I shut down my web servers on Thursday. I’ve had a home of my own on internet for 27 years. A good innings but a sad day.
A home-owner no more! I’m renting now.
Old websites have been archived to static HTML and moved to a shared host. I said goodbye to some old apps. You’...
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ASMR is that full-body tingling some people get when listening to sounds like gentle tapping or whispering.
It is detectable in the brain using EEG spectral analysis: ASMR amplifies low frequency and reduces high frequency oscillations (2022).
(Technically: self...
OpenAI just dropped 372 math proofs on the world. They dropped a Navier-Stokes proof about a month back and there was a bunch of controversy so I guess the new PR strategy is shock and awe.
I’m not qualified to assess quality but watching the reaction of mathematicians, some...
It has been a busy summer over at Inanimate.
Yes that is still a holding page.
Bringing up a new consumer electronics company is, uh, kinda intense.
So where we’re starting with the whole room computer, ambient intelligence thing is WORKS: five limited-edition devices for yo...
I have moral queasiness about the fruit fly work going on in the AI world – I’m not 100% sure why. We need to invent new prayers, that’s where my thoughts take me. Bear with me while I think it through…
In case you missed it:
Google Research and partners mapped the complete ...
Hey I ran my second marathon this last weekend. I wrote about my first one. It was hard (btw people liked that post).
I made my race plan, kept to it while resisting temptation, got round without stopping to walk and without calf cramps (that was the goal), and got a new per...
How many Hollywood actors are there?
I means ones with the combination of
talent
can carry a movie for the public
can be accepted by producers.
Certainly more than a dozen at any given time. But I’m sure fewer than a thousand, to put an upper bound on it.
So, to guess, a p...
I watched the trailer for the new Harry Potter TV series on HBO.
My overwhelming feeling is that it is so absurdly redundant to make this. Not even reimagined but to cosplay the movies so slavishly… the sets look the same, that same teacher with the same hat and the same Sco...
I published my perfect iPhone weather app, and my guess is that you won’t want it.
Premise:
Why doesn’t my weather app tell me the weather yesterday?
I can never plan based on numerical temperature, etc. Am I going to be walking outdoors today? Should I take a jacket? Number...
I updated my Galactic Compass app for iPhone with augmented reality mode.
Background:
Galactic Compass is a floating green arrow that always points the way to the middle of the Milky Way, 26,000 light years away.
Here’s the announcement blog post from 2024.
It went kinda vir...
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My favourite translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (Wikipedia) - 1,000 year old Persian poetry - is by Robert Graves from 1967.
Graves, it turns out, unknowingly based his translations on hoax sources. Which might not have gone down so badly, except that he used the...
The best way to prevent a rogue AGI from processing the Earth into maximum paperclips is to unleash a second AGI that will work to stop it.
The problem of ensuring that an AGI doesn’t mulch everything into paperclips by mistake is called alignment.
AGI = artificial general i...
Hey, if you have a Poem/1 then can I ask you to do a manual firmware update?
It’ll take just a few minutes and I built a special firmware update tool to make it easy.
(That is an actual AI clock on my actual bookshelf in my actual house.)
Why? Three reasons…
No more stopped...
My perfect podcast app would be a long phone call in which I listen to the show and can also talk back to remember things. (Someone build this for me.)
It would immeasurably improve my running. Long story short, I added slow runs into the training mix, and had to switch from...
I watched Ferris Bueller’s Day Off which was as great as I remember.
It has an age rating of PG-13 in the US and 15 in the UK for bad language and some kissing. (There is also lying to parents but apparently that doesn’t count.)
This seems absurd.
I have way less problem wit...
I wonder how you would design a really single-minded voice UI?
Like, voice interfaces are really good now because of AI.
But they’re so unbounded. If you’re having a voice interaction with a computer or with a device, you could end up having a conversation about anything.
An...
I went into my kid’s school a couple months back and spoke to the year group about manufacturing.
Honestly it was the most rewarding speaking gig I’ve done all year.
It was about the process of making my AI clock and I have a ton of pics from my factory visit to Shenzhen (mo...
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It’s hot in London so I’ve been seeing a lot of handheld portable fans, usually with a strap so you can hang it round your neck.
My faves are the ones with thermoelectric coolers in the middle of the fan: a small plate that is so cold that it is covered with icy condensat...
I didn’t know what a near-infrared LED mask was a week ago, and now I am obsessed with this ad from Omnilux.
Because there’s a lot going on.
The aesthetic of the mask itself is wild: the lines look like sinews as if the woman has been flensed
But the schematic flesh is com...
Wet lab.
“Wet lab” was a new term to me, I had to look it up – it’s a laboratory with chemicals where there’s spill risk etc. I have a physics background myself and the closest I came to liquids was liquid nitrogen, and when you spill that it just boils furiously and goes aw...
When we end up voluntary ceding control of our own body parts to AI (for example so we can automatically walk around the grocery story while simultaneously catching up on boxsets on a VR headset) I wonder what that will feel like.
The underlying tech is currently in researc...
Ok a bunch of friends have their own personal AI agent using OpenClaw or Hermes or whatever.
Confession time: I don’t.
I haven’t found I need one. I’m a heavy user of agents for coding, sure, and a few isolated tasks. I haven’t found I need one digging through my notes or se...
We’re open sourcing Resident, our library for running AI-authored code on microcontrollers – with no compile step and no firmware flashing.
It’s our twist on vibe coding firmware, built for instantly loading new device functionality coded by end users. It’s aimed at device d...
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I love this terrible fake address generator:
We have spent 3 years collecting data from every country to generate this enormous database.
…it promises.
These are not English addresses:
"2 Scott Common Jenniferstad S60 2PT"
"4 Matilda Via North Emilychester M20 1BT"
"Fla...
You know when I’m home on my own I don’t watch much TV like actual TV, but I do watch music videos on YouTube on the TV.
Sometimes new music but often ones I know really well. Music videos are such a vibe.
And it’s social too? I’ve spent many evenings with friends that just ...
Now we have abundant apps, we’ve hit a ceiling in good ways to track and share them.
For example, Simon Willison’s personal tools: "Miscellaneous HTML+JavaScript tools built mostly with the help of LLMs."
Willison lists 80+ useful tools and the search box can see 205. That’s...
The Wind in the Willows right? Kenneth Grahame, 1908.
We all know the children’s story inside-out. Mole and Ratty and gruff Badger and conceited Mr Toad with his motorcars and all their adventures.
I picked up the book as an adult - I can’t remember why - and it wasn’t what ...
I hack on hardware a whole bunch, at Inanimate and at home.
AI is in the cloud. Interaction is in my room and in my hands. The job always begins by wiring together those two ends.
So the second thing I do, every single time, is bring up real-time messaging using JSON over we...
It’s pretty clear that apps and services are all going to have to go headless: that is, they will have to provide access and tools for personal AI agents without any of the visual UI that us humans use today.
By services I mean things like: getting a new passport; finding an...
A brief update on mist, my ephemeral Markdown editor with Google Docs-style comments and suggested edits:
mist is now open source with an MIT license, and the mist repo is here on GitHub.
(Try mist now and here’s my write-up from February.)
What I love about Markdown is that...
