Twelve years ago I watched a glassblower at Disney shape molten glass into Mickey Mouse: it's my favorite metaphor for how good search works. Move freely while you're hot, commit as you cool, and never forget the best thing you've found so far. Applies to algorithms, and much in life, too.

I made a live demo of Simulated Annealing on my personal blog, and I'd love to share it here. Thanks for reading....

If I could send a letter back (you know, one that didn't contain lottery numbers or "BUY BITCOIN"), this is what would be in it. These are in no particular order, and I intend to add to them as I feel like it. Some are practical and small, some are the kind of advice that is trite but for me at least contains further depth and meaning. I doubt any of them are original. I hope they're still worth sharing, and writing down.

A sample:

10. Be the person who takes the photos. You will regret trying to...

Put a second algorithm-you-can-watch on my site this week: a genetic algorithm evolving the letter K out of fifty translucent triangles, with sliders for mutation, selection pressure, and population size. Building it reminded me why I fell for this field in the first place: you can read about premature convergence a hundred times, but causing it with a slider and watching the diversity line crash is a different kind of understanding....

When out getting groceries, in Scotland, you have to pay a few pennies for a plastic bag, and more for paper, and even more for a reusable bag. In the USA, I've found, plastic bags are often free. Yet plastic bags are a significant source of environmental harm in both countries. Why is this the case? And why do we as consumers feel the burden of responsibility? As if we are the ones packing fruit and vegetables in ridiculous amounts of plastic, then providing environmentally damaging bags.

Full post here:...

It is easy to picture the collapse of civilisation, drop a cast of characters into a grimy dystopia, and call it bracing, brutal and blunt. True novelty, building from the ground up, not relying on tropes or clichés, requires more than imagination: it requires deep empathy, a will to sit and truly consider potential paths for the future and their consequences, and how they would be felt across myriad dreamed-up civilizations. Iain M. Banks had the imagination and the skill to do so. Across nine novels (and...

I, like many, think a lot on what to do with the little amount of time we have. I don't think the question in the title has an answer. You were not made for anything - at least that's my view with my hard atheistic stance - in the sense of a purpose that a machine or something might have, and I find that freeing rather than bleak, at least most of the time.

Because if there's no label telling you what you're made for, nobody can rightly tell you that you're doing it wrong. It's your time, only you can...

couple of weeks ago I wrote a piece about optimizing your week: treat the seven days as a fixed budget of 168 hours, write down what you actually value, attach a weight to each thing, and let the math show you the gap between what you claim matters and what actually gets your hours. The model rested on one assumption, which I stated as if it were the only constraint that mattered: there are 168 hours in a week, and every hour you spend on one thing is an hour you did not spend on another.

Read more here:...

Everyone wants to optimize their schedule. Or, at least, I really do, because I am privileged enough to have some time to spare, but not so much that I can easily achieve all that I want to.

But before we optimize our schedule, we need to decide what are we optimizing it for? We download the apps (no shade, I love them), we colour-code the calendar (or colour in your GitHub activity), we read the book (atomic habits, the power of habit), and we never once stop to write down what we are actually trying to...

I was born in 1991, eight years after 106 million people tuned in to watch the series finale of MAS*H. By conventional logic, a sitcom set during the Korean War, broadcast during the Vietnam War, and concluded during the Cold War should not resonate with a millennial audience. Yet my Mum loved it and kept reruns on whenever they aired.

I missed most of it as a child; too much of the material depends on adult experience. I rewatched the series in my early twenties and have returned to it repeatedly*...

What is left of a person once they are gone? Not the soul, or heaven, or reincarnation, or whatever you do or do not believe waits for us on the far side. Not the body either, the slow patient chemistry of what happens to us in the ground (which is described in hilarious detail in Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach, and one I highly recommend). Something more important is left behind, both for us and for those in the future who might find the impact of our lives: the things that leave...

My PhD thesis was written in \LaTeX, and so were my papers. So, to the muted horror of every recruiter who has ever asked for "the Word version," is my CV. I have spent a meaningful fraction of my adult life inside a markup language originally released in the 1980s, and I am here to tell you it was not Stockholm syndrome, but respect and, I admit, laziness. \LaTeX, once you have it down, is so much easier to use than WYSIWYG editors....

At some point, probably in a classroom with the lights half-off and an overhead projector humming, somebody handed you a quiz that sorted you into one of four boxes: Visual, Aural, Read/Write, or Kinesthetic. You got your label assigned to you and you may still remember it. People bring up their learning style the way they bring up their Myers-Briggs type or their Hogwarts house (ew, J.K. Rowling reference), except this one comes with institutional backing: schools teach it, teacher training repeats it,...

As I write this, my Last.fm profile reads 49,716 scrobbles, which means that sometime in the next couple of weeks, probably while I'm doing the dishes or debugging something, a counter I switched on 15.5 years ago will tick to 50,000.

The counter has been running since the 10th of March, 2011. While I've always failed to keep a diary throughout my life, it turns out I've been keeping one anyway, fifteen years long, written one song at a time, and I only recently thought to read it....

I want more queer stories, told louder, with bigger budgets. If you ship Frodo and Sam, if that reading brings you joy, you are welcome to it and to my genuine goodwill; fandom is a playground, not a courtroom.

I (the person that is not you) have never read Frodo and Sam as gay. Not out of squeamishness, and not because I think a gay Frodo would diminish anything, but because what Tolkien actually put on the page seems to me a different but still very salient fictional relationship. He wrote two men who...

There's a filter on my gallery labelled "abandoned," and it's one of the used tags for my shots: dozens of photographs of peeling wards, graffitied corridors, staircases climbing into darkness.

This is a rundown of what draws me to these places, the story of the category I photographed most, and the ethics of pointing a camera at somewhere truly abandoned, often forgotten, but surviving locations preserving history. Photographers call this "urbex"....

I'm not a finance guy. I mean, I work for a mortgage company, but my degrees are in Computer Science, AI and leadership. BUT I have been through a bunch of debt. So, I made this to help myself, and others in a similar situation - because strategizing your specific scenario should be easy.

Whether you have $4,000 or $400,000 in debt, it is heavy. Taking on more debt can feel like a solution to today's problem, even if it hurts you tomorrow.

There are two main debt payoff methods: snowball and avalanche....

"Fun read." Five stars.

That is the entirety of my review for He Who Fights with Monsters 2 by Shirtaloon. Meanwhile, I also gave five stars to bell hooks' Feminism Is for Everybody, except that review is 2,516 characters long and covers intersectional feminism, the failures of liberal approaches to gender, and how reading the book made me uncomfortable in ways I needed - but had the same star rating. A 280x difference in the amount of effort I put into explaining myself. Whatever those five stars are...

My photography gallery has 500+ images spanning about a decade of shooting. Landscapes, urban decay, wildlife, portraits, and a surprising number of cat photos. For years they sat in a flat grid with no way to filter or browse by subject, which meant anyone visiting the page was essentially scrolling through a shuffled pile of everything I've ever pointed a camera at. I wanted category tags, but manually tagging 500+ photos sounded like a weekend I'd never get back and would inevitably lead to...

If you've ever felt like a standard grid of thumbnails doesn't quite do justice to the geographic story of your photography, you're not alone. My own portfolio spans two countries I've lived in and several I've visited, and I wanted a way to showcase that journey visually.

In the latest installment of my "How This Site Is Built" series, I break down how I built a custom, interactive photo map for my portfolio—and how you can build one too.

You'll find out about:

1. The Data: Why I chose to manually...

GitHub pages lets you host your own website, for free! But: it's static, which means you can't have anything "dynamic" - or interactive - on it.

Except if you know this little trick making use of GitHub Discussions. ;]

https://www.kenreid.co.uk/blog/free-comments-via-github-discussions.html