I see a lot of people very obsessed with privacy, and I really don't get why.

Small piezoelectric crystals could be placed under the keys of a keyboard. These might generate enough power on a key-press to create a signal that could be picked up by a dongle plugged into the computer creating a self-powering wireless keyboard.

When they are lost, dung-beetles can use the Milky Way in the night sky to find their way home. Isn't nature beautiful?

I'm sure you've at least been exposed to the saltest in a sudden flurry of one-word-title-that's-the-name-of-the-main-character movies – Wonka. No offence to Timothée Chalamet, but I don't like it. Gene Wilder's Wonka was a lying child-endangering nutter who who took people on mad psychedelic boat rides with giant insects while screaming at them. Depp's was perhaps more deranged (for better or worse). I don't think Chalamet will have any scenes with this kind of bite, and all that's left behind will be a sickly-sweet feel-good movie with little actual substance.

I see a load of people hating on textured ceilings but they are the best ceilings. It's not like you have to look at the ceiling all the time so you barely even notice them. Then, when you do look at the ceiling, textured ones are the most interesting to look at.

Rapid growth is expected from new businesses, but this will surely lead to failure if they provide quality products that last a long time. If they expand operations to meet the demand while they grow, they will be left with a huge drop off in sales once everyone that wants their product has bought one. For such businesses, slow growth is much more sustainable than fast growth, yet fast growth is effectively demanded from all new businesses.

I've gotten this advert on YouTube with some really annoying music in it a lot recently. It only just occurred to me that I don't know what it's for beyond that it has cars in it. I don't think I know what any adverts are for because I've seen so many that my brain just blocks them out. I would guess most people are like this which makes me wonder how adverts make any money at all.

You might consider menus as a sort of 4^th wall of video games. They exist as interface between the world of the game and the physical reality of consoles. It's quite odd then, that many games present these diegetically – as though they actually exist in the world of the game. The Pip Boy is a good example of this. They player's in-game character will look at a watch-like device on their wrist to access the items they're carrying. It's down-right strange that to get an item out of your backpack you would somehow use a smart watch to select it, but that seems to be the canonical way of doing this in the Fallout games. Another example is MMO menus as seen through Isekai anime. Characters in these shows will often open a stat menu as a strange floating hologram which they take as naturally existing in the world. Games like Undertale can even be observed breaking this 4^th wall when characters from the game interact with the player's menu.

If something has a rating of 5/10, you would be inclined to say it's somewhat underwhelming and perhaps not entirely liked. This assumes that the scores are normally distributed. If they are instead distributed according to the inverse – a marmite distribution where people love it or hate it and scores cluster around 1 and 10 – there will be a much greater absolute number of people who love it. The average score could be lower for the marmite and it would still have a greater number of devotees. Being controversial actually makes something more liked than being bland.

You know when you have a quest to follow an NPC in a video game and they move just faster than your walk speed but slower than your run speed? I had always just assumed that was necessary. If they moved at just the walk speed it would be too slow and you'd get impatient, but moving at the run speed they might get too far ahead. I had always just dismissed this problem as unsolvable until I thought about it for more than 5 seconds and realised you could just have them go at run speed then slow down if they get too far ahead. So if any video game makes that mistake in the future, they now have no excuse (aside from it looking a bit odd if everyone runs everywhere).

It occurs to me that a common Christian perspective on art is that it's motivated by God and he is the true source of inspiration. In that sense, he could also inspire the random noise which serves as the basis for AI art.

There are two possibilities for how society responds to plastic pollution. The first is that we continue to produce plastic and destroy the world with it. It's impossible to recycle most of that plastic and the recycled stuff eventually becomes waste anyway so plastic recycling doesn't help here. The other is that we stop producing plastic. Plastic recycling is useless if there is no plastic. Either way, these stupid plastic recycling project people come up with are useless. They only serve to justify the production of more plastic by pretending it can be recycled and isn't as bad as it is.

Note: I have selected this rather extremist title as an exercise in irony.

There are a surprising number of centrists on the Israel/Palestine debate, and I think it exposes their fundamental stupidity. Sometimes people are just correct about things, and being against Israel's persecution of Palestinians is one of those instances. The closest situation I can think of is how European settlers treated the natives of the Americas. The Europeans were wrong to do all the bad things they did to the natives. People in the past have been wrong, so clearly people in the present can be wrong. Yet centrists deny this reality. Words shouldn't be used because people don't like them being used, even if they obviously are applicable. Facts aught to be avoided as they can influence people's opnions. Reality is but an inconvenient footnote that might cause uneccessary bias in favour of one side or the other. Centrism has replaced logical thought in these people's minds. Blindly applying a strategy of take the middle road usually makes them seem sophisticated and diplomatic, but completely fails when you are talking about something this black and white.

It strikes me as extremely immature that so many places censor swear words. YouTube is a prime example; it will disable adverts on videos which involve swearwords. Advertisers are afraid that someone will see their advert next to a swearword. Why? I don't know. Then you have the people who think the world will end if a child hears a swear. Newsflash: most of them already have. But there's this strange sentiment that swearing is a kind of moral transgression against the listener. Finally, all these AI companies tend to block the AIs from doing inappropriate things. They think people will associate AI with porn if they let people make porn with AI. That's stupid. The main thing people search on Google is porn and Google isn't seen as a porn site. The AI would be less child-safe if you could make porn with it, but I question the degree to which a child looking for porn needs to be protected from seeing it. Many parents have the delusion that, if a child finds porn on the internet, it's only because they accidentally stumbled upon it rather than because they actively sought it out. I can't help but think of videos like this with an adult shocked and angry about the search history of a very upset child. I guess what I'm trying to say is: people should just get over porn and naughty words.

I find that, when trying to go to sleep, the greatest obstacle to it is the very fact that I am trying. While this is a rather common experience, it is interesting to find how often similar situations arise. When performing some activity that takes physical skill, you often need to get out of your head – stop trying and do. One of the best ways to remember something you've forgotten is to simply stop trying and do something else. To me, this reflects that the conscious mind constitutes a vanishingly small proportion of our overall cognition. For all its use, it is often a hindrance to the subconscious, which is more technically adept in most regards. It has been an especially strange insight that my mind does things I'm not fully aware of in such a predictable way. I can delegate it some task (e.g. remembering), leave it to its own devices, and find that task later completed. I often conceptualise myself a mind, then the body I inhabit is incidental – external to the self. You can see then, how it would be disturbing to discover that parts of my mind too are external to my self. Where, if not there, does the boundary lie between self and body?

I've seen a few of these gift cards that you can spend in any shop floating around. A gift card is already a pointless thing from the consumer's perspective. The only real reason behind them is to satisfy the requirement that you purchase goods for the annual consumerism events. It still makes sense from the shop's perspective. People who buy giftcards are spending money in the shop that they mightn't otherwise. Some of the money is likely wasted when the recipient of the card doesn't quite meet the face value, or they will be prompted to spend extra to go over. None of these benefits exist for a multi-store gift card. I would assume the money is just held by the card company until its spent at one of the supported shops. It offers nothing for either party involved. It's just money but worse. Why do we have these?

I have been using the internet for several years, and I just realised I haven't seen any women on it. Obviously part of this is bias. I assume I'm talking to men most of the time, so some women might have fallen through. But even in a context where I know the gender, the number of women is vanishingly small. Out of my 210+ YouTube subscriptions, just two are women (and one of those was a man when I subscribed). I wonder if I am a secret misogynist? The only other explanation I can come up with is that men and women's interests are just algorithmically different in some way that separates us as groups.

I've noticed an increasing tenancy for projects to stick to a major version of 0. I found an especially bad case in the README of Kamila Lisp: Every release will be tagged as 0.3.x.y where a bump of x signifies a breaking change, while the bump of y signifies a non-breaking change. To keep the major version as 0, they had to add an extra sub-version below the patch version and shift the meanings down by one. This exact effect can be achieved through regular versioning by omitting the leading 0 from this new scheme. I think the issue generally comes from a mismatch between how projects are developed and how version numbers work. Most open source projects are developed a single patch at a time, with each patch being released to the public instantly, so there is no instant at which it makes sense to break off into a new major version. By contrast, commercial software releases features in large batches, and so major versions make sense. Another reason for sticking to version 0 is that an increase in major version is a kind of commitment. There is an expectation that some amount of maintenance still happens on older major versions, which may be beyond the scope of a given project. I urge developers to be aware of the reason a major version may not change, and then to actually increment the major version when it is logical to do so, rather than treating it as untouchable.

If you use the internet a lot, you've certainly seen some kind of non-standard embed link. These are services such as fxreddit which essentially acts as a proxy to Reddit, but adds information that can be used to embed content into other applications. Essentially, a link to reddit.com/some/resource is replaced with rxddit.com/some/resource. When you click the link, it will take you to the Reddit page at some/resource as any other link would. What this link adds is some metadata that allows a summary of the target page (for instance, the post title and an associated image) to be embedded near the link in the source page.

One can't help but notice that left-wing parties tend to support immigration. Why?

For a long time I've assumed that Nigel Farage dresses in hunting gear to go around counsel estates in some out-of-touch attempt to seem common. Poor people all work in the fields, so I better wear my country clothes to look like one of them. This was my rough approximation of his logic. It occurs to me now that there may be a simpler explanation: He wants to look like a rich person. His goal is to appear as an elite who listens to and loves the lower classes, descending from his opulence to guide them to success. His greatest trick is to make people love their rulers and hate their neighbours.

Having just seen this horrifying AI abomination advertised to me on YouTube, I'm concerned about the effect of AI on children. I think we can all appreciate that brainrot IPad-baby content is probably bad for children in the same way that social media is probably bad for adults, but this seems uniquely harmful. I think it's because there might, at some point, be genuinely be no human involvement in these videos at allIn fact there would be two different AIs at work, training to feed children with the optimally engaging content. Channels will use AI models to mass produce colourful nonsense, then the YouTube AI will create a kind of natural selection, causing these channels to evolve into whatever optimally holds the attention of children. The result is a phenomenon known as brainrot – content which uses techniques algorithmically developed to retain viewer's attention and nothing else. It's probably bad to expose children to this stuff, especially at the scale AI now threatens to. There should be some human oversight.

I've been looking at a lot of the stuff coming out of the Starmer government, and I have to say it looks stupider by the minute. I used to think there was a kind of logic to Starmer's policies, but now I can't possibly interpret what that could be and I'm confident they won't try to explain it. Beyond that, his optics are awful. This is the man who had people laughing at him during the election. His understanding of optics is clearly limited. But this is not just him; there is an entire team which has allowed this shambles to proceed. Many people would have had to review the idea to cut the winter fuel payment and they collectively decided it was a good idea. I can only assume these are whatever talentless dregs were left over after they knifed Corbyn in the back. They seem to have about as much understanding of actual governance as they do of optics. But then I think back to Sunak, and he seemed much the same—desperately flailing around in the hopes something good would happen and people would like him. Then Truss, Johnson, May, Cameron; few of these people demonstrated any kind of understanding of the systems of government. The decline in the quality of politicians is as stark as it is concerning. Is there anyone in this country who's fit to lead it?

God help them.

I've recently read a bit on the moderation of the BlueSky platform, and one particular feature stood out to me: block lists. These are user-curated lists of accounts which you can either bulk-block or -mute. The first thought I had was the creators of those lists sure do have a lot of power. I don't think the people who sign up to the lists do any extensive background checks of the maintainers. So essentially random people are being elevated to the status of pseudo-moderators. I don't like moderators, or at least those on platforms like Discord. When they don't have a concrete set of rules or any accountability, they often abuse their power. There's nothing to stop the curator of a block list from adding arbitrary people to the list just on the basis of not liking them. The subscribers of said list would have no way to know, because they couldn't see that user's posts. Do you want to be in a situation where you're talking to someone with the power to soft-ban you from thousands of accounts, with no clear reason nor chance for appeal? If not, then I would suggest you are very cautious in handing this power out to people.

Events with a probability x^-1 are typically said to be more likely than not after x occurrences. A better estimate is 0.7x occurrences.

Every so often, I'm reminded of a great technology which hasn't seen wider adoption. Today, that was websites without passwords. Instead of making the user input a password, you send them a one time code to their email address and store a secure password in their browser as a cookie. Never again will users employ insecure passwords. Though it's important you send a code which only works for the user's specific session to prevent the email from being evesdropped. Though it would be nice if the browser added an API for sensitive cookie data, that way the user could also specify a global password for all login tokens stored on their computer.

I've recently seen a lot of discussion around the OpenWorm project. It aims to fully simulate every cell in the body of a certain type of nematode worm. Is this program vegan? Aught fully simulated animals have the same rights as regular animals? I would object to my real cat being killed, but what about turning off a simulation of a cat? What about an AI language model? I have far more evidence of the latter's is consciousness than I do of my cat's. So is it vegan? Does anyone care? So many questions for which I have no answers.

I recently saw a discussion around the idea of banning advertising, and the tired old complaint came up: how will we define what advertising is? And then you want the government to decide what counts as advertising!? I'm sick and tired of it. Yes, the government can decide what a thing is. They can categorise a thing in a useful way and ban it. That is their job. And then courts can determine which things meet that criteria and so apply that law fairly. That is the function of the court system. People seem to act as if giving the government any power to enforce laws on any matter will inevitably lead to horrible consequences. It won't. We can ask politicians to figure out how to regulate things and then courts will fairly determine the things to which that regulation applies. That's how the system works, and if it has stopped working, you have much greater issues than the laws which you want being enacted in a flawed way.

This page is very well designed.

The popular essay “Goto Considered Harmful” by Dijkstra has long inspired an almost religious hatred of the construct, but this is no longer justified. The GOTO of which Dijkstra spoke was unrestrained, and so programmers would often use it to jump from the body of one function into the body of another. Such reckless use of control flow is clearly objectionable. Modern goto is much less powerful than that, and mainly causes issues in languages with manual memory management due to variables being initialised to unexpected values (this makes its omission from Java even more questionable as Java doesn't have manual memory management). But I should like to make a stronger thesis, that goto as a programming construct is made entirely obsolete by common PL techniques and has been so for many years. I will show how these techniques can likely already be used in C using common compiler extensions. Finally, I shall present a rough draft of how such a design may be integrated well into a future C-style language.

With the impending doom of XSLT, I got to thinking, this really isn't a Web browser anymore.

I've heard the advice that one aught not use a slash (/) in formal writing as it is ambiguous whether it means and or or, but I find it works well in cases where either would work. In situations such as a carpenter/cabinet maker, both alternations are describing the same person, so that person is both things—conjunction—but equally both activities are not partaken at the same time—thus disjunction. The slash therefore has use when describing two mutually exclusive properties of the same subject. I think the real source of the complaint is that the slash symbol tends to look rather bad in type setting, for instance in the phrase carpenter/cabinet maker, the slash appears to group carpenter/cabinet where it is actually taking both words after it. I think a reasonable solution to this, is to write a carpenter slash cabinet maker. While some may find this literal use of punctuation disturbing, I note that the slash is often actively pronounced in speech, and is thus more of an abbreviation, similar to ampersand (&), the recommendation for which is use only in cases where space is limited and not in prose. Extending this treatment to slash is only logical.