Thoughts on trauma, autism and depression
Multiple content warnings: autism, depression, traumatic injury
I spent most of Saturday at an in person, hands on, outdoor first aid course, although I knew I was probably in too poor a state of mental health to complete the course. I booked on the course before the start of my present depressive episode; because I've been in a chaotic state I hadn't cancelled it; and when my diary reminded me on Friday I felt that it would be useful to attend, partly as a challenge to and test of just how fragile my mental state is, and partly because what I would learn would be useful.
This isn't the first first aid course I've done by any means, but it was certainly the best taught and most intensive, and I did learn a lot.
AGI Will Not Have a Lizard Brain
Rejoice, for even though we do, verily, walk through the valley of the shadow of death, not all the phantasms we see in the valley are as dark as they appear.
I will argue in this essay that
Post Scarcity state of play, May 2026
20260505
The stack frame corruption(?) bug
I have a weird bug in read_symbol, which at present I'm not understanding (now fixed: read on).
Review: Penric's Demon
What does one say about Lois McMaster Bujold's Penric series?
Bujold is an uneven writer. I'm not an admirer of her science fiction. But her novel The Curse of Chalion is a genuinely superb book, and introduces a world — closely based on an altered Medieval Europe — with a genuinely interesting and original theology. The third novel in the series, The Hallowed Hunt, is in the same class: not quite as startlingly innovative, but introducing many new and interesting consequences of her initial theological scheme, and extraordinarily well executed.
Post Scarcity state of play, April 2026
I write up the state of play of the Post Scarcity Software Environment in a developer's log on a fairly regular basis; but it only gets published (here) when I publish a new release, which is to say, rarely.
I assume that no one else at all is interested in the project, that it is simply my lone obsession; but, my blog is also mostly my lone obsession, and, on the off-chance that someone out there is sufficiently mad to be following along, I thought I would publish soft-of-monthly updates on my blog. The discipline of doing so may help me stay focused on the project, too.
So here's the first such.