It's only taken me two decades but I've worked out why I've never liked people using the term "grok", despite being a big nerd who's the right age to have read that Heinlein novel.

Using it is a way of reinforcing your sense of being part of a special group …

Too Like The Lightning
Seven Surrenders
The Will to Battle
Perhaps the Stars

New York City: Tor, 2016-2021

Ada Palmer

I wrote a review of the first part of Ada Palmer's novel (it's very much one book in four volumes) back when I read it in 2018. I caught up …

Stories about AI have an impoverished visual grammar: bots that look like something from a 90s music video, all porcelain surfaces and dark hydraulic sinews, against corporate vaporwave neon swirls, or junk from DALL-E. I suppose there's a need to embody the disembodied, the same impulse that puts a CGI-rendered …

I've been spending spare moments putting together a sort of musical experiment - it doesn't feel coherent enough to call it an instrument yet - written in Scheme using Spritely Goblins and David Thompson's Chickadee framework. I do not know if either of these technologies is the best for the job but …

I put filters on "ChatGPT" and "LLM" on Mastodon because the constant flow of discourse, to which I was also contributing, was starting to wear me out, so I'm writing this post with a slightly guilty conscience.

Here's something about nerd culture which it has taken me longer than it …

I turned off the Twitter versions of my fleet of bots last week, and today I went through their various home pages and took out the Twitter timelines - which seem to have stopped working anyway - and replaced them with embedded timelines from their Mastodon incarnations, using Emfed, which was really …

• This cosmology paper has the best acknowledgements section ever written

• I'll admit that I had never actually read the paper in which Turing outlined his 'Imitation Game' until this week, and I really want to write a whole blog post which gives it a close reading. You should read it …

This was the first week I've gone to an office for five days straight since March 2020. I'm enjoying commuting and getting more of a sense of separation from my work and home life.

• A terrible Philip Adams article from 1983

• Nature is not allowing scientists to include ChatGPT as …

• Visualise and/or animate the effects of git commands - a warning that this blew up when I tried using it to visualise a simple git rebase

• Sapling is Meta/Facebook's source control system, a fork and rewrite of Mercurial which they've started to open source. The fact that it interoperates …

Last year was a really big one for me - I changed jobs and institutions just before the end of 2022, and was lucky enough to become a group lead in the new team in May. It's been challenging but really exciting, I feel like I'm getting a lot more out …