Bubbles
Latest Posts
If you haven’t played Kern Type yet, you’re in for a treat – released by Mark MacKay in 2011, it’s a delightful browser game that teaches you the art and the math of text kerning: If you have played it, you’re still in for a treat, as...
Anne Lister kept a diary for 25 years, and by the time she died in 1840 it ran to roughly five million words across 26 volumes, dwarfing even Samuel Pepys' famous journal by a factor of four. Most of it reads like any other 19th-century...
This article appeared in the Guardian. I read it at speed. What special, world beating, middle-classic (?) fuckwittery have we here? I can only say that this isn't really a problem in the special little places that form the lands, north...
A few days ago I wrote about a new tool called wacz-pdf, which will read a WACZ file and write out each web page as a PDF file. I got some quick feedback from Henry Wilkinson who suggested that it could be useful to allow a user to...
Ron Charles, previously book critic for The Washington Post before they decided books were not for them, relates a hilarious tale of scam-solicitation at his Substack — well more accurately hilariously relates a troubling tale. Mistaken...
During times of organisational change and institutional vandalism, it is natural to feel some fear and uncertainty. As your caring managers, we want to reassure you that this is fine and normal, and in fact it’s how we want you to feel,...
Everybody says beating short-form addiction is necessary. There are studies showing how harmful it can be to the body and mind. But nobody talks about how to actually quit the short-form addiction, especially TikTok and Instagram Reels....
Material I’m stashing here for future reference. It’s about death and grief, approached in an elegant way, so indirectly as to be soothing in terrible times. First from Suetonius, then from Catullus. Gladiator days. From Wikipedia: Avē...
This is my 13th blog post for the Blaugust 2026 community blogging project. Join me all this month for more blogging. I just returned from a long weekend in Ashland, Oregon. Ashland is a beautiful town in the Rogue Valley, a half hour...
[It’s hard to get a big head when you have no head.] My laser printer (a Brother whatever-it-is) can’t do color, but CVS will print a 4”x6” photo for all of 42 cents.1 It takes about a minute and a half to upload an image file and click...
MLA, KDA, MoE, NoPE all attack either bytes transferred or bytes resident. MLA shrinks KV per token, KDA replaces a O(n)O(n)O(n) cache with an O(1)O(1)O(1) state.
photo cred: my dadMost advice is bad. It’s either obvious (“Don’t sweat the small stuff”—if I thought it was small, I wouldn’t be sweating it!), applicable to some people but not to others (“Be more aggressive”—some people should, sure,...
The boy appeared on a Thursday, which was collection day. Danny Toal had taken over the corner of the big shed from Micky Breen two years before, and he still thought of the week in terms of who needed reminding, who needed visiting, and...
Why do we care about avoiding rotary positional encoding in the first place? RoPE aliasing is one reason, but the second reason is that RoPE basically erases the compression we gained from MLAs low-rank latent, and forces materialising...