The Fences Going Up Around Everyday Life
Bank branches close, high streets empty, and services move online. Digital-by-default Britain is a modern enclosure — and it’s shutting the poor, the old and the offline out of society itself.
Random Thoughts
The Temptation of the Tidy Answer
Search preserves disagreement; AI resolves it into one tidy answer. The good ones are seductive—here’s what we quietly lose when we stop interrogating them.
Bring Back the People in Brown Coats
Ordering campervan plumbing parts online is a mess of bad catalogues and useless AI chatbots. A nostalgic case for the hardware shop expert who just knew.
What the VAX Generation Got Right (and Why It Stopped Being True)
An idle CPU was once a sin. Now a bored home server is the point. Lessons from the VAX and DEC days on thrift, utilisation, and what “efficient” really means.
The IDE Bloat Cycle, or How Your IDE Ate Your Afternoon
VS Code and PyCharm started as the coder’s friend, then bloated into arms-race complexity. A look at feature creep in code editors and why the best tools get out of the way.
Meditations on a random Facebook short
A reflection sparked by a Facebook short: if nothing truly belongs to us, why do goodbyes hurt? On presence, impermanence, and the only ownership that matters.