Correspondence with a friend in Gaza
Today I received this message from a friend in Gaza:
Hello Simon, I appreciate your engagement and interest in our posts, and I'm very happy about that🤍🕊️ I truly see a significant impact when you share and interact with my posts, so I always strive to support you. I wanted to consult with you on the best way to convey our struggles, needs, and ideas to the public, as you have a large following on your account, which is a valuable asset✨
AGI Will Not Have a Lizard Brain
Rejoice, for even though we do, verily, walk through the valley of the shadow of death, not all the phantasms we see in the valley are as dark as they appear.
[This essay is incomplete. Updates will appear on this URL when I have time to write them.]
Post Scarcity state of play, May 2026
20260505
The stack frame corruption(?) bug
I have a weird bug in read_symbol, which at present I'm not understanding (now fixed: read on).
Review: Penric's Demon
What does one say about Lois McMaster Bujold's Penric series?
Bujold is an uneven writer. I'm not an admirer of her science fiction. But her novel The Curse of Chalion is a genuinely superb book, and introduces a world — closely based on an altered Medieval Europe — with a genuinely interesting and original theology. The third novel in the series, The Hallowed Hunt, is in the same class: not quite as startlingly innovative, but introducing many new and interesting consequences of her initial theological scheme, and extraordinarily well executed.
Post Scarcity state of play, April 2026
I write up the state of play of the Post Scarcity Software Environment in a developer's log on a fairly regular basis; but it only gets published (here) when I publish a new release, which is to say, rarely.
I assume that no one else at all is interested in the project, that it is simply my lone obsession; but, my blog is also mostly my lone obsession, and, on the off-chance that someone out there is sufficiently mad to be following along, I thought I would publish soft-of-monthly updates on my blog. The discipline of doing so may help me stay focused on the project, too.
So here's the first such.