Last weekend I wrote my first Rust program, which made an LED flash on an Arduino, following this blog post and with the help of this hardware abstraction setup The impetus to getting into microcontrollers came from playing around with modular synths: I've got a little quad DAC chip and …

Early this year I finally got weary of dragging my collection of mp3s from one iTunes installation to the next. I'd worked out a fairly nice solution where I had the library on a 2TB SSD connected to my laptop's dock, so the music collection didn't take up any space …

I picked this up from the music store this afternoon and discovered that I don't have the right kind of USB cable to plug my keyboards into it, but I have managed to get one (1) annoying buzz out of it.

It's amazing that Mark Zuckerberg has managed to make so much money off all of us pretending to keep in touch with our friends. I realised about a month ago that although I still have an account there, for the ostensible reason that it feels like an important way to …

The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band who Burned a Million Pounds
London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2012

John Higgs

I went into this book feeling a bit cocky, like, how much is it going to surprise me? But it did. Quite a lot. I don't want to say which bits surprised …

Hermes Trismegistus driving a schoolbus

Last week I saw someone describe GitHub Copilot—the code-completion tool which has been trained on all of the public source code on GitHub—as a form of license-laundering, and the same thing occurs to me about DALL-E.

Clearly, it's been trained on an enormous …

GLOSSATORY is a bot which posts spurious definitions from an RNN trained on a dictionary, and every morning I use its output as a prompt for little drawings, some of which I post at GLOSSATORY. Today I tried feeding some recent definitions to DALL-E to see what it came up …

"Graffiti art of Wittgenstein riding a skateboard"

Happy Friday.

No One is Talking About This, London: Bloomsbury, 2021

Patricia Lockwood

I finished this in a couple of days and it was funny and touching—people probably think of Lockwood as a Twitter phenomenon but she'd have been a good writer no matter what platform she'd made her own. Mostly …

A couple of months ago I got a bit obsessed with this recurring question on Metafilter from people who can't or won't learn to cook and are keen to know if a single food will supply all human dietary requirements. It's been asked so often that it gets its own …