I Don’t Know, Timmy, Being God Is a Big Responsibility

A fun short story about infinity and the idea of reality-as-simulation:

Tim blinked. “A search…?”

“Across ten to the one hundred and sixty-five star systems, for Earth. The entire observable universe and googols of times more besides. And here it is. Search result one of one.”

Nepenthes

This is a tarpit intended to catch web crawlers. Specifically, it’s targetting crawlers that scrape data for LLM’s - but really, like the plants it is named after, it’ll eat just about anything that finds it’s way inside.

It works by generating an endless sequences of pages, each of which with dozens of links, that simply go back into a the tarpit. Pages are randomly generated, but in a deterministic way, causing them to appear to be flat files that never change

Beyond kingdoms and empires

From the co-author of The Dawn of Everything

Thinking ‘in quantitative terms’ doesn’t really allow us to bypass these issues, or at least it shouldn’t. Questions remain. What, exactly, were ancient empires ‘successful’ at, if extraordinary levels of violence, destruction and displacement were required to keep them afloat?

Decolonize your mind.

Art, Art-Making, & Image Files

Did Hilma af Klint draw inspiration from 19th century physics?

Once again, the evidence wasn’t direct, but it seems af Klint would have attended certain local lecture circuits about science, while several members of the Theosophy Society were familiar with modern physics and Young’s earlier work.

Hilma af Klint was a pioneer of abstract art, and discussion of her work is often precluded by her expressed, documented interest in mysticism and spiritualism, but something about that always felt a bit off to me. In many ways it seems to me her artwork also grapples with the nature of how visual perception works.

Krita brushes 2025-01 bundle

Krita is perhaps the best example of what open-source can be, because their target audience is artists who illustrate, and illustration is about intuition and feel. These are some great brushes, and released into the public domain.

The Nature of Code

My goal for this book is simple: I want to take a look at phenomena that naturally occur in the physical world and figure out how to write code to simulate them.

A great resource for anyone who’s into art and/or programming and would like to better understand models for natural processes.

WebP is so great… except it’s not

An angry rant from an artist about how technology people prioritize the wrong things, and a reminder that promises of any new technology should be taken with a packet of salt.

there is a real issue with the design priorities of image algos from tech guys who clearly lack historical and artistic background, and don’t talk to artists, who anyway have largely decided that they were above science, maths and other menial materialistic concerns.

Ethical Technology

We Don’t Need More Cynics. We Need More Builders

I am not fond of wishing, but I wish I could reach back through time to force my teenage self to read this.

Cynicism is quite good at masquerading as wisdom. Pattern recognition is valuable — we should learn from history and past failures. But pattern recognition becomes pattern imprisonment when it blinds us to genuinely new possibilities.

Ursula Franklin’s tech project checklist

A great set of things to consider when working on projects that can impact people.

Web Development is Collapsing

My apologies if you find these a bit repetitive, but it’s a field I’ve worked in for 20 years, and a place where I’ve met a lot of great friends and colleagues. I’ve been making web pages for 30 years, I care about publishing; it’s a topic I can’t simply ignore.

Creative Strategies for Suviving the AI-pocalypse

Big Tech is literally salivating at the idea of taking your job away and replacing it with automation at an industrial scale. Their plan seems to be to hire a bunch of low-wage prompt monkeys to coax AI agents into spitting out “working” React code and JSON APIs, and then handing that work off to a dwindling number of senior engineers for final polish and bug-fixing.

I’ve seen this writing on the wall for a while now, and am fortunate enough to be able to steer my efforts towards building things I hope to sell.

Not Feeling Big Tech This Year? Start an Indie Blog!

Free yourself from the painted yellow lines., the tracking, the ads, the arbitrary rules and follower counts and gaming the algorithm and acquisitions and shutdowns and a chronic lack of ownership. Free yourself, for the low low cost of a single domain and a moment’s effort.

Lately, I’ve been helping a few friends get their own websites going, and not just on some hosted thing like Squarespace or Wix, but, same as this website and Evan’s, from static files.