.

It’s easier if it’s motivated externally, e.g. using a tech at work, cover it at home, or a market starving for info on niche. Otherwise the “why” behind the whole enterprise has to be fabricated.

Quake Press

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 05:43:31 +1100

I’ve been thinking about mini tech books on Quake for about 15 years.

My first google doc of ideas is dated 2010.

I was thinking today, why not develop a “quake press” with a large suite of books over many years.

What kind of books?

All kinds!

There could be references, e.g. quakec reference, release histories, bsp file format reference, etc.
There could be code walk throughs, e.g. how do weapons work, monsters, bots, etc.
There could be mod walk throughs, e.g. reaper, quakeworld, ctf, team fortress, etc.
There could be interviews, e.g. mod authors, community leaders, mappers, etc.
There could be tutorials, e.g. weapons, monsters, bots, etc.

Each book could be high quality yet short and sweet (highly targeted), e.g. ~100 pages.

Denisovans

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 04:36:52 +1100

I read a book about Denisovans this week in the book:

The Secret World of Denisovans: The Epic Story of the Ancient Cousins to Sapiens and Neanderthals

It book was not bad, buy not as exciting as Cave of Bones: A True Story of Discovery, Adventure, and Human Origins about discovering Homo naledi. A different kind of a book, more of a general story/history of what we know.

Anyway, I took away two interesting titbits.

Post-Work People

Sat, 20 Dec 2025 05:52:48 +1100

I’m about half way through Nick Bostrom’s “Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World”.

I love it. I don’t love the discussion/socratic sections (skip), but I love the lecture sections.

Anyway, early on he talked through groups of people now/historical who don’t work as a model for what it might be like in a post-work future.

Obvious and helpful. Why didn’t I think of that. I typically read books about retirement/retirees to get thoughts in this space, but that is only one of many groups.

The Body Defends Against Losing Fat and Muscle

Fri, 19 Dec 2025 07:56:45 +1100

My eldest son started working out at the gym this year.

It’s really great!

Something I tell him all the time is:

…once you gain good muscle, you will keep it the rest of his life

What I mean is, if he stops for some period of time then later, with modest retraining, he’ll be able to get back to the same tone/size. Or something like that.

I tell him that once you gain the increased number of muscle cells, you keep them. They may shrink if you stop training, but they are there waiting to grow as soon as you start up the exercise regime again.

Heinrich Schliemann

Fri, 19 Dec 2025 05:23:04 +1100

This week, I finished the book:

The Gold of Troy: Story of Heinrich Schliemann and the Buried Cities of Ancient Greece

It was great!

Here’s a summary from gpt5.1:

The Gold of Troy: Story of Heinrich Schliemann and the Buried Cities of Ancient Greece tells the dramatic story of Heinrich Schliemann, a wealthy, self-taught archaeologist whose obsession with Homer’s epics drove him to search for the real Troy. The book traces Schliemann’s rise from impoverished beginnings to international fame, focusing on his excavations at Hisarlik in modern-day Turkey and his discovery of what he claimed was “Priam’s Treasure.” It explores both his groundbreaking contributions to archaeology—helping to uncover lost Bronze Age civilizations such as Troy and Mycenae—and the controversies surrounding his methods, exaggerations, and destruction of archaeological layers. Overall, the book presents Schliemann as a complex figure: visionary and passionate, yet reckless, whose legacy reshaped our understanding of ancient Greece while raising lasting ethical questions about archaeological practice.

(Un)Limited Video Game Time

Fri, 19 Dec 2025 05:16:40 +1100

My eldest loves playing video games, which is understandable.

We limit screen time per day.

Why?

Generally, I say things like:

It feels like you are achieving goals, but it is all fake.

And:

It ramps up your emotions and makes you overly angry when you talk to us.

Fine.

What does gp5.2 have to say as the main negative points against:

It crowds out real life — games take time away from school, sports, friends, and sleep
It messes with your brain’s reward system — games give fast rewards, so real work feels boring
It makes stopping harder — you get used to instant fun and struggle with self-control
School can suffer — focus, homework, and reading get harder
Sleep gets worse — late gaming = bad sleep and worse mood
Social skills can shrink — less practice talking and hanging out in real life
Emotions get bigger — more anger, frustration, or anxiety when you can’t play
Your body pays a price — sitting too much hurts fitness, posture, and health
Real goals feel slow — real achievements don’t “level up” as fast as games
It can turn into a habit you don’t control — you think about games even when you shouldn’t

And a persuasive paragraph about why limiting video game time per day is important, targeting a 14 y/o:

Archimedes Palimpsest

Mon, 15 Dec 2025 08:04:40 +1100

I read “Eureka Man: The Life and Legacy of Archimedes” last week.

Good book.

Half was a rough biography of Archimedes the other half was about the history of the Archimedes Palimpsest.

I found the latter a whole lot more interesting. It dug into the history of this important document, something I was interested in/hoping for recently (for example, with plato’s dialogues).

Here’s a summary of the palimpsest via gpt5.2:

The Archimedes Palimpsest is a medieval parchment manuscript that preserves an overwritten Byzantine Greek copy of several works by the ancient mathematician Archimedes and other authors, originally written around the 10th century and later scraped and reused in the 13th century as a Christian prayer book (a euchologion). Because the original Archimedean texts were thought lost, the palimpsest is uniquely valuable: it contains the only known Greek versions of important works such as On Floating Bodies, The Method of Mechanical Theorems and Stomachion, among others, revealing insights into Archimedes’ use of mechanical reasoning and early ideas akin to integral calculus. Discovered in the early 20th century but hidden for decades, it was rediscovered at a 1998 auction and has since been studied with advanced imaging techniques that recover the erased undertext, profoundly enhancing our understanding of ancient science and mathematics.

Who Were the Trojans?

Sun, 14 Dec 2025 06:34:55 +1100

I’ve read a few books about Troy recently.

This week I read “Great Ancient Civilizations of Asia Minor”. It was serviceable.

Who were the people living in Troy?

Was it an break-away Greek settlement?

Nope.

Many peoples have lived at the site, there are layers and layers of settlement. I guess I’m interested in the Bronze Age and the time of Homer’s poem.

Checking in with gpt5.2, it seems they were (probably) Anatolian, at least during the Bronze age.

Artifact by Jeremy Robinson

Sun, 14 Dec 2025 06:24:19 +1100

I read Artifact by Jeremy Robinson this week.

Great fun.

Here’s the blurb:

In an isolated Alaskan town, the local sheriff uncovers a secret lab where generative A.I. and bioprinting have unleashed grotesque, living anomalies—and now, something monstrous is loose.

Sheriff Colton Graves prefers the quiet life in Raven’s Rest, Alaska, a remote town accessible only by tunnel and home to a hardy mix of locals and secrets buried in the ice. But when a camel wanders down Main Street—its head grotesquely sprouting a dozen eyes—Colton knows his quiet days are over. The bizarre incident leads him to NovaGen, a nearby research facility constructed inside a Cold War bunker, buried in the mountains above town. There, a trail of blood and eerie silence hints at something far more sinister than an escaped animal experiment.

Textual History of Plato's Works

Thu, 11 Dec 2025 07:54:59 +1100

I read a great course on Greek Philosophers this week and another on Ancient Writings:

It got me thinking about the corpus for a given writer, e.g. Plato.

There must be hundreds of copies of his dialogues that have survived. Each copied at a different time, in different condition, with differing levels of completeness and errors.

Scholars must analyse each new discovery and see how it updates the main corpus. Repeat with all other ancient writers.

LLM + Evolutionary Search

Thu, 11 Dec 2025 06:33:24 +1100

I tripped over another LLM + Evolutionary search post yesterday on HN:

OpenEvolve: Teaching LLMs to Discover Algorithms Through Evolution (news.ycombinator.com)
OpenEvolve: Teaching LLMs to Discover Algorithms Through Evolution (algorithmicsuperintelligence.ai)

I like this area of research. It’s an area I’d dig into, if I was compelled to do research.

I’ve touched on this before: AlphaEvolve and LLM Prompt Optimization and perhaps others.

What is this field of study called? No consensus yet.

Programming Mini-Books

Wed, 10 Dec 2025 08:46:50 +1100

I loved learning programming and writing code as a student.

The nuts and bolts stuff. The learning curves.

There was a thrill in unlocking a new feature, a new language, a new library, in building a thing.

I was thinking about re-capturing some of that.

One idea I had was to write a series of mini-books on programming, e.g. 6"x9" books, with about 100 pages.

There are many ways this could go, but I was thinking of selecting 5-10 languages and writing an jump-start for each.

Ptolemaic Scholar Monographs

Tue, 09 Dec 2025 09:31:50 +1100

I finished another book on the Ptolemaic Dynasty this week:

The Rise and Fall of Alexandria: Birthplace of the Modern Mind

Very good.

A thing that got me thinking was that so many of the scholars in the great library wrote so many monographs. Some wrote many hundreds of works. The length may have been short, but that doesn’t matter. They were working hard and outputting stand-alone work product.

I guess that was the thing to do, e.g. no culture of peer-to-peer scientific papers. Instead, gather all ideas into short books.

Original Greek Sources

Mon, 08 Dec 2025 10:53:53 +1100

I was thinking, how do we know “who” wrote “what” in ancient Greece?

There were many scholars and artists grinding out monographs and plays over centuries, and they was all happening on paper-equivalents.

We must have surviving copies of materials that give ideas, but what exactly?

My first guess would be copies that survived 2k years in various monasteries/libraries. My second is paper materials in rubbish dumps in super-arid locations, e.g. deserts in Greek-Egypt.

Athens Monuments

Sun, 07 Dec 2025 07:52:47 +1100

Thinking about my trip to Athens, Greece.

I was thinking, what are all the cool ancient monuments we should see?

Looking at google maps, many are in the city center, in walking distance of each other.

Searching google returns pages and pages of travel-blog-ad-spam. Useless.

Here’s what gpt5.1 gave me:

Acropolis of Athens – The iconic hilltop citadel overlooking the city.
- Parthenon – The most famous temple dedicated to Athena.
- Erechtheion & Caryatids, Propylaea, Temple of Athena Nike.
Temple of Olympian Zeus – Once one of the largest temples in the ancient world.

Alexander the Great's Tomb

Sun, 07 Dec 2025 06:31:55 +1100

Reading books about the Ptolemaic Dynasty recently and I was thinking about Alexander’s tomb.

Where is it? It’s a whole thing, e.g.:

Tomb of Alexander the Great, Wikipedia

In various books, there’s mention of Romans coming in and visiting the tomb in Alexandria.

So he died somewhere (Babylon), was buried (Memphis, after being stolen while on the way back to Macedon), was dug up and re-buried (in Alexandria). And this may have happened again, few more times.

Breakfast of Champions

Sun, 07 Dec 2025 06:03:53 +1100

I finished Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut yesterday.

Not sure what I read. It was a fun, I guess, and a little unstable.

Yes, I could see the subtext of American consumer automatons. But there was too much bad language and sex to no real effect (i.e. delete it and it has the same story/message).

Gave me vibes of Infinite Jest. The pithy short sentences. The “and so on’s”. The narrator getting involved (e.g. metafiction).

Ptolemaic Dynasty Timeline

Sat, 06 Dec 2025 05:51:17 +1100

I finished a book on the Ptolemaic Dynasty yesterday:

The Last Dynasty: Ancient Egypt From Alexander the Great to Cleopatra

Not bad. Perhaps a little boring.

The dynasty did not last as long lasting was I thought (less than 300 years), and perhaps as expected, Alexandria – specifically the library, is the most interesting part.

The early part of the dynasty was more interesting (e.g. Ptolemy II and Ptolemy III). For example, the interactions with the islands in the Aegean, with Rhodes and Cypress, the back and forth with the mainland. The were big dogs in the region for a short while.

Niche Books on the Greeks

Thu, 04 Dec 2025 07:51:18 +1100

I’ve been sniffing around for more niche books on the Greeks.

Less overarching historical books and more biographies and reviews of specific topics.

For books on Archimedes, I chose:

Eureka Man: The Life and Legacy of Archimedes, Alan Hirshfeld, 2009.

For books on Aristotle, I chose:

Aristotle: A Very Short Introduction, Jonathan Barnes, 1982.

For books on the Ptolemaic Dynasty (in Egypt), I chose:

The Rise and Fall of Alexandria: Birthplace of the Modern Mind, Justin Pollard, 2006.
The Last Dynasty: Ancient Egypt From Alexander the Great to Cleopatra, Toby Wilkinson, 2022.

For the discovery of Troy by Heinrich Schliemann I chose:

Anthony Bourdain on Naxos

Thu, 04 Dec 2025 07:45:15 +1100

I’ve been sniffing around for more material on Naxos, an island in the Cyclades I’m plan on visiting.

I came across an episode of the TV show “Parts Unknown” by Anthony Bourdain focused on the island circa 2015.

There’s a few copies on youtube here and there, e.g.:

Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown | The Greek Islands | S07 E03

Very nice.

It looks like he visited out of season because he and others are in jeans most of the time.

Sir Arthur Evans and Knossos

Tue, 02 Dec 2025 05:37:40 +1100

I enjoy reading books about explorers and adventures, especially in their own words. And especially when they were out there causing trouble in the 1700s and 1800s.

Related to my Greece kick, I’ve been looking into the discover of key civilisations, e.g. discovery of Knossos by Arthur Evans, and Mycenae and Troy by Heinrich Schliemann.

Let’s start with Arthur Evans and his work on the Minoans.

Via gpt5.1:

Sir Arthur Evans (1851–1941) was a British archaeologist, scholar, and adventurer best known for uncovering the Palace of Knossos on Crete and identifying the Bronze Age Minoan civilization, which he named after the legendary King Minos. A charismatic and energetic figure, Evans combined the curiosity of a traveler with the resources of a wealthy, independently minded scholar. Beginning excavations at Knossos in 1900, he revealed an advanced, pre-Greek culture with elaborate palaces, vivid frescoes, and mysterious scripts (Linear A and Linear B). Brilliant but sometimes controversial, he also reconstructed parts of the palace in concrete—an imaginative but debated move that shaped how the world visualizes the ancient Aegean. His work fundamentally changed our understanding of early European civilization.

Demosthenes

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 07:56:24 +1100

Building on yesterdays dig into Phaedrus from “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”, I was thinking of ancient Greeks in other books I’ve re-read many times.

I came up with “Demosthenes” from “Ender’s Game”.

Ender’s brother and sister stir things up on the “socials” of the day and eventually his brother becomes some kind of world leader.

The sister posts the brothers view as “Demosthenes” and the brother posts the sisters view a John Locke, as a check on each other.

Phaedrus

Sun, 30 Nov 2025 07:57:34 +1100

Thinking about Greek stuff, I recall that Pirsig referred to himself as “Phaedrus” in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

I enjoy the book. I’ve read them a few times, and reading them makes me feel smart.

Anyway, I figured Phaedrus was some Greek philosopher related to rhetoric, the area of study of the main character/Pirsig.

Why not dig in.

Here’s what GPT5.1 says:

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the narrator uses “Phaedrus” as the name for his earlier, pre-breakdown self—the hyper-intellectual persona obsessed with defining “Quality.” He borrows the name from the historical Phaedrus of Plato’s dialogues, a young Athenian who appears most prominently in Plato’s Phaedrus. In that dialogue, Socrates and Phaedrus explore rhetoric, truth, beauty, and the nature of the soul—exactly the kinds of philosophical questions the narrator’s former self grappled with.

Visions of Greece

Sat, 29 Nov 2025 06:12:37 +1100

I’ve been sniffing around for documentaries on Greece.

I’ve watched a few, and they’re fun.

I found one on Prime video called “Visions of Greece” (2003).

Here’s the blurb:

A beautiful virtual tour that lifts off from Athens, and embarks on an odyssey as varied and dramatic as Greek history, exploring islands scattered like stones in the blue Aegean, ancient ruins, verdant hills, rocky coastlines, and timeless traditions. The dramatic view is enhanced by a soundtrack of traditional and modern Greek music and a narrative that celebrates Greek history and mythology.

Warm Escapes From Melbourne

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 15:09:42 +1100

I live in Melbourne, Australia.

Melbourne gets (relatively) cold for about 1/2 to 2/3 of the year and it’s a tradition to escape further up the east coast of the country in search of warm weather.

We do this most years, typically in the Autumn or Spring and leave winter for warm weather in the northern hemisphere.

The problem is, we always seem to go to the same old towns:

XGBoost Book!?

Wed, 26 Nov 2025 07:48:58 +1100

XGBoost is all you need (for predictive modelling with tabular data), or so they say.

I have used XGBoost for a long time, since shortly after it was developed.

I wrote one of the first books about it in 2018.

Last year, I created a website with 500+ recipes showing how to use XGBoost:

XGBoosting.com

And the twitter feed:

@XGBoostAwesome

The site is doing well, getting many thousands of visitors each week.

Greek Excellence

Tue, 25 Nov 2025 05:34:28 +1100

A nice idea I’ve come across in my reading of the ancient Greeks is what they call “Arete”.

Perhaps translated as virtue or excellence.

Really it’s about striving to be the best version of yourself.

I think I noticed it while reading “The Last of the Wine” by Mary Renault, perhaps when our narrator goes to the Olympics. I could be wrong. I also think it was a theme in the second episode of the great documentary on the Greeks I mentioned yesterday.

Ancient Greece Timeline

Mon, 24 Nov 2025 07:49:36 +1100

I continue to read books about Greece, ancient and modern.

The timeline was fuzzy, but I started watching a history channel documentary on disney+ and I think I have (some) things straight now.

Here’s the documentary, I watched it with my kids, it’s great:

The Greeks (3 parts)

Importantly, there perhaps three key time periods I needed to sort out:

Bronze Age Greece
Greek Dark Age (the gap)
Golden Age

The Greek or Aegean Bronze Age captures the Minoan civilization on Crete (3100-1100 BC), followed by the Mycenaean civilization in the Peloponnese (1750-1050).

Photos Are Lost Forever When You Die: We Need Digital Estate Planning

Sun, 23 Nov 2025 06:04:50 +1100

I finished stuffing my last batch of printed photos into my 2025 photo album yesterday.

See My (lame?) Family Photo Backup Process.

Anyway, I was thinking that I only print a fraction of the photos taken. The rest are essentially lost, or will be with time.

This applies to most people, e.g. most families that take hundreds/thousands of photos every year.

So many photos/memories are lost.

Now imagine archaeologists/sociologists/anthropologists in 1,000+ years. They would give anything to access middens of these “lost” photos. These candied yet rejected snapshots of places/times/people.

Travel Playbook

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 06:12:44 +1100

I understand why people write travel guides.

There are a few times in life when “normal people” (non academic researchers) do a lot more research into a topic than they otherwise would, such as travel, parenthood, marriage, buying a house, etc.

They are not used to deep research and don’t want to see all that work go to waste after the decision point.

I feel the urge two, but slightly differently.

The Greek World (The Great Courses)

Fri, 21 Nov 2025 06:33:06 +1100

I finished an audio version of a course on ancient Greece yesterday:

The Greek World: A Study of History and Culture

It was fantastic, great high-level coverage of the topic.

I am planning two more:

I also like the look of the following:

And more.

Great for consuming and thinking through a the gym.

King Theseus

Thu, 20 Nov 2025 07:54:06 +1100

I’ve been reading books about the myth of King Theseus.

Specifically, I finished Mary Renault’s “The King Must Die” and am about to finish her “The Bull from the Sea”.

These are fun historical fiction versions of the mythos of his life.

And it’s myth. According to our gpt5.1 friend, there’s not evidence for a real Theseus:

There is no direct historical evidence that Theseus ever existed as an actual king. He is considered a mythological hero, similar to Heracles or Perseus, and appears primarily in Greek mythic tradition rather than in contemporary historical records.

François Baranger's Lovecraft

Wed, 19 Nov 2025 10:47:22 +1100

Related to yesterday’s post on Lovecraft manga, I also recently read illustrated Lovecraft stories by François Baranger.

Specifically his two volume:

The story is good, of course (one of my faves), but the illustrations are beyond words.

Sublime.

Look at examples on google image search!

I want to order his illustrated: “Call of Cthulhu”, but it’s so expensive. These are not cheap books.

Gou Tanabe Lovecraft Manga

Tue, 18 Nov 2025 07:58:55 +1100

I’ve been reading manga by Gou Tanabe.

Specifically his adaptations of Lovecraft stories.

And they are so good! 5/5!

More modern, more fun than the origional stories. Stories that I’ve read many times over.

I’ve read his “The Call of Cthulhu” and “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”.

I have “The Hound and Other Stories” next and am about to order his “The Colour Out of Space”.

He has a two volume “At the Mountains of Madness” that I am considering. Although I did just read the story again recently.

Mary Renault Books on Ancient Greece

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 07:42:33 +1100

I’ve been casting around for good books for my eldest to read about Greece.

I came across a series of historical fiction books by Mary Renault that are well regarded.

There are one-offs like:

The Last of the Wine

Two book series, such as this one about Theseus:

And three book series, such as this one about Alexander the Great:

There’s a complete list here:

Minimize Lifetime Insulin

Sat, 15 Nov 2025 08:24:13 +1100

I was reading and re/reading Mark Sisson books this week.

For example:

Good ideas. Eat whole foods. Low carb. Lift heavy with few reps, etc.

Anyway, one thing he mentioned a few times across the books was to:

Minimize lifetime insulin secretion

Now, this does not mean become a type 1 diabetic.

It means something like, the mammals/people that minimize insulin secretion across their life live longer/heather.

Movies in/about Greece

Fri, 14 Nov 2025 07:42:25 +1100

In preparation for our trip to Greece, I was thinking of movies I could watch with my eldest.

The idea, along with a reading list, is to fill his head with history/culture and build anticipation.

He’s 14-15, so I’m leaning more toward action/battles/greek gods/etc.

Here’s what I came up with:

Percy Jackson & The Lightning Thief (2010)
Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters (2013)
Troy (2004)
Alexander (2004)
300 (2006)
Clash of the Titans (2011)
Wrath of the Titans (2012)
Immortals (2011)
Hercules (2014)

That’s a good start.

My (lame?) Family Photo Backup Process

Thu, 13 Nov 2025 09:22:49 +1100

Like most (all?) families, we take tons of photos and videos.

Mostly of our kids. Mostly on holidays. And we typically holiday 1-2 months per year.

Therefore, we have hundreds of new photos each year.

I back-up our family photos once every year or two. This involves:

Syncing photos from both my and my wife’s phones with the Photo app on my workstation
Exporting all new photos (since last update) to a folder.
Zip the folder of photos
Upload to S3.

Therefore, we have 3 versions of the photos: the phones, my workstation, and the cloud.

Greece Travel Memoir

Wed, 12 Nov 2025 08:09:57 +1100

I’m preparing for a trip to Greece.

As such, I’ve been sniffing around for good travel memoirs.

Specifically a memoir or travel log. Not a fictional travel love story. There are zillions on Amazon.

And not just party stories from the islands in the Aegean. Boring.

I picked three:

The Colossus of Maroussi, Henry Miller
Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece, Patrick Leigh Fermor.
Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese, Patrick Leigh Fermor.

Why these. A general focus on the mainland, history, and great writing.

Percy Jackson Greece

Tue, 11 Nov 2025 07:57:52 +1100

In primary school, by eldest son loved the “Percy Jackson” books by Rick Riordan.

Even now, they will be a fun/quick re-read for him when he’s looking for a comfort-read.

These books gave him an interest in ancient Greece. I’ve purchased a few books for him over the years to kindle the interest, e.g.:

300, Frank Miller
Mythos: The Greek Myths Retold, Stephen Fry.
Circe, Madeline Miller.
The Song of Achilles, Madeline Miller.
Lore Olympus, Rachel Smythe.

And I’m sure I’ll buy more. Probably the rest of Stephen Fry’s series.

Notes on Being a Man

Mon, 10 Nov 2025 11:02:15 +1100

I read “Notes on Being a Man” over the weekend.

Good story telling. Good tips.

I’m always trying to think hard about the lessons, ideas, memories to jam into the heads of my son’s.

Exercise and working out is a big one. “Boys should be strong” is something my wife and I say to them often. At home and more recently my eldest has been hitting the gym 3-4 times a week. We also have a stack of dumbbells and a work plan sitting in their rumpus that I and my youngest make use of daily. Making exercise/being strong a habit will be a big deal, and being strong/fit as teenagers will help a ton for health/confidence/etc.

House of Dynamite

Sun, 09 Nov 2025 07:31:58 +1100

I finished watching “A House of Dynamite” on Netflix last night.

Oh man. What a movie.

I don’t remember being so stressed out watching a movie for a long time. I also don’t recall the last time I watched such an “adult” movie.

Thank god. It feels like most of the movies that wash up are for kids/teenagers. It’s nice to see something tense and difficult.

Makes me want to go back and watch Zero Dark Thirty (same director) or Sicario (another deeply tense movie).

Protestant Work Ethic as Meme

Sat, 08 Nov 2025 07:59:49 +1100

I finished “The Ape that Understood the Universe” (Steve Stewart-Williams, 2018) this week.

A good book on evolutionary psychology, probably the best I’ve read in years.

Anyway, there was a piece at the end talking through the evolution of culture and memes, and the “Protestant Work Ethic” (PWE) as a meme and its effect.

Very cool idea.

So, here it is:

Protestant work ethic, Wikipedia.

It’s not a thing per se, but a theory by the sociologist Max Weber. It’s well named I guess and became a thing. A meme/memeplex.

Quake2 Programming Tutorials

Fri, 07 Nov 2025 09:32:27 +1100

As part of my Quake 2 Bot Archive project, I’ve been doing research into old quake bot websites.

I gather the research in markdown so I can re-trace my steps later, and also for good file provenance and complete mod coverage for the archive.

For example:

Quake II Bot Research

Anyway, this lead into into capturing links to old collections of Quake2 mod tutorials and bot tutorials.

For example:

Quake II Code Tutorials

Damn it.

Only One Body for Life

Thu, 06 Nov 2025 09:08:41 +1100

Warren Buffett had a quote along the lines of:

if you only had one car for the rest of your how would you look after it…

It was a thought exercise and analogy for how you should look after your body.

The paraphrase of the quote from chatgp5 is:

Imagine you had a car and it was the only car you would ever have in your life. You would maintain it carefully and treat it like a treasure. Well, you only get one body and one mind — take care of them.

Lan Party

Wed, 05 Nov 2025 07:45:54 +1100

I read “LAN Party” last week:

LAN Party: Inside the Multiplayer Revolution, GoodReads.

More here:

LAN Party, Read-Only Memory.

It’s more of a photo book with occasional essays and interviews.

I went to a lot of LAN parties in high school (circa 1995-1998, a couple after this) and it was awesome.

I ended up hosting many parties because I had a ton of network cards, cables, and space.

The best lan parties were the all day affairs. The worst were overnight/all night as nothing is fun when you’re sleep deprived.

Solid Project For Web Decentralization

Tue, 04 Nov 2025 10:36:15 +1100

I finished Tim Berners-Lee’s autobiography yesterday:

This Is for Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web

The description early years was good.

The latter part of the book was a push for his Solid Project.

More here:

Solid (web decentralization project), Wikipedia

It sounds like something like this (private date wallet) is a good idea. Maybe even this approach.

For All Man Kind

Mon, 03 Nov 2025 08:31:35 +1100

I’m watching the TV show “For All Man Kind”.

I’ve finished S1 and I’ve just started E1 from S2, and it keeps getting better and better.

I can’t believe such an awesome show has just been sitting there and it took me 4-5 years to find it, and to then pull the trigger.

It looks like another meh apollo program show, but it’s so not.

It’s hard scifi + alt history. Win!

Quake2 Bot Research

Sun, 02 Nov 2025 06:03:23 +1100

I’ve been doing research into the release chronology of some Quake2 bots.

This is for the Quake2 Bot Archive.

Specifically:

The idea is to nail down exactly what files were released and when.

This helps when searching, e.g. what files to look for and how to disambiguate multiple releases with the same filename.

It’s also a lot of fun.

Lies My Doctor Told Me

Sat, 01 Nov 2025 07:04:43 +1100

I’m re-reading “Lies My Doctor Told Me”.

It’s good.

What I really like is the structure.

Something like lie, science-backed truth and it finishes with further reading or “homework.

It encourages the reader to do their homework and come to the same conclusions. And the book recommendations are solid.

Great stuff.

Addiction

Fri, 31 Oct 2025 06:47:47 +1100

I just read two books on celebrities whose lives were ruined by addiction:

Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, Matthew Perry.
The Book of Sheen, Charlie Sheen.

I’m so glad this disease does not afflict my wife or myself, and I really hope my sons are spared.

It also reminds me of a Charlie Munger quote along the lines of

“the hard thing about being rich/famous/powerful is not losing your mind”

Eating Operating System

Thu, 30 Oct 2025 07:42:50 +1100

I fatten quickly when eating carbohydrates.

Not just sweets and ice cream, but bread and pasta.

You might even say I’m carbohydrate intolerant.

I think it’s because I was plump as a young kid and I have too many fat cells, especially around the mid section. They’re just sitting there all day waiting to grow. Begging.

This is a reminder to myself that my eating operating system is to eat meat and vegetables.

Sequence of Innovations for LLMs

Wed, 29 Oct 2025 06:41:28 +1100

Yesterday, I was listening to the Modern Wisdom podcast interview with Eliezer Yudkowsky about his new book (which I’ve read).

The podcast:

#1011 – Eliezer Yudkowsky – Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All

The book:

If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All, Eliezer Yudkowsky & Nate Soares, 2025.

Yudkowsky always gives great analogies, this interview was no different. The climbing the ladder analogy hit for me:

Brain Fuzz

Tue, 28 Oct 2025 06:56:12 +1100

I was travelling for some time recently. Many weeks.

During that time, I pulled back on reading books and even on consuming long-form podcasts.

Instead, I consumed vast amounts of social, specifically Instagram and TikTok.

They are amazing at narrowing in on my interest of the moment.

But I found that I felt off. Wrong.

The best way I can describe it is my brain was fuzzy.

I could not think clearly. I didn’t care so much about “stuff”. I was lethargic. I didn’t want to eat right or go to the gym. I just stopped caring.

I'm Too Young To Die and Gaming Nostalgia

Mon, 27 Oct 2025 07:46:39 +1100

I read “I’m Too Young To Die” by Bitmap Books last week.

Here’s the official homepage with lots of cool photos of the book:

I’m Too Young To Die: The Ultimate Guide to First-Person Shooters 1992–2002

Here’s the blurb:

I’m Too Young To Die: The Ultimate Guide to First-Person Shooters 1992–2002. Covering the early, experimental years of the first-person shooter, we celebrate more than 180 games as we track the genre’s explosive entrance onto the ’90s gaming scene. Whether obscure oddities or genre-defining behemoths, first-person shooters transported players to alien worlds, alternate universes and the shores of Hell itself, and in doing so helped to trigger the 3D-graphics arms race.

Heart Flutter

Sun, 26 Oct 2025 08:02:15 +1100

I read “Wisdom Takes Work” this week.

Good book. too much on Elon Musk.

There was a good reminder to work on things that make your heart flutter.

Great advice.

I need to remember this.

Calorie Deficit Tips

Sat, 25 Oct 2025 08:41:22 +1100

Back from long holidays and I’ve put on 5kg/10lbs like it was nothing.

Calorie deficit time.

To get me in the mood, I sat down with Claude we wrote ~400 tips for maintaining a calorie deficit.

I then hooked this up to my auto-tweeter and created a new twitter account:

Calorie Deficit Tips

It tweets new tips every 2 hours around the clock.

I make sure to read the last few tips every time I’m on twitter to stay on the path.

Machine Learning Mischief

Sat, 25 Oct 2025 08:38:35 +1100

I just just looking over my “Machine Learning Mischief” project from December last year:

Machine Learning Mischief

Good stuff.

Very fun to think about, write about, and develop examples about.

I was idly thinking of turning this into a book.

No audience though… oh well.

Maybe expand a subtopic and do that? e.g. seed hacking/p-hacking.

Or maybe get out there and market/promote the ideas.

5km Running Times

Fri, 29 Aug 2025 08:07:26 +1000

I run 5km 2-3 times per week as part of my cardio day at the gym.

I have a routine of setting the pace at 6 minute kilometres initially and increasing every km. For example, the pace in minutes looks as follows over the whole 5km: 6, 5.5, 5, 4.5, 4.

This takes 25 minutes.

If I’m tired, I’ll run the first 2km at a 6min pace, then increase after that, for example: 6, 6, 5.5, 5, 4.5. This takes 27 minutes.

Discipline Coding (opposite of vibe coding)

Thu, 28 Aug 2025 09:28:37 +1000

Every movement has a counter or opposite movement.

The opposite of vibe coding?

Let’s call it: “Discipline Coding”.

Tenets

Self-Reliance over Delegation
- Belief: If you didn’t write it, you don’t truly understand it.
- Practice: Hand-roll core algorithms, avoid generated code, and limit dependencies.
Deliberate over Emergent
- Belief: Good code isn’t discovered in a “vibe,” it’s designed with intention.
- Practice: Careful planning, diagrams, upfront modeling before writing a line of code.
Transparency over Black Box

Pushback to Vibe Coding?

Thu, 28 Aug 2025 07:57:47 +1000

I have been thinking about what the push-back to vibe coding will look like.

Rather than:

“do everything for me, and do it right now”

The sentiment might be something like:

“do everything myself, and take my time”

Along these lines, I was thinking a “code from scratch series”.

A swing toward discipline, mastery, and minimalism.

For example:

I’m a serious programmer, not a vibe coder. I coded this massive thing from scratch in ansi c with no dependencies other than stdlib and here are the 300 hours of video on youtube proving it.

You Can Just Do Things

Wed, 27 Aug 2025 11:23:15 +1000

I read Jay Yang’s “You Can Just Do Things”.

Good book, good stories, and good reminder.

Importantly, I purchased a physical copy for my eldest.

I’m hoping it inspires him. And, it is a good reminder to keep buying him books along these lines. Something will hit.

'Useful Not True' by Other Names

Tue, 26 Aug 2025 08:01:03 +1000

Thinking more about “Useful Not True”.

It occurs to me that this idea is known by many different names across many different fields.

I was thinking about instrumentalism and the placebo effect.

But chatting with chatgpt shows many more (obvious in retrospect).

Here are some:

🧠 Psychology & Cognitive Science

Cognitive Reframing / Cognitive Restructuring Changing the way you interpret events so your emotional and behavioral responses are more helpful. (CBT uses this heavily.)
Placebo Effect A belief that isn’t objectively true (“this sugar pill heals me”) still triggers real, measurable benefits.
Positive Illusions Term from psychology for mildly inaccurate self-beliefs (“I’m more capable than average”) that improve motivation, health, and resilience.
Adaptive Denial Temporarily refusing to believe a discouraging truth to maintain hope and action (often studied in trauma and recovery).
Self-Deception as Strategy Evolutionary psychology suggests humans deceive themselves so they can more convincingly influence others.

📚 Philosophy

Pragmatism (William James, John Dewey, Richard Rorty) A belief is “true” if it works in practice — if it leads to successful action. James explicitly said: “Truth is what is useful to believe.”
Instrumentalism From philosophy of science: theories don’t need to be true, only useful for prediction (e.g., Newtonian physics is “wrong” but incredibly useful).
Fictionalism We act as if certain things exist (numbers, morals, nations) even if they don’t, because the fiction organizes life productively.
Noble Lie (Plato, Republic) Myths or beliefs that may not be literally true but hold society together and motivate virtue.

📖 Literature, Religion & Myth

Myth as Metaphor Stories in religion/mythology are not “true” literally but serve moral, cultural, or existential functions.
Suspension of Disbelief (Coleridge) Temporarily accepting something you know isn’t true so you can immerse and benefit from the story. Similar to adopting useful beliefs.
Faith as Pragmatic In some religious traditions, belief is valuable not for truth claims but for shaping conduct and community.

💼 Business & Performance

Visionary Fictions Entrepreneurs hold “unrealistic” beliefs about what’s possible — beliefs not objectively true yet — which motivate innovation.
Growth Mindset (Carol Dweck) Believing “ability can always improve” may not be objectively true in every domain, but it drives persistence and better outcomes.
Fake It Till You Make It Acting as if you already are something (confident, disciplined, skilled) even if it’s not true — until it becomes closer to true.

🎲 Game Theory & Evolution

Credible Commitment Through Self-Deception Sometimes it’s useful not to know the truth so your actions are more convincing to others (e.g., bluffing in poker, signaling in negotiations).
Evolutionary Adaptive Illusions Some inaccurate perceptions (e.g., overestimating control, optimism bias) improve survival and reproduction.

🌱 Modern Self-Development

Useful Beliefs (Chris Helder) — literally a motivational framework named after the same principle.
Affirmations — self-statements you may not believe yet, repeated until they shape behavior and identity.
“As If” Principle (Richard Wiseman) — act as if you already feel/are something, and your psychology often follows.

I’ve done enough marketing to not dismiss all this out of hand.

Useful Not True

Tue, 26 Aug 2025 06:32:17 +1000

Yesterday I read Derek Sivers’ “Useful No True”.

Should there be a comma in that title?

Anyway, good book.

I think the thesis is something like:

Actions over beliefs. Hack your beliefs to achieve desired actions.

Gaslight oneself?

This is not bad. We all do this anyway, just take the reigns.

Via chatgpt5:

The book argues that we should adopt beliefs, perspectives, and thoughts not because they are absolutely true, but because they are useful. Its central idea is reframing: deliberately shifting the way we interpret reality in order to act more effectively, feel more at peace, or achieve our goals.

Sometimes Human Authorship Doesn't Matter!?

Mon, 25 Aug 2025 08:16:34 +1000

I read Florian Ernotte’s “Writing with LLM is not a shame. An essay about transparency on AI use.”

Something like:

The demands for AI disclosure often represent “empty vigilance” and conformity rather than genuine ethics, that ethical standards for such new technology are still being developed and shouldn’t be rigidly enforced yet and the AI disclosure is only relevant when content is good and valuable

I was then reading HN comments on the post and read this:

Open Problems, Closed Problems

Sun, 24 Aug 2025 06:39:59 +1000

I have been thinking a lot about Gian Segato’s post, see Probabilistic Era.

The job of building software for people, i.e. software engineering is about taking an open problem, making it closed so we can build it and verify we have built it with tests (of various sorts).

The problem is open because it is for humans or involves humans. We’re not building a bridge, we’re solving some vague business problem with semi-automation, or something.

Probabilistic Era

Fri, 22 Aug 2025 07:57:41 +1000

I just read Gian Segato’s “Building AI Products In The Probabilistic Era”.

Good read. Good take.

But, it makes sense. He’s a data scientist and we (as a community) have had to think this way for 10-15 years when working with narrow probabilistic models.

But, the scope has changed.

Inputs and outputs are open-ended.

His examples around replit are good, e.g. constraining the use case to code gen for websites would prevent other use cases like code gen for games.

Tiny Online Store

Thu, 21 Aug 2025 10:12:45 +1000

It would be nice to have a tiny store online that could just sit there for decades.

Focus on one tiny and useful need and do it well, world class.

Sell one or a few tiny products or services for that one thing.

Not a full time thing, free content, self-serve product sales with on-demand support.

I guess SuperFastPython fits the bill, but even it’s scope is too large.

Ideally one thing. One algorithm, or one data structure, or one library/module.

Automation Replacing Human Programmers (and that's fine)

Wed, 20 Aug 2025 08:14:38 +1000

I was listening to an Acquired episode and the guest mentioned the role of computers (people) being replaced by electronic computers, and how programming/coding will/is seeing the same fate.

Here’s the episode:

How is AI Different Than Other Technology Waves? (With Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor)

And here on YouTube where I got the transcript.

Here’s the quote:

I self-identify as a computer programmer. It’s like the thing I like to do the most. And I’m like, man, that’s sort of like saying I’m—do remember like the calculators, people who like calculated things before we had calculators? I’m like, am I that?

Fishers Fundamental Theorem

Tue, 19 Aug 2025 09:05:36 +1000

Among Ronald Fisher’s many contributions to statistics, genetics, and evolutionary theory at large was his “fundamental theorem of natural selection”:

“The rate of increase in fitness of any organism at any time is equal to its genetic variance in fitness at that time.”

See:

Fisher’s fundamental theorem of natural selection, Wikipedia.

In plain language (with llm help):

“The rate at which a population becomes better adapted (its average fitness increases) is directly proportional to the amount of genetic variation for fitness it already has.”

Machine Learning Street Talk: Banger Episodes

Tue, 19 Aug 2025 08:26:26 +1000

Machine Learning Street Talk is a YouTube channel and podcast by Tim Scarfe and sometimes Keith Duggar.

I’m a fan of the podcast, and have been for some time.

Follow them on X here:

Machine Learning Street Talk

Recently, like this northern hemisphere summer, they have been releasing fantastic episodes.

Both the quality of the guests and the quality of the questions/discussion. Riveting stuff.

Specifically:

The Secret Ingredient for AI Creativity A chat with Kenneth Stanley.
Did a 7 Year Old Really Solve the Universe? A chat with Guillaume Verdon.
Mutually Assured AI Malfunction (Superintelligence Strategy) A chat with Dan Hendrycks.

All three had be sitting and staring into space for a long time, thinking through things. Not sure I’m smart enough to keep up at double speed, a few listens are required.

Navy Seals Quake

Tue, 19 Aug 2025 08:12:38 +1000

I’ve created a new Quake archive, this time for the Navy Seals modification by Minh Le aka “Gooseman”.

This was originally an ad hoc archive as a gist here:

Navy Seals Quake

I decided to make it a standalone archive as I came across rare/hard-to-find versions of the mod that I believed required independent hosting.

You can see the full archive here:

Quake Navy Seals

Authority Site in 2005

Sun, 13 Jul 2025 08:39:06 +1000

I listened to part 1 of the Acquired Podcast on the history of Google.

Outstanding and nostalgic.

I was a super early google user, thanks to a mention on slashdot on the late 90s.

It got me thinking: what if…

What if I travelled back to 2005 with my current knowledge, what would I do? What online business would I build?

I was thinking about SEO and authority sites, based on the Acquired podcast episode on google.

Back on the Path

Wed, 02 Jul 2025 09:57:22 +1000

After a long holiday where you eat like a pig and exercise not at all, how do you get back on the path?

You must cut calories and get the body/brain used to the new regimen as fast as possible, e.g. avoid backsliding.

Firstly cut all junk food and processed foods.

Next, cut carbs.

Then cut calories to below maintenance.

All while exercising daily, as close to normal as possible. Don’t feel like going to the gym? Who the hell does? Fine, walk 5km. Lift at home. Get that body moving. Strain those muscles.

Quake2 Official Release Archive

Mon, 23 Jun 2025 07:42:18 +1000

I created an archive of all official releases for Quake II (Quake2):

Quake II Official Archive

It complements my Quake Official Archive and Quake III Arena Official Archive.

It seems that the Quake2 era circa (1998) was perfect for the wayback machine and almost all Quake2 files were archived.

This Quake2 archive is the most complete of the three archives.

The main files missing are a few solaris dedicated server releases, and these may or may not be “official”, more research is required.

Public Knowledge Private Ignorance

Sun, 15 Jun 2025 08:19:35 +1000

I found and acquired a copy of the monograph:

Public Knowledge, Private Ignorance, Patrick Wilson, 1977.

From the first chapter:

Scholars and scientists engage in attempts to make contributions to a public body of knowledge about the world. They do not work simply to increase their own private understanding of the world, nor simply to increase the understanding of their co-workers in a specialized branch of inquiry. Their work is incomplete until they have made their results public, available to anyone, now and in the future, who can understand and make use of them.

Hidden Knowledge and Literature-based Discovery via LLMs

Sun, 15 Jun 2025 06:28:08 +1000

I read Samuel Arbesman’s “The Half-life of Facts” yesterday.

Good book, great even. I’ll be reading more by Arbesman.

One section got me thinking about LLMs, chapter 6 titled “Hidden Knowledge”.

It is about how there are breakthroughs sitting in plain sight, in public hidden knowledge.

For example, disparate facts spread across fields that need to be unified.

“Hidden knowledge takes many forms. At its most basic level hidden knowledge can consist of pieces of information that are unknown, or are known only to a few, and, for all practical purposes, still need to be revealed. Other times hidden knowledge includes facts that are part of undiscovered public knowledge, when bits of knowledge need to be connected to other pieces of information in order to yield new facts. Knowledge can be hidden in all sorts of ways, and new facts can only be created if this knowledge is recognized and exploited.”

Prompt Scaffold

Sat, 14 Jun 2025 06:47:07 +1000

I have been thinking of coding up some more elaborate prompt scaffolding for writing projects.

I guess I don’t need to.

Today, I watched:

I Got AI to Write a Book with One Click, and It Was…

It’s a great video.

It uses Make connected to models via OpenRouter.

It’s you’re classic code-free workflow tool, but for prompting LLMs.

It starts with a sequence for developing the story outline, then uses the outline to create 3 outlines of chapters in parallel.

Struggle

Fri, 13 Jun 2025 06:32:46 +1000

I re-read Mark Manson’s “Subtle Art” yesterday.

I enjoyed it more this time than the first time through back when it was released. I guess am more ready to hear it.

A part that that really clicked with me was on struggle.

It’s a piece I used to mention often, but I guess I’d forgotten recently.

We all struggle. Struggle is growth, it’s life. But, we can pick our struggle.

He's Not Lazy

Thu, 12 Jun 2025 09:59:16 +1000

I just finished “He’s Not Lazy” by Adam Price.

Good book. Read more pre-emptively I guess. Preventative maintenance.

Lots of things I need to remember, especially in the heat of things when thinking turns off.

The most important being that any “fight” with a teenager is probably about power and you will lose because they will go further. They have less to lose.

“However, there is one type of conflict you should learn to avoid: a power struggle. Without even knowing you, I can predict who will win the next one: your teen. He will always win. That’s because he has so much more at stake than you: He’s fighting for his independence. He will best you because he’s willing to go to any length to win—screaming, swearing, embarrassing you in public, whatever it takes.”

First Hardware Projects

Wed, 11 Jun 2025 10:47:45 +1000

I’ve been working on trying to acquire hardware for the “Old Desktop PCs for Learning” project for my eldest.

We have a few bits and are hoping to get a few more. It’s harder than I thought. I guess the e-waste initiatives are working. In the old days, there were tons of old hardware out there in hard rubbish and in peoples garages.

Anyway, once we get a good base stock of hardware we need workshop projects to work through.

Old Desktop PCs for Learning

Sun, 08 Jun 2025 08:01:27 +1000

My eldest is getting interested in PCs and building his own desktop system.

Cool.

I did that around his age and it was a lot of fun.

A thing I did was I acquired many old systems from people (e.g. hard rubbish) and cobbled together my own little LAN of 286/386/486 systems running Linux. It forced learning in both hardware and OS/software and was a lot of fun.

I was thinking we could do something similar.

Dumbbell Tips

Sat, 07 Jun 2025 08:32:51 +1000

With two sons, three males in the house, exercise is a big deal.

We all work out to different degrees. Fitness, strength, etc. is discussed often.

I’m getting a set of dumbbells for the boys to use. I will use them too, to complement my gym stuff.

Weights: 1.5kg (we have already), then 3kg, 5kg, 8kg, 10kg.

They’ll stick with the lighter weights for now, with room to grow.

I don’t want them to get hurt, so I asked grok3 to help me make some posters to stick up.

Python Code Review Custom GPT

Sat, 07 Jun 2025 08:27:01 +1000

I built a simple custom GPT for Python code review.

Mainly for my algorithm and data structure implementations for the thing described here.

Here it is:

Python Code Reviewer: Suggest improvements to your pasted Python code

Here’s the logo I made for it:

Australian Pride

Fri, 06 Jun 2025 08:01:19 +1000

My kids often come home (from school) talking about how the environment is ruined or all of the bad things “we” did in “our” past, as Australians.

Perhaps.

I push back. Bad things may have been done, perhaps even for messed-up or noble reasons, but “we” don’t have to carry that guilt in order to learn/change/etc. Yes, I think we can explore this argument without downplaying all the bad things of the past. We can handle two or more ideas in our heads at once. And so can children. e.g. collective responsibility without personal guilt.

Which Algorithms Data Structures?

Thu, 05 Jun 2025 11:10:50 +1000

Regarding Code Simple Algorithms and Data Structures:

Which algorithms and data structures did we have to understand + code up back in introduction to compsci?

I asked gemini 2.5 flash (why doesn’t it have a prominent copy button?):

Data Structures

Arrays
Linked Lists (Singly, Doubly, Circular)
Stacks
Queues
Trees (Binary Trees, Binary Search Trees)
Hash Tables

Algorithms

Sorting Algorithms (Bubble Sort, Selection Sort, Insertion Sort, Merge Sort, Quick Sort)
Searching Algorithms (Linear Search, Binary Search)
Recursion
Graph Traversal Algorithms (Breadth-First Search - BFS, Depth-First Search - DFS)

This is a helpful reference to my future self so I can keep coding these things up without having to think “what next”.

Code Simple Algorithms and Data Structures (from scratch for fun)

Thu, 05 Jun 2025 08:04:30 +1000

Vibe coding is amazingly productive, at least for experiments and prototypes.

And fun.

Recently, I’ve noticed something missing. A feeling.

The feeling you get when thinking hard while crafting a piece of code. Of desk checking it in your head. Of thinking through edges cases.

I’m missing the feeling of making my brain sweat while crafting some code.

I had an idea:

Why not code up simple algorithms and data structures from scratch for “fun”?

Serve

Wed, 04 Jun 2025 09:10:12 +1000

If you’re feeling bored or lost or directionless: serve.

Go and find people you can help.

Jump onto reddit. Find a subreddit of beginners in an area you know a lot about and start answering questions.

Give your opinion. Quote experts. Suggest directions.

Help.

Serve.

It works wonders.

AI Point of View

Wed, 04 Jun 2025 06:27:27 +1000

I was listening to a podcast with Rick Rubin on his vibe coding book and he said some good stuff.

The interview:

Rick Rubin: Vibe Coding is the Punk Rock of Software

The book:

The Way of Code: The Timeless Art of Vibe Coding

He said AI needs a point of view. That this is what we, as artists, supply.

From the interview transcript:

But the reason we go to the artists we go to or the writers we go to or the filmmakers we go to is for their point of view. The AI doesn’t have a point of view right. A point of view is what you tell it. What you tell it the point of view is to be.

Fast Genetic Algorithm Tutorial/Book

Tue, 03 Jun 2025 07:53:01 +1000

A while back I showed how we can get a genetic algorithm in Python to run as fast then faster than a naive implementation in C.

Here it is:

Fast Genetic Algorithm in Python

It was fun little project that mainly consisted of lots of timeit tests of different numpy functions and different ways of vectorizing the operations.

The project was not very didactic. More of a progression. A show and tell.

AlphaEvolve

Tue, 03 Jun 2025 05:59:04 +1000

I was thinking about DeepMinds AlphaEvolve from last month.

It’s pretty cool. The results are cool. The overall structure is pretty straightforward-ish though. As in, it did not surprise me very much.

Here’s how I’m thinking about it.

It’s a GA with LLM operators. Something that many people have been trying, but have not unlocked this well, so far.

Kaggle for Optimization Problems

Mon, 02 Jun 2025 09:23:36 +1000

Back in grad school days, it was fun to pick NP-Complete optimization problems and have little competitions to see who could get the best solution (lowest cost) in a given time frame.

One of the more popular competitions we had was made semi-formal called maxpath:

Max Path

Pic:

I’ve always enjoyed optimization more than machine learning.

I remember having coffee with Kaggle’s Anthony Goldbloom circa 2010 and saying that he should add competitions for optimization problems. It wasn’t a good fit.

Looking Back (from the future)

Sun, 01 Jun 2025 07:31:32 +1000

Sometimes I don’t feel like working hard.

I’ll procrastinate. Everyone does.

I’ll fiddle with small stuff around the edges of the project. Bikeshedding.

A trick I use to snap out of it is to “look back from the future”.

I’ll pretend that I’m me but it’s the end of the year and I’m looking back at the achievements for the year. At all the projects completed.

I will want to see the current project done, and more. If it’s not done, I’d be most disappointed. I’ll be asking hard questions, like: “Why the hell not? What were you doing exactly?”

Personalized Books

Sat, 31 May 2025 07:50:53 +1000

I’ve been writing novellas for my kids for the last few months.

The writing is fine. The stories, fine. Not mind blowing.

The real trick is personalization.

Telling stories about the kids as characters in places they know with our inside jokes.

They are personalized stories. Written for them.

This is key. It makes up for the so-so stories and writing.

It’s a lot of work. It’s a heavy collaboration, a lot of careful specification by me of specific details to include.

I Love Small Technical Handbooks

Fri, 30 May 2025 11:10:46 +1000

I saw this on HN this morning:

Show HN: I wrote a modern Command Line Handbook

It’s currently number 3 with 63 comments and 245 upvotes.

Nice!

It’s for a book on how to use the command line on the big 3 OS.

It’s a short, focused, basic handbook.

I love those.

I love making those.

And I’m so happy that the tech community is still supporting them. And interesting in them.

Generate vs Archive (generate as the new archive?)

Fri, 30 May 2025 10:53:38 +1000

I have a hobby as a quake archivist.

It’s fun for two reasons: the nostalgia and the hunt (e.g. variable rewards).

Many files I seek to archive are lost. They maybe in the deep web somewhere, or they may be in peoples personal archives, but unless I can surface them, they are essentially “lost”. Lost to the archives at least.

I was thinking, soon the AI models will be good enough to generate list artefacts on demand.

Investing For Kids vs Adults

Thu, 29 May 2025 07:48:23 +1000

Someone was asking me about investing the other day.

I gave my normal spiel about not picking stocks and instead picking countries/economies and buying indices. I also said to stick with what you know. If you know property (she’s a real estate agent) then invest in property, you probably have some edge.

The conversation flowed between investing ourselves and her kids starting to invest in stocks.

I made the important observation that investment goals matter a lot and that the investment goals of hers will be different from her kids.

Gear Acquisition Syndrome

Wed, 28 May 2025 09:24:00 +1000

I was thinking about to early game modding.

I made the most and best progress when I “just made stuff”.

If in doubt, the second best thing to do would be to complete tutorials, e.g. coding tutorials, mapping tutorials, etc.

The worst thing to do ever was to print/read manuals.

There are two clear cases in my memory of doing this:

Printing the DEU editor manual/guide (on my dot matrix printer)
Print the Quake III Arena Shaders manual (in colour!).

I never read them all the way through, and they never helped.

Information In Your Head Is Valuable

Wed, 28 May 2025 07:42:58 +1000

I was talking to someone the other day about how to earn some extra cash.

I said something like:

There is information in your head that is valuable to other people, so valuable that they would happily pay you to learn it. Even over zoom. All you have to do is figure out what information and what people.

It’s true, but challenging advice.

It’s the “All you have to do is figure out what information and what people” piece that is so hard.

Coffee and Resting Heart Rate

Tue, 27 May 2025 06:24:53 +1000

I drink 3-4 coffees a day, sometimes tea (earl grey) as well.

I was thinking, is this elevating my resting heart rate? Am m I going to die earlier because of my coffee habit?

I don’t think so.

I checked in with o3.

The short answer: At the level you describe — about 3–4 single espressos a day (≈ 180-320 mg caffeine) — there is no solid evidence that your resting heart rate will stay chronically elevated or that you will damage your heart over time, provided you are otherwise healthy, keep your blood pressure in the normal range and sleep well.

Quake2 Genetic Learning

Mon, 26 May 2025 14:09:54 +1000

About 20 years ago, I experimented by adding simple neural net and genetic algorithm based agents to quake2.

Here’s what I did back then:

Ecosystem: Constructing a simple self-perpetuating society of adaptable agents (archived)

I was thinking about that again today.

It might be fun to develop a suite of mini experiments using genetic learning an neural net learning in little q2 agents. To setup little ecosystems on server processes and let them run for days and weeks and see what happens.

Q3Test Addons Archive

Sun, 25 May 2025 07:52:24 +1000

Before Quake3 was released, there were a number of Q3Test releases.

It was an exciting time in 1999 from about May to about December before the final demo and retail release.

Q3Test releases were made for win32, linux and mac. I was mainly a win32 and linux user at the time and getting GLX/OpenGL working on linux at that time was hard work.

Anyway, during this time many mods and hacks were developed for the Q3Test.

Related Genetic Percentage

Sat, 24 May 2025 05:27:08 +1000

My kids were asking how related all of their relatives are to them.

I posed the question to gpt3o and asked for percentages in terms of genetic material. I thought I knew the answer, but was a little surprised.

Anyway, here’s the result again:

From a genetic perspective, relatedness is typically measured using the coefficient of relatedness, which represents the probability that a gene selected at random from one individual is shared with another due to common ancestry. Here’s a list of how genetically related various relatives are to you, expressed as percentages:

Latent space optimization?

Thu, 22 May 2025 09:16:52 +1000

I was randomly thinking about embeddings this morning.

I was thinking how they are fantastic at creating a continuous representation space from discrete data, e.g. words, category labels, etc.

I was then thinking it might be fun to use the embedding as a representation for an optimization process, like a genetic algorithm. Or any optimization algorithm.

The algorithm would sample the embedding space and drawn vectors would have to be evaluated using a simulator or objective function or whatever, depending on the domain.

Search for Rare Quake Files

Wed, 21 May 2025 09:34:47 +1000

I’m doing a first-pass search for files for the Quake3 Official Archive.

I have notes on finding rare files here but I’m being super systematic for this first pass and thought I should document it (for next time).

First, the given is we know what we are searching for, e.g. we have a wishlist of known filenames.

The first pass involves either finding the file or collecting all known locations where the file used to exist. Later we can dig further into each URL via the wayback machine to learn more.

Quake3 Official Archive

Tue, 20 May 2025 15:31:16 +1000

Since posting the q3test versions there’s been some interest in a Quake III Arena official archive.

I pitched doing the same thing as the Quake Official Archive.

So, it’s begun, here it is:

Quake3 Official Archive

I’ve added all the q3test versions, point releases, source releases and tools.

Lots of mopping up to do, which will likely takes weeks to months, if not years.

Fun!

My PC History

Mon, 19 May 2025 06:29:38 +1000

I read “Building my childhood dream PC” by Fabien Sanglard and shared in his nostalgia for his childhood dream PC.

So cool. So beautiful. So nostalgic!

I like the final line in the epilogue:

I am quite eager to build a “Beautiful 1997 Quake Machine” now.

YES!

Now, I’m trying to remember my PCs. It’s really hard.

Here’s a first draft of my PC history:

XT (later a 286?), Dad’s, early 1990s to about 1993.
486 DX2/66 (?), Family’s, 1995-ish?
Pentium 133MHz, My first PC, circa 1996-ish
Pentium 266MHz MMX, Upgrade + 3DFX, circa 1997-ish
Celeron 300A @450MHz, Gaming box, circa 1999
AMD 1.2Ghz, Some kind of AMD and GForce video card?, circa 2000-2004
Apple iBook, sold everything for a laptop, circa 2005-2008.
Apple iMac, first imac, 2008-2017
Apple iMac, Current Workstation, circa 2017-present

Some details are solid, because I have hard evidence. Others less so,

Australian English Copy Editing GPT

Sun, 18 May 2025 11:26:50 +1000

I have created a custom GPT for copy editing pasted or uploaded text in Australian English.

It includes all of my rules, refined over a ton of books, as well as a simple and terse way of presenting the errors so that can be quickly found and corrected in the original text.

Here it is:

Aussie Copy Editor

Official description:

An Australian English copy editor that reviews pasted or uploaded text for common errors.

Book as ChatGPT Wrapper

Sun, 18 May 2025 08:00:49 +1000

I listened to an episode by Nicolas Cole on his “Coffee With Cole” podcast titled “The AI Writing Trend No One Is Talking About”.

Here’s the YouTube version:

The AI Writing Trend No One Is Talking About

The thesis of the episode is that non-fiction writers should stop publishing books and instead use the material as prompts/context in ChatGPT wrapper apps to help the target audience achieve a desired outcome.

Bali Coin

Sun, 18 May 2025 06:40:41 +1000

I have written a novella for my youngest son (e.g. targets age 6 to 12).

It’s about him and his brother visiting their favourite holiday destination.

The title is: “The Bali Coin”

Here’s the cover:

Here’s the blurb:

One mysterious coin. Two brothers. The adventure of a lifetime.

When seven-year-old Jon and his teenage brother Alex arrive in Bali for a sun-filled family vacation, they anticipate lazy pool days, towering sandcastles, and endless breakfast buffets. But everything changes when Jon discovers a peculiar, ancient coin hidden in the sand, sparking an unforgettable adventure. Adorned with mysterious symbols, the relic points to secrets scattered across the island.

Chopper Land

Sat, 17 May 2025 08:17:36 +1000

I was digging more into old q3test bots and I found one of my old websites.

The site was called “chopper land”.

I remember it started as an experiment on in my student account on an RMIT server in early 1999 (I believe Minyos or minyos.its.rmit.edu.au).

Found it, here:

http://minyos.its.rmit.edu.au/~s9966394 (archived, Dec 2000)

I then migrated to GeoCities.

I believe the focus was initially on bots in the q3test (circa June 1999) then moved to all gaming stuff.

Q3Test Versions

Sat, 17 May 2025 05:47:55 +1000

I was thinking a lot about the q3test bots written about yesterday.

Nostalgia.

What test versions were released when?

IHV Leak

The IHV leaked perhaps late February or early March 1999.

Quake III Arena IHV Test Leaked, Mar 01, 1999

Q3Test Mac (v1.01?)

In late April a Mac version of the Q3Test was released:

Mac Q3ATest Released, Apr 24, 1999.

Including:

MacQ3Test.bin

Q3Test v1.03

An updated Mac version was released along with a linux version and a win32 server:

Q3Test Bots

Fri, 16 May 2025 09:53:49 +1000

Before Quake3 was released there were public test versions. And before that there was a leaked IHV version.

I acquired and played all of them.

I remember spending a lot of time trying to get bots working with one of these releases.

It may have been the q3test v1.05.

We had to run a program that modified the game, then we could use commands in-game to spawn bots. The fun was figuring out what all the bot commands did.

Fruit

Fri, 16 May 2025 08:18:12 +1000

A piece of fruit after dinner is a delight.

I look forward to it.

This is a reminder that if you’re trying to slim down, drop the fruit.

I’ve been eating a piece or two after dinner for the last two weeks and my weight has plateaued for that time.

Even though calories are low, e.g. deficit.

It’s probably water retention, but still. Stop.

Fruit undoes all the good work.

Terminator Bot

Thu, 15 May 2025 14:40:24 +1000

I took a break from novella work to dip back into my Quake bot archive work.

I spend the morning digging into the release history for the Terminator client-side Quake bot by Olivier Montanuy and documenting it here:

Terminator Bot

It’s so much fun.

I don’t know how this work can be made valuable to others, but if I could justify doing a deep-dive into the research history for every bot in the archive, I would.

Easier to Gain Than to Lose Weight (for me)

Wed, 14 May 2025 05:53:14 +1000

I get that food/calories don’t have the same effect on everyone.

For me, its a lot easier to gain than to lose weight.

It’s very easy to overeat. In fact, I suspect the energy partition hypothesis is correct and even small amounts of simple carbohydrates make me gain weight fast.

Nothing new here.

But I was thinking:

What is the relationship between gaining and losing weight?

What is the ratio? Linear to sublinear or worse. Is it 1:0.8 or 1:0.5, probably.

ChatGPT 4o Images

Tue, 13 May 2025 06:13:04 +1000

ChaptGPT 4o can generate images natively.

For example:

Introducing 4o Image Generation

I’ve been using this feature, almost daily since launch a month and a half ago.

It’s really really good. Especially compared to Dall-e and Grok3 and even Gemini, other image generation models that I’ve used a lot.

But also limited.

I’ve used it for photos of invented scenes, which has been really great. Almost faultless.

I’ve also used it for artistic impressions of fantastical things, also pretty solid.

Novellas, Why Bother?

Mon, 12 May 2025 17:37:21 +1000

I’ve been writing novellas for my kids for the past few months.

They are probably objectively terrible.

Why bother?

It helps to turn this question around.

What if someone else was writing novellas and asked what I thought? What if one my kids was writing novellas and asked?

I would think it was awesome, and to keep going!

You’re practising how to conceive, execute and deliver, on project.
You’re practising how to develop a compelling story by trial and error.
You’re practising how to collaborate with LLMs for prose, descriptions, images, proofreading, copyediting, etc.

You must iterate in order to get good. Make 100 and make each one 1% better than the one before it. Repeat.

The Yarran Wraith

Sun, 11 May 2025 05:20:21 +1000

I have published another horror novella for my eldest.

I think he’s enjoying them, it’s hard to tell.

This one is titled:

The Yarran Wraith

It’s set in bushland that I grew up playing in.

It’s epistolary with emails and journal entries as well as sketches and photos of what our main character found in the bush.

Here’s the cover:

Here are some links:

Here’s the blurb:

David Williams

Sat, 10 May 2025 06:40:08 +1000

My youngest has been reading a ton of David Williams books recently.

I’ve not read them, what are they all about?

Firstly, who is David Williams?

Via grok3:

David Walliams, born David Edward Williams on August 20, 1971, in London, England, is a multifaceted English comedian, actor, writer, and television personality. He gained prominence through his collaboration with Matt Lucas on the BBC sketch comedy series Little Britain (2003–2006) and Come Fly With Me (2010–2011). Beyond comedy, Walliams has become a bestselling children’s author, with books like The Boy in the Dress and Gangsta Granny, selling over 50 million copies worldwide and often compared to Roald Dahl’s work. He served as a judge on Britain’s Got Talent from 2012 to 2022, earning multiple National Television Awards for Best TV Judge. Walliams is also known for his charity efforts, including swimming the English Channel and River Thames for Sport Relief, raising significant funds. His diverse career spans television, literature, and philanthropy, marked by a distinctive humorous and heartfelt style.

Do Not Think

Fri, 09 May 2025 05:51:21 +1000

Sometimes thinking messes things up.

Specifically things where the thinking was done up front.

I’m talking about situations when you are two selves, the thinker and the doer.

The thinker plans it all out the doer just has to execute.

As soon as the doer thinks, it’s over. The doer will “think” there way out of the plan and fail to execute.

This is for mechanical things. Habitual things.

Meal plans
Gym plans
Writing plans

And on.

Prompt for Copyediting

Thu, 08 May 2025 05:47:41 +1000

I write a lot using sublime text.

It has only a very basic spellcheck and no grammar check.

Therefore, I use LLMs for basic copy editing.

I have written about this before.

A prompt I find useful recently is as follows:

I will paste chapters from my novella in markdown/pandoc format.
Read them and report spelling errors and major grammatical errors.

- require UK/Australian English
- report any US spellings that must be changed
- report double words that are in error
- report missing words
- report spelling errors
- report grammatical errors that are no stylistic choices

Output errors in bullet point form with error and suggested change

I only want you to tell me about things I need to fix.
If there are no errors and correct spelling, say nothing.
Do not tell me about words that are spelled correctly.

I am able to paste 2 or 3 1k-2k chapters before it starts going off the rails. I then start a new chat and continue.

Serialized Fiction

Wed, 07 May 2025 05:55:19 +1000

I watched “How to Write a Viral Serial using AI in 2025” by The Nerdy Novelist (Jason Hamilton).

His videos are great.

A serial sounds fun:

episodes and seasons with each episode about 2k to 5k words
cast of characters, some which might come and go
story arcs across episodes and seasons
cliffhanger at the end of each episode
end of season finale or climax

What are platforms where you can read/write serials?

Operating System

Tue, 06 May 2025 06:06:22 +1000

It’s fun to think about an “operating system” for life.

For example, below are some parts of my OS.

Nutrition:

Eat whole foods (meat and vegetables)
Eat at meal times only
Eat within an 6 hour interval (1-6pm)

Exercise:

1h weights 3x week
1h cardio 2x week
15-20m sauna 5x week
Walk/stairs whenever possible (shops, kids school, etc.)

Consumption:

Watch 1h of screen per day (ideally a serialized drama or half a movie)
Audiobooks during exercise (walking, gym, etc.)
Read in the afternoons (paperbacks)
Read before sleep (kindle)

Other stuff, I don’t know were it fits:

Sphere

Mon, 05 May 2025 06:25:44 +1000

I was thinking about Michael Crichton’s Sphere.

The setup is so good. The middle and ending not so much.

And the movie is like a direct port of the book, which is nice.

I re-read it and re-watch the movie for the beginning. For the setup.

What I remember from the setup:

They fly a team of clever scientists out to a ship
The team has to go to the site underwater, then stay because of a storm
The military have found “something” and the team need to figure out what it is.
It looks like an alien ship, but says USA on it.
They go over and find the sphere.

After that it kind of goes off the rails.

Financial Independence

Sun, 04 May 2025 05:50:57 +1000

Financial Independence is wild.

I’ve been Financial Independence or “FI” since the end of 2021 (maybe December 2021), so 3 and a bit years. Not rich, but time wealthy. I don’t have to be anywhere or do anything unless I want (or my wife/family want or need).

Here’s a definition from gpt4o:

Financial independence is the state of having sufficient personal wealth to live comfortably without needing to actively work for basic living expenses. It means your investments, savings, or passive income sources—such as rental properties, dividends, or interest—generate enough income to cover your lifestyle costs. Achieving financial independence often involves disciplined saving, smart investing, and careful budgeting over time. It allows individuals greater freedom to choose how they spend their time, whether that’s continuing to work by choice, pursuing passion projects, or retiring early.

Derek Slaton Horror

Sat, 03 May 2025 06:40:54 +1000

I listened to an interview with Derek Slaton on The Creative Penn podcast.

Expanding Audiobook Revenue Through YouTube And Podcasting With Derek Slaton

There’s also an episode on Brave New Bookshelf that I have queued up:

Episode 35 – Exploring AI, Translations, and Zombies with Derek Slaton

I may be mistaken but it seems Derek is using AI to crank out tons of zombie stories, one per week, and is doing very well out of it.

Sugar is Bad

Fri, 02 May 2025 05:52:10 +1000

Smoking kills, tobacco is bad.

In 100 years (or less), added sugar will be considered the same.

Sweets kill, added sugar is bad.

Here’s a summary of the hypothesis from grok3:

In approximately 100 years, added sugar will be perceived by society in a manner analogous to how tobacco is viewed today, characterized by widespread recognition of its adverse health effects, including obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease, leading to significant social stigma, stringent regulatory measures such as high taxes and marketing restrictions, and public health campaigns aimed at reducing its consumption. This shift will be driven by accumulating scientific evidence definitively linking added sugar to chronic diseases, coupled with economic pressures on healthcare systems and a cultural pivot toward healthier dietary alternatives, though resistance from the food industry and entrenched cultural practices may temper the extent of this transformation.

Endurance Running Hypothesis

Thu, 01 May 2025 05:49:02 +1000

I like to run.

I used to run about 15km 3-5 a week in grad school. A daily run each afternoon is how I fondly remember it, especially when the work was hard/focused.

These days I run 5km twice a week on my cardio days, and daily when I’m on holiday somewhere tropical.

My knees hurt, I use a treadmill instead of the footpath now mostly, but I still look forward to my runs.

Beach Fossil

Wed, 30 Apr 2025 05:31:51 +1000

My latest novella has been published.

The title is:

Beach Fossil: An Investigation Into Strange Discoveries At Beaumaris Bay

Here’s the cover:

Here are some links:

It is on Google Books and GoodReads.

No Audible version yet, but I will soon. It will take some work.

It came together really fast and after the first few iterations I had little to change.

It is also the shortest and the simplest novella so far.

Amazon Book Description

Tue, 29 Apr 2025 06:40:04 +1000

Writing a book description for Amazon is hard.

Really hard.

It’s copy writing.
It cannot give away the whole story.
It must give away something of the story.

Anyway, I have a prompt that I use that helps.

I compile the entire manuscript into a single markdown file, then attach it to an LLM and issue the following:

You are a professional copywriter specializing in creating Amazon book descriptions that captivate readers without revealing major plot developments.

You will be given a novella in Markdown format.

Your task is to:

- Carefully read the novella.
- Write an Amazon blurb that is:
  - Engaging, polished, and professional.
  - Spoiler-free: Do *not* reveal any plot twists, surprises, or resolutions from Act 2, Act 3, or the finale.
  - Instead, hint at the mysteries, conflicts, and stakes without giving away specific outcomes.
- Capture the tone and genre of the novella (e.g., dark, whimsical, suspenseful, romantic, adventurous).
- The blurb should feel like it belongs on a bestselling Amazon page — hook the reader without giving away the journey.

Important guidelines:
- Focus mainly on the setup (e.g. Foreword and Act 1) and the intriguing elements that lead into the main story.
- Suggest tension, mystery, or stakes that will entice readers to learn more.
- Avoid direct spoilers or detailed descriptions of mid-story or end-game events.

Output format:
- Title of the novella (if given)
- An optimal length, gripping description
- Never use an em dash in the output

It works great, as long as the manuscript is not too long (e.g. less than 30k words) and the acts of the story are well specified (a little editing of the markdown file can remedy this).

Borne

Mon, 28 Apr 2025 05:47:03 +1000

I re-read Borne last week and liked it. It’s good, but not great.

First time round, I hated it and DNF. I guess this time I was ready.

It’s the first in a series, the Borne series.

I’m still reading The Strange Bird. It too is good.

Directly after Borne, I read Dead Astronauts.

The cover is so great!

I had tried reading this before and DNF. I finished this time, the end was a slog and I remain not a fan.

Audience of One

Sun, 27 Apr 2025 06:52:25 +1000

I listened to KK on “AI & I” with Dan Shipper:

How to Predict the Future Like Kevin Kelly

KK is always good.

He talked about one of his AI experiments of getting Leonardo da Vinci, Martin Luther, and Christopher Columbus to have a meeting, to create a new city and a whole world around this idea via wikipedia pages.

And importantly, that he did it for the pure enjoyment of it.

Maximize Output

Sat, 26 Apr 2025 06:11:43 +1000

Tripped over this video of Richard Socher talking about AI:

Richard Socher says your view on AI depends on what you think your job is for.

If you optimize for output -- more stories, more illustrations, more healthy people -- AI is a gift.

But if your role is about getting paid by the hour, AI feels like a threat. pic.twitter.com/QluGnQg7Dw
— vitrupo (@vitrupo) April 22, 2025

The start of his response going something like:

Days Matter

Fri, 25 Apr 2025 06:04:47 +1000

Days slip through your fingers like water.

You need a goal or objective and you must to keep moving toward it.

Otherwise, time passes, you look up and you have lost weeks, months, years with nothing to show for it. The time is all burned up. Consumed. Spent. Stolen.

Each and every day matters.

Set aside a block of time and make progress toward the current thing.

Once the objective is reached, set a new one. Fast.

Dune Automatic Drawing

Thu, 24 Apr 2025 06:02:13 +1000

I watched Dune: Prophecy recently.

Meh.

There was a cool scene were all the sisters were hypnotized as a group and proceeded to perform automatic drawing together.

Without obvious suggestion, they all draw the same things in image after image. A shared nightmare.

The final image they all draw is black with two white eyes. The two eyes are motif from the season.

Very cool idea. The whole scene is great.

Bill Bryson Comfort Food

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 06:20:51 +1000

I finished Bill Bryson’s “A Walk in the Woods” yesterday.

Reading Bryson is comfort food. Comforting writing?

This is not disparaging in the slightest. Bryson is a warm crackling fire on a winters night.

He’s a great writer, and his topics are interesting, but reading him is very comforting. And I’m sure zillions of people would agree. He moves books.

I probably have two comfort writers.

Bill Bryson and David Sedaris.

Squidstone Hollow

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 08:01:27 +1000

My latest novella has been published, yay!

Squidstone Hollow: A Historical Investigation Into The Leviathan Of Port Phillip

Here’s the cover:

Here are some links:

It’s also on goodreads and there’s a preview on google books.

Like the last novella, All Our Eyes, it was written for my eldest. The mandate for this one was “less complex”.

Like the last one, it is didactic, although the focus with this story is history of Melbourne/Port Phillip. It blurs the line so that although he’ll get a lot of history while reading, he won’t know what is real history and what is history that I’ve invented.

UFO Archaeology

Mon, 21 Apr 2025 06:13:31 +1000

I first heard Bob Lazar’s story on the Joe Rogan podcast.

On it, I remember he mentioning that UFO craft were apparently found as part of an archaeological dig.

I later read his book “Dreamland” and saw no mention of this, which was disappointing, because it’s one of this nuggets that really gets your imagination going.

Regardless, it’s all fun stuff.

Here’s the clip from the episode:

Bob Lazar Says UFO was an Archaeological Finding

A rough quote transcribed from the auto-generated subtitles:

Devils Den

Sun, 20 Apr 2025 07:02:24 +1000

I read “Incident at Devils Den” yesterday.

A spooky story for sure. True? I have no idea, nor care.

What I liked the most was the structure of the story telling.

Specifically, the lead-up to the “1977 incident” and the twice retelling.

It’s a great progression. First, we get hints while retelling background and prior incidents.

It’s why the the book exists, to document an encounter:

The genesis of this book is an event that occurred in 1977. While camping at a state park, a friend and I encountered an enormous UFO. It was triangular-shaped, and each side was approximately a city block in length.

Thronglets

Sat, 19 Apr 2025 06:15:31 +1000

I am working my way through the latest season of Black Mirror (S7) and watched the Plaything episode (E4) the other day.

Here’s a one paragraph summary via grok3:

In Black Mirror’s “Plaything,” set in the Bandersnatch universe and aired on April 10, 2025, Cameron Walker (Peter Capaldi and Lewis Gribben) faces murder charges in 2034 and recounts his 1990s past as a video game journalist. Invited by eccentric programmer Colin Ritman (Will Poulter) to review Tuckersoft’s Thronglets—a game featuring digital creatures without conflict—Cameron becomes obsessed, believing he can communicate with them after an LSD-fueled night. His fixation escalates as he upgrades his computer to enhance their interactions, leading to a violent act tied to the murder charge. Exploring AI, human connection, and digital ethics, the episode, written by Charlie Brooker and directed by David Slade, was praised for its unsettling tone and accompanied by a real-world Thronglets mobile game.

Interview About The Incomprehensible

Fri, 18 Apr 2025 06:22:22 +1000

I re-read Solaris last week.

There is a great scene in the book, an interview with a pilot named Berton who “saw things”.

It starts with the pilot’s log, then moves into an interview. And it’s super creepy as we discover what he, a top pilot, saw and the effect it had on him, and the fact that the panel of interviewers think him insane.

While I was still some distance away, I noticed a pale, almost white, object floating on the surface. My first thought was that it was Fechner’s flying-suit, especially as it looked vaguely human in form. I brought the aircraft round sharply, afraid of losing my way and being unable to find the same spot again. The shape, the body, was moving; sometimes it seemed to be standing upright in the trough of the waves. I accelerated and went down so low that the machine bounced gently. I must have hit the crest of a huge wave I was overflying. The body — yes, it was a human body, not an atmosphere-suit — the body was moving.

Abstinence

Thu, 17 Apr 2025 06:10:18 +1000

I’m re-reading “The Case for Keto”.

I re-read this one a lot. It has a great group feeling while reading, as in “some people just can’t eat carbs, and that includes you and me”, e.g. the author too.

“The message should be straightforward: Carbohydrate-rich foods are fattening. Or to complicate it slightly such that naturally lean people might more likely understand: For those of us who fatten and particularly those who fatten easily, it’s the carbohydrates that we eat—the quantity and the quality—that are responsible. The relevant mechanism appears to be simple, as well: Carbohydrate-rich foods—grains, starchy vegetables, and sugars—work to keep insulin elevated in our circulation, and that traps the fat we eat in our fat cells and inhibits the use of that fat for fuel.”

Insulin System + Fat Maintenance

Tue, 15 Apr 2025 06:54:07 +1000

I’m re-reading Gary Taubes books.

I re-read them, and similar books, about once per year to brainwash myself to stay off the simple carbs. It seems to only stick for about 6-9 months before I need a ~~reminder~~ re-brainwashing.

I’m lean, but it takes work.

At core, calories in, calories out (CICO) works, but there is an undeniable level above that and it’s a level of simple carbs. For whatever reason, my frame fattens quickly when I eat them and staying lean requires complete abstinence.

Raw Writing

Mon, 14 Apr 2025 06:04:55 +1000

I was joking to my wife that people will get sick of AI writing and will push back with a reactive style.

Something like impressionistic and abstract art pushing back against polished realism.

We have seen this with music as well, the preference for analogue vinyl records over CDs. Or the preference for being disconnected like CD and tape walkmans over streaming.

Jokes often have a kernel of truth, I think some version of this will happen.

Can't Not

Thu, 10 Apr 2025 08:20:47 +1000

I just read pg’s latest essay “What to do”.

It’s great, as always.

He gives the generally good base advice of:

“One should help people, and take care of the world.”

He then goes on to suggest:

“Make good new things.”

Clumsy phrasing, but great advice.

The rest of the essay mops up.

I can’t argue.

But I was thinking about this myself, personally.

For me, I follow the maxim:

Dark Writing

Wed, 09 Apr 2025 06:58:37 +1000

I’m revising my next novella.

And it’s coming out dark.

Each revision is even darker.

I’m reminded of Steven Pressfield in “Do the Work”:

My friend Paul is writing a cop novel. He’s never written anything so ambitious—and he’s terrified. “The story is coming out dark,” he says. “I mean twisted, weird-dark. So dark it’s scaring me.”

Paul wants to know if he should throttle back. He’s worried that the book will come out so evil, not even Darth Vader will want to touch it.

Writing as a Practice

Tue, 08 Apr 2025 05:14:23 +1000

I’m re-reading Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones.

Like her Wild Mind, it’s less on tactics and more on the mindset of a writer and the writer life.

The books make you feel okay with the disgust you have for your own writing and self-loathing you feel almost continuously. Or maybe that’s just me.

I have internalized an early chapter in the book: “Writing as a Practice”.

You write every day. It’s what you do. And the more you do it, the more it be comes a habit and hopefully the better you get.

Wonderbook Revision

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 06:34:18 +1000

I just reread Jeff VanderMeer’s Wonderbook yesterday.

It’s great fun, lots of useful advice. It’s also a beautiful book.

The section on revision was particularly helpful to me right now.

I try to jam everything I can think of in my first draft/s so and trim it back later. Jeff agrees:

“Exactly because revision combines analysis and redeploying your creativity, most things you get wrong in your first draft can be fixed in revision, especially as you gain experience. Usually, however, it is easier if you have too much in your first draft rather than too little; mangled can be altered more readily than the invisible.”

AI 2027

Sat, 05 Apr 2025 05:14:32 +1100

I recommend reading (or listening) to AI 2027.

Then consume (watch/listen) the most recent episode of the Dwarkesh podcast.

It’s a huge amount of work. The site is beautiful. The implications, if accurate, terrible.

The authors are very impressive and Daniel Kokotajlo’s What 2026 looks like written in 2021 is very impressive (it’s probably more than survivorship bias).

Yes, it feels like science fiction in places, but it’s all very plausible to (naive) me.

Layered Prose via Iterative Rewriting

Fri, 04 Apr 2025 08:13:07 +1100

I’ve been fighting an epic struggle with my LLM friends on some writing, and failing mostly.

My mistake was trying to one-shot or two-shot the piece.

I loaded in all of the context in structured sections (3k or 5k words), ask for a plan for a piece of writing, then ask it to follow the plan and all the context and write the piece.

And every variation I tried failed. The writing was TERRIBLE! So bad.

Genetic Book of the Dead

Thu, 03 Apr 2025 06:17:57 +1100

I just finished Richard Dawkins’ 2024 book “The Genetic Book of the Dead: A Darwinian Reverie”.

Another great book. Dawkins rarely misses, although the older I get the more I want a tl;dr. This was a shorter book of his, but it felt a little repetitive and a little long.

Anyway, the premise is that you can look at the genes of something alive as a snapshot of what the pressures of its evolutionary past look like. From the genes, we could reconstruct the environment that shaped the current instance of the creature or plant or whatever you.

Optimize a Sequence of Steps

Wed, 02 Apr 2025 05:26:25 +1100

My eldest practices sabre fencing and the competitions can be quite brutal.

A “bout” is basically a dual. Hard physically and emotionally.

Many of the kids are roughly equally skilled and it often comes down to mindset on the day. Like most competitions, I would expect.

Here’s a cool pic from wikipedia:

In one competition, last year, I made a comment, something like:

“There exists a series of steps or moves you can make in the next bout that will allow you to win. You just need to think about what those steps are. Find them. In fact, there exists many paths of varying lengths, many series of steps to victory.”

Get It All Down

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 07:58:27 +1100

I’m ~~writing~~ constructing another novella.

This one on the history of Port Phillip as told by research into a sea monster.

It’s fun. It’s not literature. It’s not even great story telling. But I’m having fun.

It’s also so easy to think and rethink every little thing without making forward progress. Progress in the form of pages and chapters. Work product. Not meta work product.

I must remind myself to get down the first draft as fast as possible.

The Obstacle Is the Way (at the gym)

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 05:08:12 +1100

The older I get, the more annoyed I am with my fellow humans.

My first thought is that I need to meditate more. I need to slip in a thought before doing something stupid.

Alternately, I can use the annoyance. The annoyance is the way, the path.

This reminds me of Ryan Holiday’s The Obstacle Is the Way.

Great book, and a great title based on a quote from Marcus Aurelius:

“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”

William Buckley and the Bunyip

Mon, 31 Mar 2025 06:47:26 +1100

I read “The Life and Adventures of William Buckley” yesterday.

It’s really something. Even embellished by an overzealous writer/editor, it’s really something.

It tells of William Buckley, a British soldier who fought Napoleon in Holland, got caught with some stolen fabric and was sentences to transportation in Australia.

He was part of the Sullivan Bay settlement which only lasted a few years before failing and everyone heading to Hobart. He ran away before the trip to Hobart then managed to live among the native Aboriginals for 32 years.

Hanging Rock

Sun, 30 Mar 2025 06:43:18 +1100

I purchased a copy of Picnic at Hanging Rock for my eldest.

It’s a classic gothic-horror set just outside Melbourne.

Here’s a one paragraph synopsis of the book from DeepSeek:

On Valentine’s Day in 1900, students from Appleyard College, a strict Australian boarding school, picnic at the ancient and eerie Hanging Rock. Four girls—Miranda, Marion, Irma, and Edith—along with their teacher, Miss McCraw, venture up the rock, only to vanish mysteriously amid strange occurrences: watches stop, time seems distorted, and Edith flees in terror with no explanation. Irma is later found unconscious with no memory, while the others disappear without a trace, sparking a frantic but futile search. The school spirals into chaos, with one student dying under suspicious circumstances and the headmistress unraveling, all while the rock’s ominous presence lingers. The novel ends ambiguously, leaving the fate of the girls open to supernatural interpretations—time slips, alien abductions, or the rock itself consuming them—heightening its haunting, Gothic atmosphere.

Living Among the Stars

Sat, 29 Mar 2025 08:12:06 +1100

I am watching the TV Show “Dune: Prophecy”.

It looks good, is well acted, but the story is thin at best. Nevertheless, it’s scifi and my options are few.

It’s set 10k years before Dune and some thousands of years from now. Okay…

I was thinking:

Wow, it would be so very cool if we, our species, can spread out among the stars and cause trouble for tens of thousands of years without killing ourselves off.

Monstrous Cthulhu

Fri, 28 Mar 2025 13:53:04 +1100

Thinking again on describing the monstrous.

As we did with Area X.

Let’s pull some descriptions from Lovecraft’s classic The Call of Cthulhu.

Not the statute, the actual monster from dreams and the encounter.

From the dreams of the insane in Part I

…a gigantic thing “miles high” which walked or lumbered about

From the investigation of the cult in Part II:

He indeed went so far as to hint of the faint beating of great wings, and of a glimpse of shining eyes and a mountainous white bulk beyond the remotest trees—but I suppose he had been hearing too much native superstition.

John von Neumann on Tap

Fri, 28 Mar 2025 06:07:20 +1100

I was reading A Beautiful Mind yesterday and tripped over a lovely exchange between John Nash and John von Neumann.

It’s a great book, a great movie too. Highly recommended. I’ve also read countless books on the scientists and mathematicians of the era and always love hearing more stories about them.

Anyway, they’re both at Princeton. Nash had his great idea and rushed off to tell the great von Neumann about it.

The Writing Life

Thu, 27 Mar 2025 06:21:25 +1100

I read Annie Dillard’s “The Writing Life” yesterday.

It’s great. Many times I was nodding, smiling, agreeing. It captures a lot of the craziness of sitting in a room alone for months working on a thing. In her case writing, mine too, but “writing” could mean code or non-fiction or fiction. It’s the same thing though.

It’s exhilarating!

“Putting a book together is interesting and exhilarating. It is sufficiently difficult and complex that it engages all your intelligence. It is life at its most free. Your freedom as a writer is not freedom of expression in the sense of wild blurting; you may not let rip. It is life at its most free, if you are fortunate enough to be able to try it, because you select your materials, invent your task, and pace yourself. In the democracies, you may even write and publish anything you please about any governments or institutions, even if what you write is demonstrably false.”

Monstrous in Area X

Wed, 26 Mar 2025 06:40:30 +1100

I have been thinking about scenes of something entirely monstrous.

There are many, e.g. Lovecraft. But I come back to the Southern Reach series, perhaps because I have re-read it so many times.

There are two scenes from the series that fit the bill.

The first is the video from the first expedition in Authority and the second when the transformed biologist attacks our crew in the lighthouse on the island in Acceptance.

Gym for the Mind

Tue, 25 Mar 2025 06:32:49 +1100

We have to move our body every day.

This typically means the gym. Going to a room where we simulate the hard things we had to do just to survive:

Lift heavy things
Run a long way

This is normalized.

If we don’t do this, or something like this, our bodies don’t work right.

What about our minds?

What do we need to do or simulate doing to ensure our minds “work right”?

Novella Lessons Learned

Mon, 24 Mar 2025 06:58:24 +1100

I have been thinking about what I could have done better with my novella “All Our Eyes”.

So what worked?

The story had a 3-levels of narrative. I wrote them from the inside out and this worked well. The second level of the narrative had a lot of cross-referencing and writing that in was a lot of fun. The outer layer was meta, and that too was easy/fun.

When I had to change something major, like delete chapters (I deleted at least two) and reorder chapters (e.g. act 2), it caused a ton of pain with cross-referencing. A more solid plan would have allowed these major structural changes to have occurred earlier, perhaps.

All Our Eyes

Sun, 23 Mar 2025 06:02:09 +1100

I think my novella is done.

I may tweak it a little more while I wait for the paperback proof to come, but it’s “done”.

The title is:

All Our Eyes: The Lost Investigation Of The Jindee Rock Shelter Demolition

The cool quote on the front cover, lifted from the story, says:

“They Watch, They Wait, They Take”

I’m publishing under a pen name: “J. D. Brownlee”, to distance it from my tech books.

Archive 81 is Awesome

Sat, 22 Mar 2025 08:59:29 +1100

I love the Netflix TV show Archive 81.

The podcast was fine. It went off the rails in season 2. But the TV show really grabbed me.

I’ve probably re-watched it 5 or 6 times by now.

Here’s the plot according to grok3:

Archive 81 is a supernatural horror series that follows Dan Turner, an archivist hired to restore a collection of damaged videotapes recorded by documentary filmmaker Melody Pendras in 1994. As Dan delves into the tapes, he uncovers Melody’s investigation into a mysterious cult tied to the Visser apartment building, where strange occurrences and disappearances abound. The narrative alternates between Dan’s present-day efforts and Melody’s past, revealing a sinister connection between them as Dan becomes obsessed with uncovering the truth, only to discover that the cult’s rituals and a malevolent entity might still be at play, threatening his own reality. The show blends found-footage elements with psychological horror, culminating in a twist that questions time, identity, and the nature of the tapes themselves.

Copy-editing and Proofreading with LLMs

Fri, 21 Mar 2025 15:00:19 +1100

I’m hunting for errors in my novella right now.

And finding a ton. Mostly inconsistencies and tiny grammar things.

This is something LLMs are great at. But there are some tricks.

I get better results if I give it 1/3 of the content at a time, rather than a single 30,000 word text file.

I also get better results if I use a reasoning model rather than a non-reasoning model. Specifically, gpto1, grok3+thinking, and R1+thinking.

Book of the New Sun #1

Thu, 20 Mar 2025 07:45:40 +1100

I just finished a re-read of “The Shadow of the Torturer”.

It was better this time around. I guess I was more ready for it. I gave it 3 stars, but perhaps by the time I finish the series, I will up that. Perhaps it will join my annual re-read rotation? We’ll see…

The first time I read it, I did not finish. Too slow, too boring. Don’t care. Also, it felt like a fantasy. It’s not, it’s clever scifi dressed as fantasy. Yay!

Jumping Through Historical Time Periods in Fiction

Wed, 19 Mar 2025 06:31:46 +1100

I was thinking more about The Fountain and why I like it so much.

I suspect it is the multiple time periods. Specifically, the 1500s, the present, and the far future. It’s just cool.

It’s why I like Cloud Atlas (book and movie), and Highlander. The former is very clever, the latter is just plain fun. Both are underrated. I guess I will forgive bad in other areas for some time-hopping in the story telling.

The Fountain

Tue, 18 Mar 2025 07:46:55 +1100

I love Darren Aronofsky’s film The Fountain.

I remember anticipating it for years before it was finally released, and then it was impossible to find and watch.

I found it. Watched it. Then rewatched it all the time for years.

The plot, via grok3:

“The Fountain” (2006), directed by Darren Aronofsky, is a visually stunning and emotionally complex film that weaves together three interconnected narratives spanning different time periods. The central story follows Tomas (Hugh Jackman), a modern-day neuroscientist desperately searching for a cure to save his dying wife, Izzi (Rachel Weisz), who is battling a terminal illness. Izzi, a writer, is working on a book called “The Fountain,” which forms the second narrative: a 16th-century Spanish conquistador named Tomás, sent by Queen Isabella to find the Tree of Life in the New World to secure immortality and protect her kingdom. The third storyline takes place in a surreal, futuristic setting where Tom, a space traveler, journeys through the cosmos with a dying tree inside a biosphere, seeking to reach a distant nebula tied to Izzi’s story and Mayan mythology.

Scavengers Reign is SO GOOD

Sun, 16 Mar 2025 07:57:53 +1100

I LOVE Scavengers Reign.

Love.

What I love about it was also in the short on which the series is based: Scavengers.

Specifically:

We’re thrown in.
Nothing is explained.
The marooned characters already “know” how to do all the things.

It as though they are not marooned, that they have always been there and the knowledge has been passed down for millennia. But they are marooned, they’re scavenging, motivated to survive and get back to the Demeter.

LLM LaTeX-fu

Sun, 16 Mar 2025 07:07:00 +1100

I build my books using Pandoc these days.

I used to use LaTeX directly, but Pandoc is better because I can write in markdown (clean+easy) then compile to epub and pdf for ebooks and paperbacks (pipeline).

Even though I’m writing in markdown, I can still use an include for custom LaTeX packages and configuration. This is very cool, because I can customize the paperback PDF to look really great.

The problem is, I forget all the cool LaTeX I’m supposed to use.

Fall In Love With (Your) Ideas

Fri, 14 Mar 2025 07:57:32 +1100

I saw this tweet go by a few weeks back:

For aspiring writers:

Your ultimate goal isn't building a writing habit.

It's falling so in love with interesting ideas that you can’t help but tell the world about them.

Writing is the medium—not the objective.
— Julian Shapiro (@Julian) February 23, 2025

Specifically the line:

It’s falling so in love with interesting ideas that you can’t help but tell the world about them.

Hard Now, Easy Later

Thu, 13 Mar 2025 09:02:48 +1100

My wife and I were talking to our eldest son about plagiarism, e.g. copy-paste from chatgpt.

Not that he does it, but he was arguing that “no one can tell”.

We talked about how it is an easy thing to do right now but it will hurt you in the long term.

I blurted out:

“easy now, hard later”

Very nice, I thought to myself. So self-satisfied :|

I then linked it to many things in his life:

LLM Beta Readers

Wed, 12 Mar 2025 07:00:33 +1100

I am playing around with LLMs as beta readers for my novella.

It’s really fun. But they are way too nice.

I upload the entire text, give them a detailed persona and books they like that are like my story and then ask for good/bad/etc feedback on each part/act/chapter/etc.

The personas are coarse-grained. More “people who like these books and movies…” rather than a specific personal history.

I used thinking models, specifically I tried grok3+thinking and gpto1.

Utopia Opening Scene

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 07:41:00 +1100

I’m a big fan of British TV show Utopia (2013).

I’ve seen it 3-4 times by now.

I can’t say why. I think it’s the color, the music, the earnestness.

It’s probably the opening scene of the first episode that really hooked me.

The two killers (Arby and Lee) let themselves into a closed comic book shop. One (Arby) asks the clerk questions, the other (Lee) calmly walks from person to person, killing them.

Remove the Boring

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 05:36:39 +1100

I’m editing something right now.

My mantra is:

“Remove the boring.”

I read the piece again and again and again.

As soon as my attention starts to drift: “Boring!”
I start skipping over lines: “Boring!”
I detect any repetition in the immediate vicinity: “Boring!”

I then come back and cut. Hack. Slash. Trim.

Nothing is deleted. Instead content is moved to a scratch document. It may be resurrected in the future. Who knows?

Solaris Scene: "No Answers, Only Choices"

Mon, 10 Mar 2025 07:46:20 +1100

I’m a fan of Solaris by Stanisław Lem.

I’ve probably read the book a dozen times.

Here’s a terse synopsis from Grok3:

Solaris by Stanisław Lem is a science fiction novel published in 1961. Set in the distant future, it follows psychologist Kris Kelvin, who arrives at a space station orbiting the mysterious planet Solaris. The planet’s vast, sentient ocean possesses the ability to probe the minds of the station’s crew and materialize physical manifestations of their memories and subconscious desires. For Kelvin, this takes the form of his deceased wife, Rheya, forcing him to confront unresolved guilt and grief.

Read Too Much?

Sun, 09 Mar 2025 07:09:02 +1100

I read a lot of books, but yesterday, I was thinking that I read too much.

I finished reading The Invisible College by Jacques Vallée.

Now, he’s a hard scientist and pretty critical, but he still says wild shit.

But rather than get all riled up, I just shrug. In fact, I’d be happy to read more of his books.

I see it all as entertainment. Something to consume and think about. It may as well be a scifi book.

Angel in the Desert (Midnight Mass)

Sat, 08 Mar 2025 06:09:31 +1100

The Netflix mini-series Midnight Mass was fun.

I like pretty much everything that Mike Flanagan puts out.

The midnight club was probably better, the fall of the house of usher was probably not quite as good. And on.

But my favorite part of Midnight Mass?

It was when we see how the old priest meets the “angel” in the desert.

From R1:

Pruitt, who is much older and suffering from dementia at the time, is on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. During a sandstorm, he becomes separated from his group and stumbles into a remote cave. Inside, he discovers a strange, winged creature that appears both angelic and monstrous. The creature is pale, emaciated, and has large, bat-like wings, but it also exudes an otherworldly, almost divine presence.

Navidson's Story

Fri, 07 Mar 2025 05:44:51 +1100

I re-read House of Leaves over the last few nights.

Not all of it, just Navidson’s story as told by Zampano and as put together by Johnny.

I skipped the footnotes, I skipped Johnny’s story, I skipped the Whalestoe Letters.

Navidson’s story is fun. It’s also a quick read.

If it were a novella, it would be great.

Maybe the experts have other options, but I don’t think the footnotes of fake academic citations add anything. I don’t think doing fancy tricks with the text helps (well, maybe on the first reading).

First Draft

Fri, 07 Mar 2025 05:35:19 +1100

The first draft is just the beginning.

A short stop before the real work begins.

And the first draft is no good. It’s complete shit.

The first draft of anything is shit

– Ernest Hemingway

The first draft only captures the first ideas. You’re not done. Far from it.

Read it, just five things wrong with it, fix those five things, repeat.

Repeat until you run out of time or you get sick of it.

No Answers For You Here

Thu, 06 Mar 2025 09:26:24 +1100

When I’m working on a larger project, my brain want’s to get all distracted.

To go off and read “news” or “socials”. To do anything other than the next step to move things forward.

Especially after finishing a task.

This may also happen at the beginning of a work session before starting a task. We’ll it did before I really dialed-in my warm-up routine.

I have a trick to pull myself out and get back to it.

Sauna Dose-Response Curve

Wed, 05 Mar 2025 06:19:47 +1100

I was thinking about how sauna is supposed to reduce all cause morality, according to some random paper.

I asked GPTSearch to find the paper and summarize the data.

We found:

Association between sauna bathing and fatal cardiovascular and all-cause mortality events (2015)

(I didn’t read the paper, the numbers below could be hallucinated, I’m just having fun this morning)

Summarized by GPTSearch:

Data Summary:

Frequency of Sauna Use:

1 session per week

2-3 sessions per week

4-7 sessions per week

The study found that compared to men who had one sauna session per week, those who had 2-3 sessions per week had a 24% lower risk of all-cause mortality, and those with 4-7 sessions per week had a 40% lower risk.

Beyond the Event Horizon

Wed, 05 Mar 2025 06:12:45 +1100

I just tripped over a cute tweet by sama + gpt4.5.

pic.twitter.com/pGe6AOHbhs
— Sam Altman (@sama) March 3, 2025

He was asking if we are close to the singularity.

GPT4.5 responded, yes, and that we are already beyond the event horizon.

The rationale is that AI is already influencing human thought, creativity, communication, and identity.

Good reasoning. I agree.

But by that reasoning, the long ramp started decades ago.

I guess we’re going exponential soon-ish.

Move It Forward

Tue, 04 Mar 2025 08:00:58 +1100

I have a yellow sticky note that says:

“Move it forward!”

It means: stop procrastinating.

Stop thinking. Don’t think. Now is not the time for that.

Now is the time for acting. Take action.

Do one thing to move the project forward.

No matter how small.

Read a thing.
Format a thing.
Edit a thing.
Talk through a thing.

Doing one small thing will kick-start the engine and get things moving again.

Eaters of the Dead

Mon, 03 Mar 2025 06:09:07 +1100

I think Michael Crichton’s “Eaters of the Dead” is cool.

I watched the movie adaption “The 13th Warrior” first, probably when it came out in ‘99.

Watching it, I was thinking: this is Vikings + Arabs. Historical fiction. Fighting. Yay!

I read the novel later, I was thinking: this is like cooler version of Beowulf.

Here’s the synopsis (via grok3):

Published in 1976, Eaters of the Dead is a historical fiction novel that blends fact, legend, and adventure. The story is narrated by Ahmad ibn Fadlan, a 10th-century Arab courtier from Baghdad, who is sent as an ambassador to the Bulgars but becomes embroiled in a journey far beyond his original mission. Based loosely on the real Ibn Fadlan’s historical account of his travels, the novel takes a fictional turn when he encounters a band of Norse warriors led by Buliwyf, a Viking chieftain.

Re-Read

Sun, 02 Mar 2025 07:42:29 +1100

I re-read a ton.

Maybe 1/4 of the books I read in a year.

Sometimes more.

Taking “Do you have books you re-read regularly?” as a prompt, I commented the following:

I re-read the following each year:

Ambergris (3 books), Vandermeer
Area X/Southern Reach (3 books), Vandermeer
Hyperion, Simmons
Enders Game, Scott Card
Flowers for Algernon, Keyes

Some others I’ll re-read every other year:

Blood Meridian, McCarthy
The Fountainhead, Rand
Do the Work, Pressfield
Call of Cthulhu, Lovecraft
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Pirsig
Solaris, Lem
Antifragile, Taleb

Why? I guess to recapture the feeling of that first read :)

Write to Think

Sun, 02 Mar 2025 05:17:20 +1100

Just read the following on the benefit of writing to help thinking:

Write to Escape Your Default Setting

Fantastic piece. Great writing too.

For those of us with woefully average gray matter, our minds have limited reach. For the past, they are enthusiastic but incompetent archivists. In the present, they reach for the most provocative fragments of ideas, often preferring distraction over clarity.

Love it.

Especially “reach for the most provocative fragments of ideas” and “often preferring distraction over clarity*”.

Whitby

Sat, 01 Mar 2025 06:10:29 +1100

There’s a scene in Authority that freaks out most who read it (as evidence on r/SouthernReach).

Its in Chapter “03: Break Down”.

The “Whitby” scene.

Oh man.

“Control”, our protagonist has climb up into the roof cavity in the store room of their large scientific installation next to the southern reach.

He’s found a horrible mural panted on a wall up there with the faces of the staff. He’s also found a sleeping bag like someone is spending a lot of time up there.

Found Fiction

Fri, 28 Feb 2025 05:56:46 +1100

Found fiction is like the movie genre “found footage”, but for books.

I typically like reading it.

It’s often called simply epistolary, e.g. letters or diary entries, but other examples include chat messages, emails, other documents.

For example “Exegesis” is a series of email messages between a women and an AI.

And “The Illuminae Files Series” is chat messages between teenagers and an AI and each other.

But “found document” rolls of the tongue (only slightly) better than epistolary.

Google AI Co-Scientist

Thu, 27 Feb 2025 05:19:58 +1100

Google’s LLM agent-based co-scientist looks interesting:

Google builds AI ‘co-scientist’ tool to speed up research

Early tests of Google’s new tool with experts from Stanford University, Imperial College London and Houston Methodist hospital found it was able to generate scientific hypotheses that showed promising results.

And:

Accelerating scientific breakthroughs with an AI co-scientist

We introduce AI co-scientist, a multi-agent AI system built with Gemini 2.0 as a virtual scientific collaborator to help scientists generate novel hypotheses and research proposals, and to accelerate the clock speed of scientific and biomedical discoveries.

Exercise Wears You Out (or helps you live longer)

Wed, 26 Feb 2025 06:12:16 +1100

I exercise 5-7 days per week, for about 1-2 hours per day.

Weights and cardio, interleaved.

It’s good for now, I feel/look better, but really it’s for the future.

After each workout I feel like I am making a deposit in my saving account (e.g. ideas like hormesis and antifragility and to a less degree post-traumatic growth).

I’m building strength, excess capacity, that will help me over the decades to come, as long as I stick with it.

Grok3

Tue, 25 Feb 2025 08:15:32 +1100

I’ve been using grok3 for a few days, since release (4-5 days now?).

https://grok.com/

Chatting is fine. I still do ad hoc chat with gpt4o and deepseek.

DeepSearch is great. I have not used this much, but I like it. I guess I don’t trust the open web. I’d rather specify sources.

I LOVE “Think” in grok3.

I’ve compared reasoning results to o1 and o3 mini and for my recent use cases, I prefer grok3. Taste I guess.

Slow Take Off (LLM Adoption)

Mon, 24 Feb 2025 06:05:53 +1100

Tyler Cowen shared his reasons why he thinks AI take-off, really LLM dissemination through society will be slow:

Why I think AI take-off is relatively slow

I’ve touched on this before in AI/LLM Diminishing Returns, but this has more reasons and more detail.

Lots of economic concepts I don’t grok.

I asked for a summary via deepseek:

The author discusses the potential economic impact of AI, emphasizing that while AI has significant capabilities, its integration into the economy will face numerous challenges. These include slow adoption in inefficient sectors like government, human bottlenecks (e.g., regulatory constraints), and the O-Ring model, where human limitations may hinder AI’s effectiveness. Historically, new technologies take time to diffuse, and GDP growth tends to remain stable around 2%, suggesting AI’s impact will be gradual. The author estimates AI might boost growth by 0.5% annually, leading to significant long-term changes but not immediate, noticeable shifts. Market prices also do not indicate rapid transformation. Overall, the author remains optimistic about AI’s potential but cautious about its near-term economic effects.

A New Type of Writing? "Just-in-Time Ghostwriting"

Sun, 23 Feb 2025 09:20:11 +1100

I’m writing a novella. Fiction. I’m sure you can guess the genre.

And I’m leaning heavily on LLMs.

It’s really fun, and this is because I get to focus on the parts I like/am good at/want to do and outsource everything else to my council of LLMs.

This is a new type of writing. Like having “just-in-time ghostwriters”.

So what is it I am doing?

I think taste.

I have an idea of:

The Blair Witch Project

Sat, 22 Feb 2025 08:08:14 +1100

I was thinking about the movie “The Blair Witch Project”.

Specifically, about the progression from “kids recording a project” to “horror” across 3 acts.

Firstly, let’s get a handle on the plot (via DS):

The Blair Witch Project (1999) is a found-footage horror film that follows three student filmmakers—Heather, Josh, and Mike—who venture into the Black Hills Forest in Maryland to document the legend of the Blair Witch. The witch is said to haunt the woods, and the students aim to uncover the truth behind the myth.

Ezra Maas

Fri, 21 Feb 2025 09:00:43 +1100

I was thinking about “The Unauthorised Biography of Ezra Maas”.

I don’t recall when I first read it, only a few years ago I think.

(checks goodreads…)

July 2023. So not that long ago.

The story is good, but the multimodal nature of the story telling is really fun.

Lots of footnotes. Letters. Other documents.

It’s great. We have to piece the story together across the styles/tones/documents/etc.

Truly “Ergodic Literature”.

House of Leaves

Thu, 20 Feb 2025 06:29:21 +1100

I first read “House of Leaves” about a decade ago and loved it immediately.

Specifically:

Narrative at multiple levels.
Found-document style
Multimodal writing (letters, footnotes, mess)

I also liked the core mystery: what was that house all about.

My favorite parts were descriptions of measuring the house, exploring the stair case, etc. When Zampano is summarizing the parts of the Navidson record that focus on Navidson + family + friends trying to understand the house.

Goals

Wed, 19 Feb 2025 08:41:56 +1100

Normally, I’m a “systems over goals” kind of guy.

Nevertheless, sometimes having a goal kicks ass.

It cuts through everything with questions like:

Will reading this get me closer?
Will doing this get me closer?
What’s one thing I can do to get closer?

I’m not saying “goals over systems”.

I’m still a systems guy. I’ll system my way all the way up and over the goal.

Just sometimes, we need a sharp knife to cut away the cruft and a crisp goal can be that knife.

Metafiction? Ergodic Literature? Multimodal Fiction?

Tue, 18 Feb 2025 07:59:16 +1100

I was talking with LLMs about fiction that I might like to write.

I think we may have settled on “metafiction”, defined via gemini:

Metafiction is a form of fiction that self-consciously addresses the nature of fiction itself, often by blurring the lines between reality and fiction or by exposing the mechanisms of storytelling.

My favorite stories are those where the plot is vague (so I can guess and think), the narrator/s are unreliable, there is a blurring of fiction/non-fiction, and often a mixture of formats/form factors (footnotes, letters, diaries, editor notes, etc.).

Cognitive "Atrophy"

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 08:45:35 +1100

I am reading “Slouching Towards Utopia”.

Good so far.

It opens with a discussion on effort required for certain output, e.g. enough calories to live on, and how that looks at different points in time.

The thesis of the book is probably something like: tech driving this dramatic drop in effort for calories, yet why don’t we experience paradise? But I might be getting that wrong.

According to claude:

…despite achieving material abundance for the first time in human history, DeLong contends that we have “slouched” rather than strode towards utopia. This is because our social, political, and economic institutions haven’t adequately evolved to distribute this unprecedented wealth or provide people with meaningful work and purpose in an age of plenty. The book suggests that while we solved the problem of production, we haven’t solved the problems of distribution and meaning.

LotR

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 08:21:44 +1100

This is another reminder to self:

Book + Movie > Book | Movie

I finished reading “Anything You Can Imagine” on the making of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Great book. Great movies, seen them many times.

I’ve stared re-watching them now after having read a deep dive into how hard they were to make. The movies are so much better.

Also, it’s probably been a decade since my last watch.

Border Science

Sun, 16 Feb 2025 06:50:02 +1100

I finished “Hitler’s Monsters” yesterday.

Meh.

Anyway, the book uses a term I’d not heard: “border science”.

I took it to mean pseudoscience, or occultism broadly conceived.

Maybe.

Wikipedia says Pseudoscience is stuff that is not science because it’s not testable, e.g. falsifiable.

Pseudoscience consists of statements, beliefs, or practices that claim to be both scientific and factual but are incompatible with the scientific method.

Fringe Science

Wikipedia has something called “Fringe Science” which seems different again, e.g. fake science.

Write Like Lovecraft

Sat, 15 Feb 2025 06:30:10 +1100

I was just re-reading “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction” by H.P. Lovecraft.

In his essay, he gives three structured frameworks:

A 5-part procedure of writing weird stories.
The 4 types of stories you can write.
How to handle the 5 types of horror elements of a story.

I thought it might be interesting to extract them and clean them up a little.

I fed the essay into DeepSeek R1 and asked it to extract frameworks for modern writers, here’s what I got:

"Lovecraft Copywork" Released

Fri, 14 Feb 2025 09:50:32 +1100

Okay, I’ve released and publicly announced Lovecraft Copywork.

Here’s the tweet:

Checkout my latest site:

Write Like Lovecraft!
Master the Art of Lovecraftian Style with Copywork.https://t.co/z3CxdtNaNw pic.twitter.com/elFfAf98dS
— Jason Brownlee (@jason2brownlee) February 13, 2025

Below are some screenshots.

Here’s the landing page that promote the benefits of copywork with lovecraft material specifically:

Here’s the stories page:

You can pick a story and see which stories you have already started and their progress.

I generated iconic images for each story, gives a good horror feeling :)

Technical Analysis in Other Fields

Fri, 14 Feb 2025 05:58:14 +1100

I was reading a book about the Occult + Nazi’s the other day and there was a mention of technical analysis for astrology.

As an aside, Germany went bananas for the occult in the early part of the century, then later the Nazi’s, because it was already in the air, e.g. Occultism in Nazism

Anyway, my thought:

Huh? Technical analysis for a field other than finance… that makes sense I guess.

I filed it away to ponder…now.

Schoolwork as Reps

Thu, 13 Feb 2025 06:17:18 +1100

My son made the comment about his school work that all kids make at some point:

This is boring. Why do I have to do this? I’m never going to use it!

I think it was with regard to some math homework.

So, we had “the talk” about schoolwork.

I stared off talking about the morning exercises he and his brother do with me:

Star-jumps
Push-ups
Sit-ups
Squats

I said something like:

Compounding Book

Wed, 12 Feb 2025 10:29:48 +1100

I finished Sahil Bloom’s “The 5 Types of Wealth” the other day.

Toward the end, there was a chapter/section on compounding.

It gave the grains of rice chessboard parable, and the usual benefits for understanding it and harnessing it.

Good stuff.

It got me thinking:

We (humans) are terrible at understanding exponentials, like compounding.

And:

I’d LOVE a tiny book on the magic of compounding.

I was thinking a whole lot of stuff to help hammer home the point.

Lovecraft Copywork Redux

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 10:27:04 +1100

Okay, I have developed a new version of Lovecraft Copywork.

Here it is:

LovecraftCopywork.com

(I purchased the domain)

It’s great!

Firstly, each story is divided into paragraph “passages”.

Progress is managed per passage both x/y words and x/y characters, and a little progress bar.

The next word to type is indicated and all prose in the passage is gray and becomes back as typed.

Any character that is not the next expected character is ignored.

Lovecraft Copywork Interfaces

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 07:44:33 +1100

I created another different prototype of lovecraft copywork yesterday.

I was thinking an “online book” version might be interesting.

One story per chapter.
Brief history of the story.
Synopsis of the story.
Structure of the story.
All prose for the story.
Selected passages from the story.
References for further reading.

The idea is that one could choose to do copywork with the whole or parts of the story, or with the selected passages.

More Lovecraft Copywork

Mon, 10 Feb 2025 10:36:53 +1100

I was thinking more about the lovecraft copywork idea.

I think it’s a no-brainer.

I think a book is what is needed.

For me, handwriting out a 2,000 word story or passage (at the low end) feels onerous.

It needs to be buffet of passages from the stories that one can hand-copy as time permits, e.g. 20 min/per day.

I asked some reasoning models to extract some passages that show strong writing technique.

Pocket Money

Mon, 10 Feb 2025 09:51:21 +1100

My eldest son is saving for a new phone.

Apparently hand-me-down iphones don’t cut it any more. Too many cracks, too slow. Whatever.

We said he could not draw upon his savings, they’re for a first car, or something. As such, he is putting his 2024 Christmas and 2025 Chinese New year money towards this new effort.

He also worked during the summer for his grandparents (washed windows) and great-auntie (front of shop in a cafe).

Type in Programs Quotes

Mon, 10 Feb 2025 08:03:39 +1100

Still thinking about the practice of typing in code listing verbatim as a pedagogical tool.

Quotes

Some confirming quotes from reading:

…I took online courses, though I made sure to type out everything as I went through them. That alone increases confidence, because you’re actually building something versus copy/pasting. Could be a psychological trick. I don’t know, but it works.

– burntjamb

I like: “Could be a psychological trick.” Yep!

Are there any scientific studies and results of the studies on if this was just tedious work, or if the user did learn something about programming just by typing it in the computer?

Benefits of "Type-In Programs"

Sun, 09 Feb 2025 07:57:52 +1100

I’ve been doing a lot of reading about “type-in programs”.

There are a lot of old-timer programmers recounting their enjoyment of typing in programs from magazines and books in the 1980s and 1990s.

Some highlights I enjoyed reading:

Great stuff.

Code Copywork

Sat, 08 Feb 2025 14:33:52 +1100

I posted to reddit, asking if other programmers learned the craft via copy work:

Did you copy/transcribe code from books when learning to program?

Lots of self-selecting confirmation bias + survivorship bias.

E.g. those that survived (and are on reddit and comment on questions) used this method, those that didn’t, didn’t.

I guess I really want to hear stories of people that don’t learn this way.

The copy-and-pasters (code copypastas? the horror!).

What is “copywork with code” called?

Anyway, this got me thinking, “what’s this called?”

Epson HX-20 "notebook"

Sat, 08 Feb 2025 14:07:34 +1100

I was commenting on reddit how I used to type in BASIC programs back when learning the craft.

I then recalled that I had an old “laptop” that only did BASIC.

After some searching, I found it:

It was an Epson HX-20, pictured below (photo from wiki):

Oh man, it was cool.

Copywork "Books"

Sat, 08 Feb 2025 09:06:11 +1100

I’m still thinking about copywork.

The previous experiment (Lovecraft Copywork) was no good.

In fact, it sucks, and not just because the UI is rough.

Using it now feels more like a typing exercise, not like copywork.

For this case to work, I think a better approach would to to create beautiful letter/a4-sized pages of text with large font that can be printed and used as a reference for the writer to hand-copy, away from the workstation.

Birth Order

Sat, 08 Feb 2025 08:12:30 +1100

I finished a book on birth-order yesterday:

Why First Borns Rule the World and Last Borns Want to Change It

The book was fine.

Reading along, I was nodding, agreeing, pulling out examples from my life, relationships, my own family, etc.

I started telling wife about this trait and that behavior in myself, in her, in our sons, etc.

Then, hmmm… it all felt a little too just so.

I realized that this has the smell MBTI.

The Toolbox Fallacy?

Fri, 07 Feb 2025 05:53:55 +1100

I did the thing I tell everyone not to do.

Human, I guess.

Do as I say, not as I do.

Advice is easier to give, than to take.

During the pandemic I started reading books on fiction writing. I’ve since read 100+ books on the topic.

I also started listening to podcasts on the topic, since consuming many thousands of hours of discussion.

Have I written novels and short stories?

Hemmingway Quote

Fri, 07 Feb 2025 05:26:50 +1100

I read “Ernest Hemingway on Writing” yesterday.

Great stuff!

The final passage got me, and made me chuckle.

Here’s a snippet:

You must be prepared to work always without applause. […] Finally, in some other place, some other time, when you can’t work and feel like hell you will pick up the book and look in it and start to read and go on and in a little while say to your wife, “Why this stuff is bloody marvelous.”

Lovecraft Copywork

Thu, 06 Feb 2025 08:30:42 +1100

I love re-reading the short stories of H. P. Lovecraft each year.

Especially his best works, his classics, like:

The Call of Cthulhu
At the Mountains of Madness
The Shadow over Innsmouth
The Colour Out of Space
The Dunwich Horror

And on.

Sure, Lovecraft is probably a terrible person, but awesome at his art (cosmic horror).

Anyway, I often flirt with the idea of writing fiction, and writing horror short stories like Lovecraft, would be a great achievement for me.

Notable Authors Advocating Copywork

Thu, 06 Feb 2025 08:11:23 +1100

I was thinking again about copywork.

Chatting with some LLMs, we came up with a list of notable writers that are known to have used or advocated copywork.

Here’s what we got (warning: quotes could be fabricated!):

Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, The Rum Diary)

“I just wanted to feel what it felt like to write that well. I’d just type out pages of The Great Gatsby or A Farewell to Arms, just to get the feel of it inside me.”

On-Demand Software

Wed, 05 Feb 2025 10:09:14 +1100

I just saw this tweet go by Amjad Masad, Replit’s CEO:

Whatever you need… make an app for that.

Now on your phone. For everyone. Free. pic.twitter.com/hxFLGaCLmg
— Amjad Masad (@amasad) February 4, 2025

It’s a video promoting “coding on the phone”.

Watch it.

Personal, bespoke, on-demand, disposable, etc. software.

I love this! I love the direction we’re going!

Some names for this, after chatting with my bro gpt4o:

On-Demand Software Development: Like cloud computing, but for instant, local, personal software.
Ephemeral Coding: Like Snapchat for code—software you generate when you need it, and discard when done.
LLM-First Programming: The same way we talk about “Mobile-First” or “Cloud-First” design.
Personal Computation: Instead of general-purpose software for others, this is about computing tailored to you.
Generative Programming: Like generative art, but for software. The goal isn’t writing code—it’s guiding code into existence.

I want the “thing”, not the hours of coding to get the thing. Especially with modern web-programming stacks that I don’t grok at all. Give me hugo :)

Motivation vs Discipline Redux

Wed, 05 Feb 2025 08:47:32 +1100

I’m reading “Tiny Habits” by B. J. Fogg.

It’s a classic on behavior design, and I. can’t believe it took me this long to get to it.

I love it so far. Lots of frameworks.

Anyway, “motivation” is a big part of his framework.

When I raised this, I raised an eyebrow. I thought we (collectively) had thrown out the idea of motivation in favor of discipline.

As Jocko has been telling us for a decade:

Crafting a (Ghostwriting) Offer

Wed, 05 Feb 2025 08:03:17 +1100

I’m finishing up my read through of “The Art & Business Of Ghostwriting” by Nicolas Cole.

The best chapter is Chapter. 16: Crafting Your Irresistible Ghostwriting Offer(3 Key Components).

It’s a great book. I don’t want to ghostwrite, but there’s really good advice in there and it’s well written.

Anyway, Chapter 16 has a framework for crafting an offer. Not new, much like the material from Russell Brunson and Alex Hormozi, but it’s well presented.

Insulin Sensitivity

Tue, 04 Feb 2025 09:38:43 +1100

I’ve read a ton of books on health, nutrition, and specifically “low carb” over the years.

The one’s I’ve re-read the most are by Fung/Taubes/etc., for example:

The Obesity Code (Fung)
Why We Get Fat (Taubes)
The Case for Keto (Taubes)
Good Calories, Bad Calories (Taubes)
And on…

I don’t spam friends/family about eating low carb (my wife is already on-board), but I am asked why I re-read books on the topic so often, especially since I’m not involved in health/nutrition in any way.

Custom LLM-Based Reader

Tue, 04 Feb 2025 05:58:31 +1100

We all should be making our custom readers.

I tripped over another banger tweet by Andrej Karpathy:

Last ~hour I built a custom LLM reader app so while I read Wealth of Nations I can ask questions about any paragraph. When you click a paragraph and “Ask” it calls an LLM, builds context window of what this is, copy pastes the full chapter, the paragraph, and the question. Works great.

Here’s the tweet:

Boost Bot

Mon, 03 Feb 2025 10:11:39 +1100

Consider receiving an an occasional nudge.

We might get these sporadically and indirectly in a work environment. You’re “thinking” or browsing the web, a college wonders over, you talk, it shake you lose and you get back to work.

So, we can bot-ify this, but better?

Drop in the daily TODO’s into doc, have an LLM check the doc and monitor your screen or project directory. They can then decide how and when to give you a little nudge to “get back to it” or “push beyond”.

Gattaca

Mon, 03 Feb 2025 07:58:38 +1100

I love the movie Gattaca.

I’ve probably watched it a dozen times since I first saw it in the late 1990s. Especially when dvd’s were a thing. These days, it’s very hard to find if and where an old classic is available.

Anyway, here’s a synopsis of the movie via our friend gpt4o:

Gattaca (1997) is a sci-fi thriller set in a dystopian future where genetic engineering determines a person’s social status and opportunities. The story follows Vincent Freeman, a naturally conceived “in-valid” with genetic imperfections that limit his aspirations. He dreams of traveling to space but is denied entry into the prestigious Gattaca Aerospace Corporation due to his inferior genetics.

For Sale: Binaries Compiled From Hand-Crafted Artisanal Code

Sun, 02 Feb 2025 06:55:44 +1100

Like most programmers, I’ve been thinking a lot about the future of programming.

There’s a lot of chatter on the wild web that given LLMs can generate snippets, functions and even whole scripts based on prompts, and they’re often very good, that we’re headed to a world where human-written code may be less and less likely.

We’re collaborating on code for now, but that won’t last. We will first alpha-go and then stockfish professional programmers out of existence.

Longevity

Sat, 01 Feb 2025 06:48:14 +1100

It seems that longevity and extending healthspan are hot topics again.

Sure. Who doesn’t want a long healthy life?

My thinking is to stick to the basics and do them well.

Stick to the stuff that does not change and probably will not change, regardless of new fads, fashions and “scientific discoveries”.

Stuff like:

Clean eating
- Eat whole foods
- Eat protein
- Eat fresh fruit and veg
- Time restricted feeding (1pm-6pm), no snacking
- Skip junk, simple carbs, processed foods
- Skip drugs and alcohol
Daily exercise
- Walk 5km 7x/week
- Lift weights 3x/week
- Run 5-10km 3x/week
- Sauna 5x/week
Sleep (3-2-1 framework)
- No food 3 hours before bed
- No drinks 2 hours before bed
- No screens 1 hour before bed (e.g. read)
- Early to bed, early to rise

And more obvious stuff like: low stress, low pollution, etc.

Rule of Ones

Sat, 01 Feb 2025 06:12:27 +1100

I was reading “The Art & Business Of Ghostwriting” by Nicolas Cole last night and was reminded of the rule of ones.

The chapter was on the topic of “How To Niche Down As A Ghostwriter” and he describes a framework for niching down that involves 1 problem, 1 person, and 1 way.

Here’s the quote:

1 Specific Problem: You can’t solve all problems for all people. Instead, you are much better off picking 1 Specific Problem and saying, “This is the only thing I do.” Why? Because when you specialize in solving 1 Specific Problem, you get to know how to solve that problem better than anyone else—which allows you to charge more (you’re the best, so you have the pricing power), and which allows you to create efficiencies for yourself (meaning you can do more work in less time). You get to be so good at solving this 1 Specific Problem that you can do it in your sleep.

1 Specific Person: When you get ultra-specific about who you help, and in what industry, three things happen. First, it’s exponentially easier for clients to find you (you aren’t a “window repair specialist,” you’re a “stained-glass window repair specialist”). Second, they immediately trust you (because you are saying, “I specialize in helping people exactly like YOU”). And third, because you only work with 1 Type Of Person, in 1 Specific Industry, you are going to know way more about the problems these people face, and the outcomes they value most—far more than all the other “I can write anything for anyone!” generalists.

1 Specific Way: Saying you specialize in solving 1 Specific Problem for 1 Specific Person is 90% of the game. But what pushes your offer as a ghostwriter over the edge (and makes people want to throw money at you) is by solving that 1 Specific Problem for that 1 Specific Person in a new, unique, and different way. I wrote about this in my book, Snow Leopard, explaining how the key to differentiating yourself is to solve Obvious problems in Non-Obvious ways, or to solve Non-Obvious problems in Obvious ways.

It’s a good chapter, although could probably be condensed to one page (but shouldn’t).

Code That (By Copying)

Fri, 31 Jan 2025 07:46:18 +1100

After learning the basics of programming, we learn algorithms and data structures.

I have very fond memories of implementing many algorithms and data structures in ANSI C and Java in the late 1990s.

There was something very pleasurable in implementing well-known and well-defined computational concepts and then playing with them.

Specifically, data structures like:

arrays
linked lists
hash tables
graphs
stacks
queues
trees
and on

And algorithms like:

binary search
bubble sort
quick sort
heap sort
breadth-first search
depth-first search
best-first search
a-star search
and on…

I don’t think I’ve implemented any of these algorithms and data structures since. But there was a time in the late ‘90’s where that is all I was doing for months and months. Perhaps years.

Embedding-Based Recommendations

Thu, 30 Jan 2025 09:39:06 +1100

I was thinking about LLM as a recommender system.

I wrote about this the other day, how they can give a different type of recommendation.

It occurs to me that we can use LLMs to give better recommendations. I want this for books.

But, LLM recommendations are different how?

That’s what I was thinking about.

So, the most basic recommendations are:

Other books by the author
Other books in genre

The most popular recommender systems for the last 15+ years are collaborative filtering.

Learn Best By Programming

Thu, 30 Jan 2025 08:36:57 +1100

I’ve often thought/said/repeated that I “learn best by programming”.

It seems true.

The process is typically something like:

pick a concept
read enough about it to get the gist
implement it in code
it doesn’t work
iterate: reading other sources and updating the code until it works
share a tutorial on the concept taught via a worked example in code (bonus!)

I did this during my phd (60+ tech reports), when writing my first book (~50 optimization algorithms), with machine learning mastery (1000+ tutorials, 20+ books on machine learning and deep learning), and with super fast python (500+ tutorials, 14+ books on python concurrency), and on.

Doomers, Gloomers, Zoomers, and Bloomers

Thu, 30 Jan 2025 07:43:07 +1100

I’m currently reading Reid Hoffman’s new book “Superagency”.

In an early chapter, he condenses and summarizes the main ideological AI camps into 4 categories:

So far, at least four key constituencies have been informing the discourse: the Doomers, the Gloomers, the Zoomers, and the Bloomers

Here’s a definition of each in turn (summarized by gpt4o from a quote taken from the book):

Doomers – People who believe AI poses an existential threat to humanity, especially if superintelligent, autonomous AI systems become misaligned with human values. They fear worst-case scenarios where AI could decide to destroy or enslave humanity. Their concerns often center on long-term risks, including AI-driven human extinction.

Ideation Framework

Thu, 30 Jan 2025 05:29:04 +1100

I tripped over an ideation framework by John Rush shared in a tweet.

Here is a local copy (tweets get deleted sometimes…):

Here’s the tweet where it came from:

My ideation framework:

(I used it to launch over 20 startups) pic.twitter.com/T0SwdBHLhL
— John Rush (@johnrushx) January 23, 2025

It’s a great framework.

Here’s a snippet of what it means, as described by our friend gpt4o:

Start with pain points as the best source of high-quality ideas.

Consider technology as a way to adapt existing solutions or create new applications.

Cloning can be a valid strategy but typically lacks originality unless combined with significant differentiation.

Thoughtfully evaluate ideas’ potential impact, innovativeness, and market fit.

Almost gpt buddy, good try.

Best Scores on Machine Learning Datasets

Wed, 29 Jan 2025 16:08:24 +1100

For about 20 years, I’ve been obsessed with the idea of getting the best score for a machine learning dataset.

It started in postgrad when we would talk about learning algorithms and the problems and datasets we were all using to demonstrate that one algorithm was “better” than another.

A good friend in our research group always pointed out Włodzisław Duch’s work.

Back in the early 2000s, he had a website that listed a suite of the standard ML datasets and the algorithms + configs that achieved the best scores (as reported in published papers), and most importatnyl, the scores they achieved.

Podcasts Make TV Better

Wed, 29 Jan 2025 14:56:01 +1100

I don’t watch a ton of TV anymore.

And I’m not a consumer of youtube. Never really liked it.

Nevertheless, I like to watch one, and only one, hour of a tv series (or a contiguous block of a movie) as part of each nights wind-down routine.

I’m a huge consumer of podcasts.

I’ve been consuming podcasts of movie reviews for a long time. Mostly movies I watched a long time ago. Often movies I won’t see and just want to get a vibe for the plot and quality.

LLM Meta-Cognition and Exploring the Adjacent Possible

Wed, 29 Jan 2025 09:09:10 +1100

Andrej Karpathy has a wonderful tweet on what he calls learned “cognitive strategies” but I think more generally is referred to as “meta cognition”.

The piece I like is:

…The models discover, in the process of trying to solve many diverse math/code/etc. problems, strategies that resemble the internal monologue of humans, which are very hard (/impossible) to directly program into the models. I call these “cognitive strategies” - things like approaching a problem from different angles, trying out different ideas, finding analogies, backtracking, re-examining, etc. Weird as it sounds, it’s plausible that LLMs can discover better ways of thinking, of solving problems, of connecting ideas across disciplines, and do so in a way we will find surprising, puzzling, but creative and brilliant in retrospect…

How to Learn Machine Learning Algorithms (for Programmers)

Wed, 29 Jan 2025 08:02:51 +1100

I’ve written a ton of tutorials and books to help developers learn machine learning algorithms over the years.

It’s not my area any longer, but if asked, my suggestion for a programmer (that learns via programming) is to code machine learning algorithms from scratch.

Is this you? It is me. It’s how I learn best.

Here, I really mean that we learn best by:

reading about thing
writing code for the thing
running the thing
it doesn’t work (it never works first go)
iterate until the implementation works (and you really-actually-deeply learn the thing)

This is how we programmers learned a ton of algorithms and data structures in our CS or SWE degree, or whatever.

Are LLMs Stuck In-Distribution?

Tue, 28 Jan 2025 09:46:32 +1100

Machine learning models have an IID assumption.

That is data on which they are trained must be representative of data on which they will make predictions on later.

The big question is AI is:

Are generative models capable of generating data out of distribution?

Naively, we I think no.

But their data distribution is so vast that it’s hard to see at first.

For example, an image generation model can interpolate within the space of ~~all~~ most images on the net.

AI Intuitive Physics

Tue, 28 Jan 2025 06:31:52 +1100

In the last two episodes of “the cognitive revolution” podcast, the host (Nathan Labenz) has mentioned AI’s developing an intuition for the physics of a domain.

Specifically:

By “physics”, he means the actual rules that limit physical domains, but we can generalize and say any domain.

Selfish Software

Tue, 28 Jan 2025 06:13:28 +1100

I just read a new post by Edmar Ferreira titled:

Selfish Software

It’s his take on what we previously called “chat-driven programming”, but perhaps broader.

I thought it was user-focused, but his description too is engineer focused, but more personal. His journey.

Selfish software refers to writing code for yourself without any external customers in mind.

I like the name, I guess.

Perhaps the process of creating software this way we can call “chat-driven programming” and the artifacts that are a result we can call “selfish software”, or what I have previously been calling “disposable software”.

Ambergris

Mon, 27 Jan 2025 09:39:37 +1100

I’ve read Jeff Vanermeers Ambergris trilogy of books maybe a dozen times.

I will probably keep reading it annually for years to come.

But why? Why has it captured me?

I first read the books on paper, one-by-one.

Later, I got the compendium of all three books.

Ambergris

Here’s the cool cover:

It’s edited down slightly and easier to handle. To sit-with.

First Serious PC

Mon, 27 Jan 2025 05:34:43 +1100

This is a nostalgia piece.

I worked at a pizza shop in high-school.

I used the money to buy my first PC in 1996. I was 15, in year 9, I was obsessed with Quake (quake 1) and the PC was a Intel 133mhz.

We had “family” PCs before this, but this one was mine alone. Purchased with money I earned through hard labor.

I also purchased a dial-up 33.6 modem and used me brand new PC to get on the internet with an ISP named Alphalink.

Breaking Through

Sun, 26 Jan 2025 08:30:17 +1100

I love scenes in stories of the main character “breaking through”.

Doing something so extreme they break tear through the fabric of reality. Dislocate.

One I love is in Alan Moore’s graphic novel “From Hell”.

The main character, the killer, experiences moments of “temporal dislocation” while he is killing.

While reading, these are shocking moments.

As a reader, you don’t know what is going on as we go from Victorian era England to modern cityscapes for seemingly no reason. We piece together, that he’s dislocating, probably because of the occult stuff he’s doing coupled with extreme acts of violence.

The Bitter Lesson Leads To Evolutionary Computation

Sat, 25 Jan 2025 10:27:21 +1100

I saw a note about the bitter lesson go by and I left a comment.

It’s an idea I’ve had a for a long time but not really said out loud.

Recall the bitter lesson (via claude):

The Bitter Lesson, articulated by Rich Sutton in 2019, argues that in artificial intelligence research, methods that leverage computation and large amounts of data have historically outperformed approaches based on human knowledge and hand-crafted rules. The “bitter” part is that our human intuitions about how to solve problems often turn out to be less effective than simple methods that scale well with computing power. This has been demonstrated repeatedly in areas like computer chess, speech recognition, and machine translation, where brute-force computational approaches ultimately surpassed carefully designed human-engineered solutions.

Ergodicity and Path Dependence in Machine Learning

Sat, 25 Jan 2025 08:28:01 +1100

I was thinking about ergodicity yesterday in the context of machine learning.

Specifically the path-dependency of training the “best” model and our typical solution to this challenge to train a monte carlo ensemble of final models (e.g. same learning algorithm + varied random seeds, same training data) and combine their predictions.

Could we do better? Are we really stuck and is this really the best way out?

My introduction to ergodicity came initially from Taleb’s books. I think it was Antifragile that dug into (the related idea) of Jensen’s inequality for the payoff in games, and his book Skin in the Game that dug into ergodicity in games with ruin.

Stacking Ensemble With Dropout Regularization

Fri, 24 Jan 2025 08:32:18 +1100

I was thinking about stacking ensembles (stacked generalization) in the sauna.

Stacked ensembles overfit, so we need to regularize.

Generally, we use cross-validation to ensure that the meta model is fit on out-of-fold predictions.

This is to avoid data leakage, but we could say it has a “regularizing” effect.

For reference, here’s how that works via claude sonnet 3.5 (light editing from me):

Let me explain how the meta-model in stacked generalization is fit using cross-validation:

Magical Tokens for LLMs

Fri, 24 Jan 2025 05:36:02 +1100

Prompts for LLMs matter, a lot.

I’m no expert at prompting (see this), but there are additional input tokens that offer a lot of leverage in producing better output.

For example:

think through this step by step

And:

As an expert in [this specific topic] explain [this thing i want to know]

And:

Output in bullet points

And:

Explain [this specific topic] for the audience [described here]

And on.

This might be an older idea (e.g. gpt3.5/gp4 - where my thinking is probably stuck), these sequences are probably baked in now.

Conceptual Blending and LLMs

Thu, 23 Jan 2025 09:07:26 +1100

I tripped over the concept of “Conceptual Blending” (thanks Kat).

From wikipedia:

According to this theory, elements and vital relations from diverse scenarios are “blended” in a subconscious process, which is assumed to be ubiquitous to everyday thought and language.

Again related back to ensembles/multiple perspectives, connected to the bag of analogies thinking from the other day.

The best presentation of the idea is the book “The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and The Mind’s Hidden Complexities” by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner.

Incomprehensible Artifacts From Our AIs

Thu, 23 Jan 2025 08:08:38 +1100

LLMs, or models like them, are going to start giving us artifacts that we cannot (easily) comprehend.

We’ve been in this boat for a while, first with stochastic optimization algorithms (the classic nasa evolved antenna), and later with automated theorem proving.

Algorithms optimize for an objective solution and we get a thing that looks like it solves the problem we want, but it’s opaque (strange, large, complex, etc.).

This came to mind because of a tweet the other day (January 20 2025) by George Hotz.

LLM Prompt Optimization

Thu, 23 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +1100

LLM prompts matter.

The quality and nature of the prompt influences the quality and nature of the response.

There is a space of candidate input prompts and a corresponding map of LLM responses, some of which are better/worse for whatever problem we are working on.

We can frame a black box optimization problem that proposes and tunes candidate prompts for an LLM to optimize a target response.

In effect, we would be finding good/better starting points in latent space from which to retrieve the desired output.

Abstraction and Analogies with LLMs

Wed, 22 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +1100

I was listening to a recent episode of the Machine Learning Street Talk podcast (a very fine podcast!).

Specifically:

How Do AI Models Actually Think?, Laura Ruis.

Fantastic episode! Just great. I need a re-listen.

Early in the conversation they touch on (I’m paraphrasing, probably wrongly) whether LLMs think/reason as Douglas Hofstadter suggests, abstracting via a collection of analogies. It’s agreed they do.

The host touches on Hofstadter’s often repeated quote:

Gyms For All The Skills That LLMs Are Eating?

Wed, 22 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +1100

Use it or loose it.

We used to do manual labor which had the dual benefit of getting the things we needed (hunt->food, work->money, etc.) and keeping us in reasonable physical (and mental) condition.

No longer for many of us, so our bodies atrophy.

To fight the entropy, many of us go to the gym. We simulate the labor we used to do in order to keep our bodies in good condition and reap the rewards (energy, look/feel better, longer life, etc.).

LLMs as Fitness Functions in Stochastic Optimization

Wed, 22 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +1100

The hard part of stochastic optimization is the evaluation function.

You get whatever you’re optimizing-for or toward and it’s always a trade-off, even if you can’t see it at first.

This got me thinking, there must be tons of problems that we cannot optimize easily because we don’t have good (cheap) fitness functions where we could use an LLM to step in.

I know I’ve read papers on something like this in the openendedness literature.

Mountain Climbers Collect Peaks

Wed, 22 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +1100

I was reading Perdurabo about Aleister Crowley.

In his youth he was accomplished mountain climber and the book touches on a suite of his climbing achievements in the early chapters.

This got me thinking.

Mountain climbing is a challenging hobby where the climbers “collect” peaks. That is, they pick hard maintains to climb, that may or may not have been climbed by others, and climb them for fun.

It is about personal accomplishment.

That Scene From "The Fountainhead"

Wed, 22 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +1100

I’ve probably read Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead about a dozen times over the years.

I’m not really into the philosophy of Objectivism, but I’m a fan of the individualism in the story.

Really, I’m a sucker for simple hero stories (think Ender’s Game, Dune, etc.)

Not sure I’ll read the book again for a while. It’s comforting to re-read, but I’ve had enough for now.

Anyway, there’s a scene that I think back on often.

Misophonia

Tue, 21 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +1100

I have Misophonia.

At least, I strongly suspect I do, self-diagnosed (!).

Misophonia is a neurological condition where specific sounds trigger strong negative emotional and physiological reactions. Common trigger sounds include chewing, breathing, or repetitive noises. People with misophonia may experience intense anger, anxiety, or panic when hearing these triggers, often leading them to avoid situations where they might encounter these sounds.

The main daily triggers for me are:

Chewing.
Breathing.
Tapping.
Loud walking (stomping/scraping/etc).
Lisps.

Chewing/slurping/eating noises though. Every meal is hard.

LLM-Based Recommendation Engine

Mon, 20 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +1100

It occurs to me that we can use LLMs to give better recommendations.

I want this for books.

The goodreads recommendations are crap.

The ton of “new hot books” newsletters I subscribe to are crap.

I want a daily email that makes highly specific recommendations made by an LLM based on:

The books I am reading and have just read.
The authors of those books.
The genres of those books.
The general areas of interest/study of those books.
The specific details in my background.

I typically read on topics that interest me right now and I typically read a cluster of books on a topic.

Mind-Reach and PSI Debunking

Mon, 20 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +1100

I’m reading “Mind-Reach” by Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff on kindle.

It’s ostensibly on the topic of remote viewing as investigated by two physicists at SRI International in the 70s.

My default, like most, is that it’s total bunk.

The investigations are presented somewhat rigorously. They are trying.

Each time they drop stats, it’s an odds estimate (e.g. this result is 1:1,000,000), my spidey sense tells me “p-hacking” and why aren’t you reporting the negative results as well?

Tech vs Spiritualism

Mon, 20 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +1100

I had an idea:

It seems that with the rise of interest/hype in “tech” we see a similar rise in “spiritualism” (for lack of a better word).

I recall during the late 1990s with the rise of the internet/.com boom, that Aliens/UFOs was all the rage and the X-files was one of the biggest shows on TV. Hmmm.

I see now with the AI-boom hype/LLMs/ChatGPT and the rise in conspiracy theories, UAPs, telepathy tapes, graham hancock, etc.

AI/LLM Diminishing Returns

Sun, 12 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +1100

Tyler Cowen was interviewed again by Dwarkesh Patel which was recently released (Jan 10):

Tyler Cowen - The #1 Bottleneck to AI progress Is Humans

I listened to it on release and a number of points got me.

One was Cowen’s comment on diminishing returns when it comes to AI.

Here’s a cartoon of diminishing returns from Wikipedia, full credit:

He may have made this point before/elsewhere, but it’s the first time I’ve tripped over it.

AutoML Has A Marketing Problem

Sun, 12 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +1100

I think AutoML is great.

I think most people should be using it. Even data scientists and machine learning engineers.

And not to “get started” but all the time on all things.

Why? It’s probably better than you are.

I recall Nick Erickson (author of AutoGluon) commenting in one of his videos/interviews that AutoML/AutoGluon is as good or better than the average data scientist. That the bar for AutoML to clear is low, much lower than most people think. I don’t have a quote at hand, sorry.

Quake2 Bot Archive?!

Sun, 12 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +1100

I’m a hobby quake archivist.

Over the last few years, I’ve been maintaining the Quake Bot Archive.

It is/was a rewarding project filled with nostalgia and writing code to scrape+index+search the internet archive.

Here’s a screenshot:

I think I’ve taken the project pretty close to the edge.

I emailed every single bot author I could find in all the old docs (think a massive spreadsheet of email addresses and current follow-up status, a client management system basically).
I tracked down modern contact info for most bot authors and reached out.
I carefully research the history of most bots to ensure I knew exactly what files were released (e.g. quake bot essays and quake bot chronology and quake bot genealogy much more).
I maintained wishlists of wanted files and wishlists of broken URLs where wanted files were known to exist at one time.
I kept expanding the scope from bots, to mods that had bots, to proxy bots/aimbots/server-side bots, and on.
I posted to the community many times kindly asking for the old timers to check their old backup CDs.
I searched usenet archives, mail archives, internet archives, warez archives, shovelware archive, etc.
I indexed all files on all old quake addon cds.
I indexed the files on all of the old quake webpages on the internet archive.
And more…

I used the same methods to build other archives, like the official quake archive which led me to many more helpful resources and generated many more ideas on how/where to search.

Stacking Is Great

Sun, 12 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +1100

Stacking or Stacked Generalization is an ensemble machine learning algorithm.

I’ve been obsessed with it since I discovered it as part of the Weka in the late 1990s and reading about it in the Weka “Data Mining” book at the same time.

From the 2016 edition:

Stacked generalization, or stacking for short, is a different way of combining multiple models. Although developed some years ago, it is less widely mentioned in the machine learning literature than bagging and boosting, partly because it is difficult to analyze theoretically and partly because there is no generally accepted best way of doing it—the basic idea can be applied in many different variations.

Algorithm Skill vs Complexity Frontier

Sat, 11 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +1100

A thought bouncing around in the back of my head related to machine learning algorithm selection is skill vs complexity.

Typically we want the most simplest skillful model, i.e. Occam’s Razor.

A way of thinking about this is to assign a complexity score to a suite of algorithms and then evaluate each in turn.

From this table of data, we can imagine a frontier (or Pareto front) of skill vs complexity.

Come to think of it, I probably got the idea from this AutoGluon slide:

Public vs Private Schools

Sat, 11 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +1100

I tripped over a discussion of public vs private schools in Melbourne (where I live with my family).

Is private school for the kids worth it?

We have two sons and went through this debate already a few years back.

I read a ton of stuff at the time, including papers and books.

I recall the following book helped a lot:

Free Schools, David Gillespie, 2014.

We got to: send them to public school, because:

Excessive Cognitive Surplus

Fri, 10 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +1100

I re-read Clay Shirky’s 2010 book “Cognitive Surplus” yesterday.

There’s some good ideas in there.

Here’s a summary by Claude:

“Cognitive surplus” is a concept popularized by Clay Shirky in his 2010 book “Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age.” The basic idea is that modern society has a vast untapped reservoir of human intellectual capacity and free time that could be directed toward creative and socially beneficial purposes. The concept emerged from Shirky’s observation that people in developed economies collectively have billions of hours of free time that, historically, was often spent on passive consumption like watching television. With the rise of the internet and digital technologies, this surplus of human attention and cognitive capacity can be channeled into collaborative projects and creative endeavors.

Scikit-Learn Algorithm Elo Ratings

Fri, 10 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +1100

I’ve been reading up on AutoGluon on and off over the last few weeks.

It’s amazing!

I highly recommend the podcast episode AutoGluon: The Story with Nick Erickson from 2023.

Anyway, one cool thing Nick touched on in his AutoML 2024 presentation was Elo ratings for AutoGluon and a suite of other AutoML frameworks.

Here’s a still from the presentation that captured my imagination:

Watch the whole presentation:

Local Temperature Forecast

Thu, 09 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +1100

A long time ago, I worked for the Australian Bureau of Meteorology.

While there, I created many internal scripts/apps using weather data, for fun and internal personal use.

One example was a tiny web app that plotted recent temperature observations, forecasts, and in-office temperature using a little USB temperature probe.

It was very cool and a few members of our team kept it terminally open.

Even today, I still leave the temperature forecast page for my suburb open all day long and refresh it before heading out to the gym, supermarket, whatever.

StackOverflow New Questions

Thu, 09 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +1100

I saw this StackOverflow Dec 2024 stats pass by.

It reports data on the number of new questions created on StackOverflow from July 2008 to December 2024.

The raw data shows a dramatic drop in new questions in recent years.

The data was collected and commented on by Theodore R. Smith, who is complaining that his reasonable new question posted to the site was closed and that aggressive closing of questions is the reason for the decrease in new questions on the site:

Chat-Driven Programming

Wed, 08 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +1100

Over the last year, I rarely sit down and write code anymore.

Instead, I have code generated and then iterate on it until we achieve the desired effect.

I direct and collaborate.

Similarly, to change existing code, I attach the file to a chat or paste the functions that require changes, summarize the change and iterate until it achieves the desired effect.

My projects are almost always side projects. Whims. Ideas. Prototypes. Examples. Ad hoc’ery. Not production grade code.

Remote Viewing?

Tue, 07 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +1100

Before Christmas I listened to the Telepathy Tapes podcast.

I heard about it on a Joe Rogan podcast and added it to the queue immediately.

I think it went viral because there was a lot of chatter on twitter/reddit about it around this time.

Here’s a plot of google trend data:

You can see the leap in interest right around the airing of Joe’s episode with Duncan Trussell.