writing

I’m delighted to share with you some exciting – if somewhat unseasonal – news … I have a new poetry collection coming out in October, perfectly timed for Christmas: which is a good job really because it’s a book of Christmas poems. It’s called ‘And So This is Christmas’ and is now available to preorder.…

Today is set to be agreeably alliterative across an assortment of areas although the occasional metaphor may cause some faces to cloud.  Idioms will be coming down like stair rods in northern regions, while the south may experience the odd outbreak of similes, like an unexpected shower of arrows.  In coastal, littoral, and seaside areas,…

Tell me, what is it about this position that interests you? The warmth, perhaps? The security? Or the power you must feel by rendering me useless? Feel free to expand if you wish.  I see you have had experience of similar positions. Can you talk about a time when you got someone’s tongue? Or were…

Today I shall listen to the news and the football scores and the tally of the dead. Intermittently, I shall pick at the crossword and the biscuit tin, and stare out of my back window at a squirrel as he scurries along my fence. Later, there may be a film to watch. But for now…

I didn’t write for a bit. The world doesn’t end; I still get paid; it’s all good. Also, I had no opinions to speak of. Well, that’s not true. For instance, if I took a moment, and I might soon, to write about the fading away of the arcane knowledge of the link. (As a […]

I admit that, post-EFF, when I read about some terrible Internet regulatory proposal, or knotty problem of digital ethics, I often have a burst of “well, thank goodness it’s someone else’s job to deal with this now.” (Except for the narrower domain that is still my problem, I guess). And then again, sometimes, I just […]

I’m downloading the large language model llama-13B-hf as we speak, hoping to get it going on the GPU I have for games. What strange gloss will they put on this moment in history, where machine-learning at home was enabledby videogame users who couldn’t bear to shift from general-purpose computing machines to consoles? My iron self-discipline […]

Sad about the District Court decision in Hachette vs. Internet Archive; not just because of the ruling against the Archive, but because of many people’s reaction to it online. People have strange intuitions, not just about the status of the law, but also of how it progresses. There’s some tut-tutting that an august institution like […]

A little change of pace. As part of the Not Secret But Not Entirely Documented Either plan to save the Internet, I’ve been spending a fair bit of time with lisp weenies. The parenthesis are rubbing off on me, I think primarily because you can stuff lisp into tinier nooks than even Linux fits. One […]

I’m hoping that the net time I get a promotional postcard from eyebuydirect, they’ll have added another “&” onto my fully-escaped surname, and so on, until it overruns the postcard’s CSS block into the street. A voice-mail from Central Computer: my computer is fixed, I can come and pick it up. It felt very like […]