Author: Tom
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Health Debt
When you’re young you’re made of rubber and magic (to quote Chris Williamson). Your body is primed to go full bore into the world and hammer through life at full speed. You’re in absolute health credit – you just don’t know it. But as you age, you effectively spend down that credit and most people…
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Nuance is a shitty sales tactic
I love nuanced ideas, conversations, and people. The world exists as a continuous flux and everything is relative. But people buy the simple solution, even if you need to explain the nuance you should lead with the most simple, reductionist argument you possibly can. And in that spirit, that’s the end of the post.
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Junk Time Buffets
Do you feel like you don’t have the time to accomplish all the things you’d like to? Do you wind up exhausted at the end of a day thinking damn, where did the time go? Perhaps you run down the list of things you’d set out to achieve this month one evening, and lament the…
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You are a verb not a noun.
Nouns are an illusion. A product of our inability (or blatant disregard) to perceive changes in the things around us over a time period that would typically let us categorise them as verbs. Things that move are easy to cast as verbs – to walk, to dance, to sing. States of being can quite happily…
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The Binary Attention Model
Fresh bruschetta is divine. Tomatoes blushing the deepest of reds. Garlic oil infushing the toasted ciabatta with sharp spikes of flavour. Fresh basil slicing through the rich tastes, elevating each bite. Even better by the sea…the light, warm breeze carrying salty notes and distant musicality of the waves breaking against the shoreline. Cool white wine…
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Apple’s Expanded Protections for Children
This week Apple announced that they were introducing a handful of new features to iOS and iCloud which were targeted at detecting child pornography in iMessage and Photos. Naturally a cacophony of young, childless, males on Hacker News erupted to claim that all idea privacy was now moot, that end-to-end encryption was now nonsense. Articles…
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A Complex Obsession
When I first started programming I was like a gap year student exploring some far-flung bazaar. Every twist a new adventure, each turn a novel experience. Intelligible languages swirling around my ears, but recognisable expressions and hints at meaning abounded. Discovering new paths through what felt like a hidden world was so exciting that it…
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Dynamic Image Compression with Go
This article is part of my learning how to use Go in a production web environment. It’s written in the style of a tutorial, but has plenty of my own notes about my experience. View the complete code here. Since launching an online shop/ordering system for a couple of local pubs last summer, the websites…
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The Unbounding
Imagine a machine which allows you to expand your consciousness into a digital space. A hyper-normal expanse, unbounded in almost every way. It starts innocently – a peripheral which allows you to plug in and saunter around some fabricated environment. Like a dream, from which you can wake at any moment should you so desire…
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Rules Not Reason
Although I’m fiercely optimistic and generally positive about life, humanity, the universe, and everything, I do sometimes find myself slipping into the deep recesses of despair in response to some things in the world. So I wanted to amble down this path and think, just briefly, about why, as a species, we’ve consistently engaged in…