The Fool on the Hill

The Fool on the Hill

Paged space objects

By Simon Brooke || 23 March 2026

Antecedents for this essay:

  1. Reference counting, and the garbage collection of equal sized objects;
  2. Vector space, Pages, Mark-but-don't-sweep, and the world's slowest ever rapid prototype.

A Sierpiński Carpet

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Don't know, don't care

By Simon Brooke || 20 March 2026

The famous XKCD cartoon showing all modern digital infrastructure depending on a single person's spare-time project

(It turns out that I'm so defensive about my 'don't know, don't care' design principle that I've written defending it twice. The previous essay with this title is here.)


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Vector space, Pages, Mark-but-don't-sweep, and the world's slowest ever rapid prototype

By Simon Brooke || 13 March 2026

Trinity College library, Dublin

I started work on the Post-scarcity Software Environment on the second of January, 2017; which is to say, more than nine years ago. It was never intended to be a rapid prototype; it was intended, largely, to be a giant thought experiment. But now enough of it does work that I can see fundamental design mistakes, and I'm thinking about whether it's time to treat it as a rapid prototype: to take what has been learned from this code, and instead of trying to fix those mistakes, to start again from scratch.

So what are the mistakes?

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Letter concerning the war in Iran

By Simon Brooke || 4 March 2026

This is a letter to my [Tory] MP, John Cooper, urging him to protest about British engagement in Trump and Netanyahu's attack on Iran. It is, obviously, framed to persuade a Conservative. It's not necessarily what I'd say to someone who was not Conservative.


Smoke rises after a missile strike on Tehran

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The Claimants to the Tortured Land

By Simon Brooke || 28 January 2026

Don't study theology, friends. In particular, don't study the Abrahamic religions. It will make you deeply cynical.

Abraham's Journey from Ur to Canaan, 1850. By József Molnár (1821–1899). Oil painting on canvas.


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