Author: Tom
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Excellence is Never Accidental
Last weekend I hopped on board a train from Manchester to London – a journey I used to make almost every week for work. Back then, it was operated by Virgin Rail and while the duration was usually a pain, generally speaking the overall experience was bang on. However, back in 2019 some money clearly…
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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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Company Values
Some months ago Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong penned a piece about his organisation being a “mission-driven company”. At the time the various echo chambers I dabble in were most delighted by his noble adherence to the mission (whatever the fuck that means for a poor excuse for a crypto bandwagon of a company anyway.) And now…
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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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Self Directed
What activities and behaviours that we engage in today will be looked upon as primitive in one or two-thousand years’ time? When we look back such lengths of time our ancestors are so far from us in their understanding of the world and their conduct as to appear profoundly limited in many ways – the…
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Errors as Information
Evolution’s two most potent tools are the passage of time, and random errors. In order to progress nature relies on variation between generations (errors across time.) In fact, we only call them “errors” because we’re focused on the wrong end-goal – we measure the ability for an organism to copy itself and pass along its…
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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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Adaptability
Humans are a funny species. We’re not the fastest runners, we’re not the best climbers, we can’t swim too deeply. Our young take years to become anything less than a liability, and many more to become self sufficient. We are profoundly mediocre at the majority of life’s basic activities. But we are extremely adaptable. I…
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The end of my first job
When I started at my first job I thought everyone wore suits. I thought that the gigantic building I had walked in to was filled with large desks surrounded by endless glass and clean lines. I thought my colleagues would glide around, thoughtfully dissecting ideas and suggesting enhancements. I had never worked with .NET or…