A Gray
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My 'Blog'
Not a real blog, because it isn't time-based - I update these articles routinely.
Not a real blog, because it isn't time-based - I update these articles routinely.
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Due to my strict browser security -
Sometimes Facebook will force me to repeat a captcha. Sometimes Google will force me to go through five levels of captchas - no exaggeration!
But worst of all is Cloudflare, who block me outright.
Cloudflare now oversees ingress for a large chunk of the internet - maybe a fifth of all major websites - and they are probably most famous for their DDoS protection and thus their bot detection abilities.
This was worst around 2022, when I was blocked even by some relatively big tech companies such as OpenAI, but it continues today with many smaller websites (such as regional newspapers).
Cloudflare can see, block or tamper with the plaintext of any communications on sites it 'protects'. Most often this is used to escape or block forum posts containing snippets of code. I believe it is enabled by default, leading to much greater difficulty publishing code anywhere, even on programming-oriented forums such as Hacker News.
Besides all this, there's an argument that Cloudflare is the reason why DDoS attacks returned to the internet (hackers used to DDoS each other, but Cloudflare offered hackers DDoS protection, basically stopping their 'civil war' and renewing the war against non-hackers outside Cloudflare's protection).
Send me feedback about this sectionEverything, thus far, is pure CSS and HTML. I wanted to avoid using JavaScript as much as possible.
I found
The sidebar (on desktop) becomes a header (on mobile). Change your browser's window size to see the problem it creates - a table of contents is more natural to display as a sidebar than as a header. To mitigate this, I grouped sub-headers into containers that automatically re-orient depending on whether the screen is in landscape or portrait mode.
Previously, I displayed a list of all blog pages on the sidebar/header of all blog pages. But the sidebar became valuable real estate when their contents grew, so I removed that and replaced it with a single link to
In the blog overview page, I wanted to display previews of all blog posts. The lazy solution to that was just to copy the raw HTML contents, use CSS to make it unclickable, and add a “click here” link to the full blog article. The problem with that is that it isn't immediately clear to the viewer that links in the preview are not clickable - so I muted the colour contrasts, which is sort of the universal way of signalling that a UI area is 'disabled'. In particular, I ensured that links in the previews have a muted blue colour - I could have achieved the same effect by simply reducing the preview element's opacity, but that can have unintended side-effects (including slower page rendering).
I found myself often clicking my circular avatar as a way to go back to the main website. This is surprising, because my avatar wasn't clickable. This behaviour was instinctively ingrained in me, presumably because it is so common on other websites that peoples' avatars are clickable. Presumably this instinct is even more ingrained in other people, so I moved my avatar into the link to make it clickable too.
This blog has a different style to the rest of my website. A light-themed blog on a broadly dark-themed website - it doesn't sound like a good idea.
The reason for this is that, to me, a dark-themed blog looks too 'l33t' - too edgy, too new-style.
Dark themes are almost the default for programming - GitHub, VSCode etc - seemingly as a way to distinguish themselves from the professional looks of other industries, just like they do in other ways: wearing hoodies to work, using black gaming laptops with RGB lighting, using monospace fonts.
Light themes are the default elsewhere - Word, Excel, Exchange, white printers, white desktops, shirts - because that is the world of paper. It makes sense to me that the simple, low-tech portion of my website that consists only of words - the blog - should fit this theme of being paper on a screen.
The sidebar table-of-contents should highlight the currently-in-focus section, and it should show only the highest-level headers plus ancestors of the currently-in-focus section (see
Send me feedback about this sectionBeowulf
I remember it being a slog to read. Not enjoyable, and only somewhat interesting.
I believe I read a version that was translated into modern-ish English, like
It's not even set in England! It's set in Denmark or Sweden. I think that was a disappointment to me - at the time I was very confused and couldn't quite understand if this was actually Beowulf, because it didn't match my expectations at all.
Both of these are merged in my mind. They were both Napoleonic-era naval series, about a man's naval career and the adventures along the way. One of these protagonists was embarrassingly 'goodie-two-shoes' - stoic, one-dimensional.
I read either Hornblower or Bolitho books when I was very young - maybe 9 years old. When I had my first crush on a girl, I didn't realise she was Asian - school only taught us about White, Brown and Black people - and because these books described the lifelong effects of 'Yellow Fever' (reoccurance of yellow skin), I just assumed that she had inherited it from her parents, because they all had quite yellow skin. But I was socially-aware enough not to ever ask her about it.
I was also young when I read these books, maybe age 10 or 11. I remember being annoyed that Sharpe (was he a Lieutenant or Captain at the time?) was 'weakened' when he fell in love with a woman.
I can't remember if this book was a stand-alone or was part of the Sharpe books. It was set in the Spanish theatre of the Napoleonic Wars, and the title comes from Spanish anger at the French strategy of 'burned ground' (retreating and burning everything to stop the enemy taking supplies). In reality, the British started this tactic, and probably engaged in it more than the French, including in their ally Portugal's lands, leading to Portuguese anger at Britain (none of which is covered in this book, nor should you expect from this style of book).
This book was about a team of astronauts landing on and investigating a mysterious object in space. It sent them back into Genghis Khan's era. I don't remember much about it, but the woman became a concubine of Khan (ew).
Send me feedback about this sectionI got into this hobby due to 3 things:
Send me feedback about this sectionI made a spreadsheet of Mugwort's aromachemical composition, and the suppliers and descriptions of those chemicals:
It's a bit of a mess at the moment, because the research papers from which I've constructed some values are a bit contradictory, and the primary research paper lists the 'most important aromachemical components' both in a summary and in two tables, but (to my untrained brain) the summary somewhat contradicts the tables (some aromachemicals listed in the tables have higher aroma-activity than those listed as the 'main components' in the summary - which might simply be because these smells are common and the research paper is trying to find what is unique about Mugwort).
Send me feedback about this sectionTeachers who paste their students' coursework into ChatGPT and ask it if it was written by AI - then falsely accuse the student of cheating.
'AI detection' tools that show 60% similarity to AI text (quite normal for a well-read human who knows 'complicated' words) - then falsely interpreted by staff as 60% chance of being written by AI.
On HN, someone wrote that written answers are part of the interview process at their company. To combat interviewees using AI, there are 'secret' instructions (in size 0 text), so that if an interviewee copies it into ChatGPT, these 'secret' instructions result in ChatGPT using specific words. Thus any response using these words is automatically discarded. So that means, as a human, you should select all the text, copy it into an ASCII text editor, and look for the words that you should avoid writing!
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'Cringe' is the sense of second-hand social embarrassment. It presumably helped early humans hone their social skills (or exclude asocial people), back when an individual would only socialise with several dozen other people in total in their life.
Today, an individual will socialise with thousands of people, from all sorts of different social/economic/cultural/etc environments. It is no longer helpful to dismiss other peoples' behaviour as 'cringe' - it's just a bit pathetic. It's like being the 'fun police', deciding what is and isn't funny, and getting annoyed at people for laughing at bad jokes.
People who enjoy each others' company will be cringe with each other. Its because they don't waste time thinking of a 'clever' thing to say, they just say something, anything, to keep the conversation going and keep having an excuse to stay in their company.
Isn't life enough of a social climbing nightmare enough already? Do we really need to be so status-conscious that we have to be careful not to act 'cringe' in front of anyone else?
Any time someone has a genuine expression of a natural emotion in public, but he does it in a slightly incorrect and thus 'cringe' way, someone takes a video of it and posts it on Youtube or Reddit or Tiktok, to deluge him with the anonymous mockery of thousands of people who are lying alone in their beds or sitting on the toilet. I think bullying comes naturally to most people, but for some minority of these bullies it must also be vicious jealousy: this person is dumber than me, he doesn't deserve to be happy, he should be ashamed of himself!.
The worst people in my life have always been the status-aware ones - those who turn every interaction into a chance to gain social status, who always insist on being correct on everything, who desperately try to prove how much smarter or knowledgeable or 'correct' they are. I used to be like that - when I was a friendless child! What motivates people to continue being like this into adulthood?
Send me feedback about this sectionI've seen so many huge spiders in my room. I don't mind the spindly ones, but there are real spiders - almost spanned the size of a woman's hand, legs almost as thick as a USB cable cord. They looked like 'brown recluses' but with patterns.
My housemate has had pigeons down her vents and now she's also getting almost as many spiders as I am (and screaming bloody murder each time).
Today, I also saw 'Trachelas Tranquillus' on the kitchen window, maybe ~3-4cm. It looked exactly
Send me feedback about this sectionInjokes are bonding moments for subgroups within a larger group.
I think injokes are often rude unless they are subtle. You shouldn't make people feel excluded by an injoke - word them so that those 'in the know' get it but not so that those 'out of the know' know that they don't know. Or at least, just do that slightly-apologetic-explanation of “That's just an injoke we have”, to acknowledge that you don't want to make the others feel excluded.
Modern memes are basically injokes on social media sites - except everyone is eventually in on the joke, and the joke is so simple (usually just 'say the funny thing') that everyone can join in. I thought I was going somewhere with that but turns out I wasn't.
I like taking injokes further - having injokes with myself. E.g.:
Send me feedback about this section“I want to believe.” That's what I always tell people when they ask me if I'm religious. It would be nice to believe there is something always looking out for me, and some kind of unconditional love.
It's surprising that nobody has ever groomed me to join a cult or something. I feel left out!
I literally walked into a cult's office in Glastonbury. They had a pyramid thing I was invited to lie in while wearing headphones with the 'messiah' voice telling me to relax and pray. Then after the 10 minutes were up, this cultist tried to get me to purchase the magic crystals (which are wrapped in copper wires).
I'm interested in learning about their beliefs so I try to probe into the 'science' of their magic. But the cultist clearly doesn't care about it! He's a pure salesman. A totally unconvincing act, repeatedly stressing the 'low price' of the gifts but not making any effort to convince me of the reason to buy it!
My friend visited this place before I did and the woman was apparently way more genuine. Shame I arrived at the wrong day!
So you see, even when I literally walk into a cult they still won't have me!
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Send me feedback about this sectionIt took me a long time to get the concept that things in the universe couldn't be entirely mechanical.
In a completely mechanical universe, if you knew the state of the universe at some point in time, you could accurately calculate the complete future state of the universe at any future point in time.
There's 3 problems:
When you throw a coin, that is mechanical. The outcome is not actually random - it is simply modelled as random because we can't easily calculate how it will land. But if we measured the position/shape/movement of your hand and coin, and the air flow, then we could theoretically know exactly which face it will land on.
Quantum events are fundamentally random. It isn't a lack of ability to measure the initial variables - they are truly, purely random events. What this means is that quantum events depend on time, whereas mechanical events do not depend on time (only on position and momentum: x and ẋ).
Don't be confused by mechanical formulas containing time in them - like distance = speed x time - those aren't events, they are not what I'm talking about. An event is a distinct change, like a mechanical clock ticking to the next minute. The clock doesn't care about time - the mechanical parts are set up in such a way that its ticks coincide with the desired time duration, but if you looked at each part of the setup, you could model each part purely with position and momentum, taking time out of the equations, something you could not do with quantum mechanics.
If you made it this far, I actually made up those previous 2 paragraphs. I have no idea what I'm talking about. Maybe I'm right, maybe I'm wrong, but I don't have anyone to discuss this with so it's staying up.
Send me feedback about this sectionAs I walk around my city, in suburban areas I will sometimes hear a loud high-pitched screech in my ear. No, it's not Havana Syndrome - it's one of those
It works by emitting a loud sound at a very high frequency, so that only young ears can hear it (because we lose the ability to hear higher frequencies as we age).
How could a device like this be legal, when age discrimination is illegal in Britain?
Not only is it legal,
Well, it turns out that 'age discrimination' only recognises one age group: age 40+. Or two, if you count various protections pensioners have. There is no law preventing discrimination against age groups younger than 40.
These devices scream at me not when I enter their property, but when I am walking on the path near their property. Basically, I need to walk in the road to avoid them. Isn't that ridiculous?
Is it morally different to making a device that specifically heats up breast tissue, to cause women (and only women) sharp pain if they walk within a close distance of it? Why is there immediate, total and silent acceptance of devices that deliberately inflict pain on all youth?
I've got lots of 'bookmarked' URLs in text files all across my filesystem... I'll just dump some of the most interesting tech ones here, and delete the least-interesting tech ones.