Insufficiently Magical

Any technology that does not translate our desires into effects cannot be called magic.

When I made this website, I had planned to write a lot more long-form text a lot more often. Unfortunately, it’s self-hosted, which is to say, more often broken than working, so most of my writing is on Twitter.

This is a mixture of my personal diary, my idle musings, my technical notes, and occasionally some things actually written for an audience. I make no promises as to consistency of topic, relevance, theme, or sanity. I do, however, promise that everything published here will be interminably long and of insufferable grammatical construction.

Writing Style

I strive to keep my writing correct to both the facts and the context in which I wrote it. I will generally mark technical writing with the relevant context (such as date or project version), and I will mark significant technical corrections explicitly, like this:

Outdated or incorrect original <ins>Updated or checked replacement</ins>

I will make minor grammatical or stylistic changes silently. You can read the versioning history if you want to see diffs that badly 🙃.

I will use marked call-out boxes, with colored backgrounds and frequently an icon, to indicate information that is related to the main text but is not part of the primary narrative. These are themed after industrial safety/hazard signage standards, and have vaguely similar goals.

Here is a listing of the available categories; each link goes to an index page of the contained articles. The full, uncategorized, list is available in the nav section.

  1. Miscellaneous Essays

    This is the main collection of things I write, which are generally unconnected from each other.

    In the future, I may migrate articles from here to specialized collections. I do not currently have permalinks, but I will retain a 301 Moved Permanently response at the original link for at least one year.

  2. Personal Essays

    These are some essays that are reflective of me personally, rather than a more abstract or technical topic.

  3. Bitvec

    General-purpose articles about my bitvec project.

  4. RFCs

    A collection of RFC documents I’ve written for Rust (and, possibly, other projects in the future?)

  5. How Computers Work
  6. Type Theory

    I am not a type theoretician nor have I taken any courses in the science. What I do have, however, is an engineering background doing fun things with data layout and type-directed programming.

  7. Talks
  8. Ferrilab

    This is where I write about the experience of creating the Ferrilab project.