This is quite dreadful — he’s become obsessed. There you go, there you go — narrow it down to obsession! (Geoffrey Hill, The Triumph of Love, XLIII) Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters opens with an “author’s note” briskly affirming her determination to ignore the stated…

It is disconcerting to see the release, with much fanfare, of a “Post-Meritocracy Manifesto” for the IT industry that contains the sentence “We believe that interpersonal skills are at least as important as technical skills”. On a generous reading, this sentence probably means something like “much IT-sector work involves collaboration…

Null-intolerant Java is Java in which there are no internal null checks. No public method in a null-intolerant library ever returns null, and no public method will ever accept a null parameter. …

Here’s a handwavey description of what a certain class of machine-learning algorithms do: they squish a sensation space down into a representation space. By “sensation space” I mean the total set of possible inputs to the algorithm, which is typically imposingly large; and by “representation space” I mean a set…

I would like to propose the following principles for future writing about AI, social media, the digital mapping of the human etc.: 1) Everything is numbers already. Or, if you like: numericality is woven into all experience, yea, even lived experience, even unto the squishy bodily stuff everyone’s so diverted…

Fluvius is a small Java library which was created to address a common scenario in the transformation of “enterprise” software systems. Because many such systems have yet to be upgraded to use a recent version of Java, it’s written in Java 7 (although it works well with Java 8). In…

The best answers are usually simple, but getting to simple is often complicated What do we mean by “simple”? Not zen wisdom — it’s more like “boring”. As ideas and technologies mature and find their niche, the novel aspects of them become routine. They move from complex (many options, unclear what the best approach is) to complicated (many options, expert analysis can identify…

(the following is a precis of a section of Alain Badiou’s response to Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, for the benefit of those who’d like to know what he said but can’t be bothered to sit through a long video to find out) Badiou notes that the positive programme of…

It’s a bold gesture, to be sure: to insist on the conjugation of lived experience with stringent formal abstraction, on the compatibility and even identity in the last instance of intersectionality and “the right to speak as no-one”, on the possibility and necessity of a transfeminism that is also a…