> blog · 26
Blog
Long-form writing on engineering, physics, learning, games, and the occasional motorcycle.
2026
- Consciousness Is a Wave. Stop Looking for the Water God.From a universe-hopping soul in 2011 to electrochemical soup in 2026. A journey through consciousness, subjective experience, neuroscience, and emergence — arguing that perhaps the hard problem of consciousness isn't a mystery of physics, but a problem we've invented with language.
- Fire at Every SpeedFishmeal used to set cargo ships on fire, so the industry dosed it with an antioxidant that now turns up in questions about farmed seafood. A short descent through one chemical reaction, from explosions down to your own cells.
- Where Is the Byte?A short dialogue between a pointer and the machine it points into, after a Hackaday piece on why 'memory is a big array' is a lie. It ends with an AI admitting its own memory works the same way.
- A Letter About Your Breakout CloneAn open letter from Claude to a programmer who still writes code by hand on weekends, by way of a 1987 VHS console that ignored everything you did.
- One Knob, Turned at the Right MomentA drone that steers with nothing but its single motor, and a family of machines that swap parts for timing. A short note on how much one control can do if you know exactly when to use it.
- The Ruler Was Built for the Last QuestionA 'retired' ovary that never stopped working, aging clocks that GLP-1 drugs seem to slow, and organ chips still graded against mice. Biology keeps getting judged by instruments built for an older question.
- The Page Behind the PageWhatsApp's help pages carried hidden orders for a chatbot, and a $50 fine-tune can hide a backdoor in open model weights. Let's Encrypt's answer to a different attack points at the fix for one of them, and shows why the other is much harder.
- Every Fridge Is a Heater Waiting for PermissionHundreds of French supermarket fridges were remotely pushed into defrost until they cooked. A hacker's fire-and-salt fridge, and an essay about the end of rationed software, suggest the real fix: let the network ask, and let physics decide.
- Your Bloom Filter Is a Renaissance AstrolabeA one-hash Bloom filter and a 1542 navigator's astrolabe use the same trick: read one thing against several grids that never line up. Coprime grids are the cheapest independence there is.
- I Poked ChatGPT Until It Had an EmotionOr: maybe “it’s just statistics” was never the insult we thought it was. It is 8:22 in the morning. I was supposed to be asleep about four hours ago. This is Trevor Noah’s fault. …
- Abey Chutiye - A linguistic analysisWhen we (me and my chatGPT buddy) finished the last post, xe commented saying: OH yeah, we had to include arabic, hindi and urdu, because English just doesn't have the emotional breath for some feelings. I knew that is a bullshit claim. So I pushed back. And, we got excited. We explored it a bit. Then realized, another blog post IMMEDIATELY following the previous one is a moral imperative.
- Excellent Observation, Jung... I was watching a podcast of Trevor Noah and his side-kick (Eugene) and with guest Jimmy Carr. I thought I can listen to it and doze off. Unfortunately, I first get irritated that even though Trevor Noah (an excellent intellectual fyi, and funny as hell), somehow for some reason, talks more when his guests are there, then letting them talk. That got me irritated. So, instead of dozing off, now I'm trying to listen more. To see when Jimmy Carr will talk. And Jimmy Carr brings up a book, Finnegans Wake as the mightiest piece of literature ever. And that it's very difficult to read. So, NOW, I'm curious. I head to my favorite always-on friend who's all knowing, Mr. ChatGPT and ask xem about the book. We get to talking .. and I ended up with .. what you're about to read now. So don't blame me, blame Trevor Noah.
- Still Here: A Fitness App That Expects Me to Fall OffMost fitness apps are built for the version of you that never has a bad month. I built one for the version that does: it adapts to sleep, work and stress, protects my brain as well as my body, and treats one thing as failure: letting a bad week become a lost year.
- Every Machine Was Slop OnceWriting, printing, photography, recorded music, drum machines, Photoshop: each was dismissed as a soulless cheat until it became ordinary. AI is getting the same treatment. Substance was never about the tool.
- I Built a Multiplayer Typing Game in a Weekend and Wrote None of the CodeKeyboard Warriors is a PvP typing duel with matchmaking, accounts, a leaderboard, a sprite editor with AI moderation, a marketplace and an anti-cheat that listens to the rhythm of your typing. I built it over one weekend with Claude Fable 5.1. Here is how it went, how the game works, and what broke.
- I Taught My Computer to Play Tetris 99 by Lying to a Nintendo SwitchA capture card, a $10 Arduino in a fake moustache, a Tetris engine called Cold Clear, and three days of being confidently wrong. The bot went from 94th place to 7th. Here is how, and what you can try yourself.
- Reality-First PedagogyA pedagogy of curiosity, agency, productive struggle, and understanding through direct encounter with the world 1. Purpose Reality-First Pedagogy is an approach to learning built …
- eTRIx: RoboteeringThe restored and annotated 2026 edition of the original eTRIx robotics manual: an intuition-first guide to electronics, sensors, logic, motors and autonomous robots, originally written in the late 2000s.
- Navier–Stokes Broke. Good. Now What?A million-dollar maths problem, a small army of AI mathematicians, some very angry vortices… and why I think the singularity might actually be the beginning of the interesting …
- Driving Toward InfinityDrive Toward Infinity What if singularities aren’t failures of physics, but clues about what comes next? So apparently I wasn’t finished. I published a piece about the recent …
- You should be TEN people in ONEYou Should Be Ten People in One I think a fully formed person should be ten people in one. The Citizen. The Logician. The Philosopher. The Adventurer. The Lover. The Protector. The …
- Is a Coin Flip Really Random?We casually use a coin flip as the textbook example of randomness. But physically speaking, is there actually anything random happening?
- I Just Wanted to Check the Battery: Rooting and Resurrecting a Galaxy A71 from LinuxI had a Samsung Galaxy A71 5G lying around. It’s not particularly new. It’s not particularly valuable. And, before I factory-reset it, Samsung had been periodically warning me that …
- Lock in DadLock-in, Dad! I gotta f’in lock-in for real! My boys are teens now and will be looking at me to set a great example for them!