%22/%3E%0A%20%20%3Ctext%20x=%2250%22%20y=%2250%22%20text-anchor=%22middle%22%20dy=%22.35em%22%0A%20%20%20%20font-family=%22system-ui,%20sans-serif%22%20font-weight=%22700%22%0A%20%20%20%20font-size=%2238%22%20fill=%22white%22%3ELC%3C/text%3E%0A%3C/svg%3E)
If you follow me on social media, you probably know that I occasionally vent about the comically lopsided incentives for authors who publish content on the internet. I try to keep these rants off the blog, apart from a short piece back in 2024 — but it’s been bugging me long enou...
I have a quick question for regular readers: did you ever start reading an article on this blog, found the topic interesting, but then had to give up halfway through because you could make heads or tails of it? If yes, can you give me an example?
Today, we’ll talk about the nature of truth. And I know what’s your first reaction: “how do I unsubscribe?”. Look, I’ve got no idea. I’ve been trying to figure that out myself.
I like philosophy. Not all of it is profound — there are two dozen treatises on the ontology of holes — but the field is accessible and can be eye-opening.
Roll a d6.
I dislike the punditry that surrounds generative AI. Perhaps on brand, much of it is machine-generated. The rest is mired in near-religious fervor, flames fanned for financial or political gain. There’s also simply too much of it. I have opinions — opinions I like! — but so does...
I am alone now. I don’t know who else survived.
I try to keep marketing in check: I’ve been working on my latest book for more than a year but only posted about it once. At the time, the book was still going through layout and editing, so I didn’t expect many subscribers to pull the trigger. But now, I’m happy to report that t...
If you’re dabbling in electronics, you might have heard of what’s known as the inverse-square law. This law says that the intensity of many types of physical phenomena decreases with the square of the distance to the origin. For example, if you get twice as far from a lightbulb,...
I don’t write about generative AI much. Everyone else does; not much of consequence ever gets said. I think the technology is great where it helps us automate mundane tasks, cancerous where it undermines genuine human expression, and darkly funny where the two worlds collide.
According to the latest projections from a frontier AI lab, we’re at most five years away from the scenario shown in the diagram below:
» Mark has joined the call. » Christine has joined the call.
Hello! The blog you’re trying to reach is currently unavailable. I am Skippy, your friendly blog assistant. How can I help you today?
This is an article I resisted writing for a long time. I didn’t pull the trigger in the mid-2010s, in the glory days of the SF Bay Area rationalist movement. I resisted the urge after the arrest of the rationalist-aligned financier, Sam Bankman-Fried. And I bit my tongue real har...
When working on my latest book, The Secret Life of Circuits, I wanted to keep the artwork real. My beef with the diagrams in popular electronics textbooks and online tutorials is that most of them are fake. At best, they’re retraced from ancient texts; at worst, they’re sketched...
Unusual clocks are a common idea for electronics DIY projects. The difficulty is never the timekeeping part; it’s making the clock look presentable. For my own take on the theme, you can check out the article I posted in May:
Last year, I published an article titled “It’s hard to build an oscillator”:
Electronic circuit theory is a frequent theme on this blog. As a part of this sorta-curriculum, I published a number of articles about operational amplifiers. I keep coming back to this topic for two reasons. First, I think these components are usually explained poorly, making th...
Today, I’d like to talk about logic — and before I do, I should probably explain why. But before we get to that, a definition may be in order: in a nutshell, logic is a system for drawing conclusions from premises (“facts”).
Last week, I posted a visual demonstration of the sameness of AI-generated content. This makes the output easy to spot even if all the individual pieces are perfect facsimiles of what a human could create:
We can't find the internet
Attempting to reconnect
Something went wrong!
Attempting to reconnect