If I scream into the void and there’s no one around, have I really been screaming?
The Last Safe Place Mathematics, the “Human-Authored” coping mechanism, and the Ghost in the Proof.
The Ritual of Purity There is a new ritual I’ve noticed in AI-adjacent research, a small genuflection performed at the start of papers to ward off evil spirits. You see it in footnotes and acknowledgments:
“This work is human-authored.”
It feels like the “Non-GMO” sticker on a grocery store apple. A signal of purity. An assurance that the insights contained within were forged in the wet, biological firing of neurons, not synthesized in the cold silicon of a GPU cluster.
The Massless Particle: When Rights Meet Reality Rights are not magic shields against probability.
The Ghost and the Machine This train of thought started with a response my friend wrote to a paper by the philosopher Julia Driver, while applying to graduate school.
The paper concerns the suberogatory: actions that are permissible but bad. This category sits opposite the supererogatory, which covers actions that are admirable but not required.
In plain terms, the suberogatory includes actions you have a legal and moral right to perform, but which still feel wrong when actually carried out.
The Mycelium Network Case Study: Three People, One Crisis, Three Internets How infrastructure decides what can be known.
Opening: The Knife-Edge Word Choice This entire discussion began with a subtle piece of grammar:
“The rise of digital systems _____ our modern world.”
When faced with choosing between predominating and dominating, predominating feels intuitively right. After all, digital systems—screens, apps, cloud services—are everywhere. They are the most numerous, the most visible, the most common factor in our daily lives.
Over the Cliff — A Job Hunter’s Tale The further back you scroll, the stranger the story gets. My favourite infosec job board has a little feature that lets you browse every old posting—a temporal archaeological dig. Q4 of 2016 sits at the top of that dig like a buried city: over a hundred postings, a small flood of opportunity. Fast‑forward to Q4 of 2022 and the sediment has compacted down to a few dozen.
“Building My Theme With a SNES Buster Aesthetic” CSS used to feel like trying to solder in the rain: technically possible, definitely unpleasant, and almost guaranteed to leave the air faintly blue. Yet somehow I blinked and found myself at the end of a weekend with a complete CSS theme, a matching Hugo theme, and a website that looks like it fell out of Mega Man X’s system menu. The weird part is that it was actually fun.
Understanding IPv4, IPv6, Subnets, and VPNs – A Rambling-but-(Hopefully)-Useful Crash Course This post was born from a late-night conversation about networking—why IPv4 feels like a cramped tavern, how IPv6 tried to clean up the mess, and how packets wander through their digital woods.
IPv4 – The Cramped Tavern Early IPv4 networks behaved like a noisy bar where every patron yelled their business across the room. Before switches became common, network traffic was broadcast across the entire segment, and your NIC had to catch every single packet.