You wave
At everyone.
Usually goodbye,
Sometimes hello.

If I had slept ten minutes, I had slept a lifetime.

Barlow beams as the escapement begins to rotate. His workshop is laced with tobacco and damp and the fading scent of industry.

In software engineering, complexity often masquerades as sophistication. Nowhere is this clearer than in frontend code that relies on inferential logic: the practice of deducing user intent or state based on limited information, rather than explicitly guiding the user experience.

Breakfasts in Cirebon are simple. Sickly sweet Coco Crunch with milk that never tastes quite right. On the humming fridge, three-quarters of the way up, is my first drawing, a cat with a jet engine for legs, crudely rendered in blue and red felt tip.

We seem to have stumbled into a strange contradiction: we demand perfection from our machines, while tolerating imperfection from ourselves. The same people who chuckle at human error in the workplace will denounce AI systems for the slightest misstep. "It hallucinated a fact!" Yes. And you never have?

A week ago I tried switching my web browser's default search engine from Google to Perplexity.

I've deleted my Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts.

A round up of the year.

A useful way to understand the successes—and the stagnation—of big tech is through the lens of organisational advantage. Not just what a company did, but how it was set up to win.